Whether China was obeying the edict of Rahm Emanuel that “you never let a serious crisis go to waste” or simply following the standard practice of governments never to do so, the Chinese government was among the many that exploited the fear and urgency attending the COVID-19 pandemic to intensify its control over the populace.
In totalitarian China, one result was an even more pervasive social-credit system. Under this Orwellian system, a component of China’s version of a telescreen in every room, persons get and lose points in accordance with how conscientiously they obey the government. During the pandemic, you could lose points by making fake masks (fraud), by hoarding supplies (planning for the day after tomorrow), and by spreading rumors (wrongspeak). One of these things is not like the others.
In March 2020, Wired reported that “China is using coronavirus to boost its dystopian social credit system.”
It was a neighbour who turned Mr Yang in. The flat compound’s management were told he had been to Wuhan and that he had not reported it. They ordered him to self-quarantine for 14 days. He had no symptoms typical of the coronavirus, Covid-19, and was worried his machinery component business would suffer if he self-quarantined. “Big data would have gotten him anyway,” one of his family members says; the Transport Bureau called about his trip two days after he and his family began their 14-day flat confinement….
Other cities across China have also expanded their social credit-related regulations to include spreading rumours that disrupt efforts to control the epidemic, hoarding, upsetting market order, making fake or poor quality masks and other medical supplies. Donations of money or materials to support epidemic-related work increases scores in Rongcheng, Shandong province. In the small city of Zhucheng, in the same province, medical staff on the frontlines also get a bump up. But severely untrustworthy behaviour leads straight to a C-level personal credit rating, which stays static for three years.
Eventually, as the severity of the pandemic waned and the public started to rebel, the Chinese government dropped many of the worst pandemic-related mandates and restrictions. But in the words of the Mercator Institute for China Studies, the state persists in its efforts to “further build up, streamline and integrate digital monitoring and surveillance” of every kind—not only a “fragmented but flexible” social-credit system.
