The Score That Does Not Exist

Somewhere in the last decade, a story became common knowledge. Every Chinese citizen has a score. Cameras and algorithms adjust it continuously. Jaywalk and it falls; buy the wrong thing and it falls; your score determines your job, your travel, your children's school.

Researchers who study the system say this does not exist.

There is no unified national score assigned to individuals. What exists is described by specialists as an ecosystem of initiatives sharing a broad logic rather than an integrated machine: company compliance records, dozens of local pilots running incompatible rules, industry blacklists, and a judicial enforcement list. A national law was drafted in 2022. The infrastructure is largely databases and paperwork, and experts describe it as surprisingly low in technology, which follows directly from there being no central score for an algorithm to compute.

Two responses to that are both wrong and it is worth being clear about which is which.

The first wrong response is relief. The real system contains something that deserves serious objection. The list of people who have defaulted on court judgments, the discredited or dishonest list, has restricted millions of people from buying flights and high-speed rail tickets. It is a real restriction on real movement, applied administratively, with limited routes of appeal, and its existence is not in doubt.

More broadly, a fragmented system run by officials exercising discretion, with inconsistent rules between jurisdictions and no reliable way to contest an entry, is not a milder version of the imagined system. It is a different problem with its own character: arbitrary rather than total, opaque rather than computational, and considerably harder to challenge precisely because there is no single thing to point at.

The second wrong response is to keep telling the dramatic story on the grounds that it is close enough and gets attention.

Here is the cost of that, and it is not hypothetical. A striking claim travels because it is striking. It gets repeated until it is background knowledge, and then somebody checks it and it collapses. The collapse does not discredit only the false claim. It discredits the accurate claims standing next to it, because to an ordinary reader they came from the same place and sounded the same. And the government acquires a decade of free defence: every time the subject comes up, it can point at the exaggeration rather than answer for the reality.

That mechanism is not specific to China and it is worth carrying out of this book as a general rule about criticising closed systems. The exaggeration is always more satisfying to make and always more expensive to have made.

Precision here is not politeness, and it is certainly not sympathy. It is the only form of criticism that is still standing after somebody has checked it.