Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ENGINEERING (Engineering a Trustworthy Society: The Evolution, Perception and Impact of China’s Social Credit System)
Période du rapport: 2022-10-01 au 2024-03-31
The Chinese Social Credit System (SCS) is an ambitious social engineering scheme of an unprecedented nature. It aims to collect information from different spheres, integrate this data, and establish reputations to steer the behaviour of individuals and organisations through incentives and sanctions. The SCS’s implementation so far often does not live up to the ambitious goals set up by the state.
The SCS ties in with global scholarly and public discussions on surveillance and privacy, trust and trustworthiness, and authoritarian rule. It is a major and novel governance initiative by a “strategic rival”, and is thus of significance for the European public. What is the shape of this system? How does it evolve? How does the Chinese public perceive and evaluate the SCS? How does the public perceive different threats to individual privacy? What are the SCS’s social, political and cultural origins and impacts?
This project seeks to provide answers to these questions and push forward theoretical debates on governance with information collection and classification schemes, data privacy, as well as trust and trustworthiness. The project’s empirical strategy is based on public opinion surveys, qualitative and quantitative content analysis and field research. The project seeks to clarify important unresolved questions on the shape of the SCS, and provide the public with empirically grounded insights. The project is led by H. Christoph Steinhardt, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna.
The SCS ties in with global scholarly and public discussions on surveillance and privacy, trust and trustworthiness, and authoritarian rule. It is a major and novel governance initiative by a “strategic rival”, and is thus of significance for the European public. What is the shape of this system? How does it evolve? How does the Chinese public perceive and evaluate the SCS? How does the public perceive different threats to individual privacy? What are the SCS’s social, political and cultural origins and impacts?
This project seeks to provide answers to these questions and push forward theoretical debates on governance with information collection and classification schemes, data privacy, as well as trust and trustworthiness. The project’s empirical strategy is based on public opinion surveys, qualitative and quantitative content analysis and field research. The project seeks to clarify important unresolved questions on the shape of the SCS, and provide the public with empirically grounded insights. The project is led by H. Christoph Steinhardt, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna.
During the first 30 months of the project, the PI has built a team of currently two postdoctoral researchers, two doctoral students, and four student assistants. The project team’s doctoral and MA students have developed their respective dissertation research designs. Together with collaborators from different countries, the team collected government documents, survey data and social media data in China. Due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, fieldwork was impossible until 2023. Since then, exploratory field trips have been made, but options for in-depth fieldwork remain uncertain due to a worsening political climate. Collaboration with Chinese partners has also become more difficult.
Two initial journal articles on the structure of privacy concerns in China and the intersection between the SCS and other social engineering initiatives by the Chinese state, respectively, have been published. A third article on the foundational policy discourse about the SCS is accepted for publication. The collected data are currently being analyzed and publications are being prepared, have been presented at conferences, and are under review. Ongoing avenues of research are the shape and evolution of the SCS in policy and policy discourse, state social engineering initiatives related to the SCS, perceptions of privacy and privacy concerns, SCS-related morality narratives and beliefs, the perception of a “trust crisis” in China, as well as the interaction between social trust and state efforts to build trust.
Aside from research, the PI, postdocs and predocs have engaged the public through talks at research institutions across Europe and Asia, secondary school teacher trainings, public lectures, policy briefs, media op-eds, as well as interviews in public radio. Public engagement will continue over the second half of the project.
Two initial journal articles on the structure of privacy concerns in China and the intersection between the SCS and other social engineering initiatives by the Chinese state, respectively, have been published. A third article on the foundational policy discourse about the SCS is accepted for publication. The collected data are currently being analyzed and publications are being prepared, have been presented at conferences, and are under review. Ongoing avenues of research are the shape and evolution of the SCS in policy and policy discourse, state social engineering initiatives related to the SCS, perceptions of privacy and privacy concerns, SCS-related morality narratives and beliefs, the perception of a “trust crisis” in China, as well as the interaction between social trust and state efforts to build trust.
Aside from research, the PI, postdocs and predocs have engaged the public through talks at research institutions across Europe and Asia, secondary school teacher trainings, public lectures, policy briefs, media op-eds, as well as interviews in public radio. Public engagement will continue over the second half of the project.
Findings so far have established that privacy concerns in China are directed mainly against business actors, while the state is perceived as a safety device against privacy threats. This indicates that the Chinese state has effectively transformed surveillance concerns from a legitimacy threat into a strategic advantage. Moreover, we have revealed that attention-generating Social Credit mandates, which target individual moral behavior at the local level, often originate from other state-led social engineering efforts. This highlights that policy implementation is incoherent, and that there are other government initiatives worth investigating to understand state efforts to steer individual behavior. Our research has further shown how actors with different agendas coalesced around a morality crisis narrative to bring Social Credit on the agenda of the government in China of the early 2000s. This sheds light on the authorities' consistent framing of the SCS within a morality discourse.
Project research has revealed that the SCS is one of several state social engineering initiatives that are rooted in a social disorder narrative and aim to prod citizens towards more pro-social behavior. Over the next phase of the project, our research will seek to push forward the empirical understanding and theoretical conceptualization of these new directions of governance and state building in China.
Project research has revealed that the SCS is one of several state social engineering initiatives that are rooted in a social disorder narrative and aim to prod citizens towards more pro-social behavior. Over the next phase of the project, our research will seek to push forward the empirical understanding and theoretical conceptualization of these new directions of governance and state building in China.