The Chinese government’s relationship with the internet and information technology has shifted significantly in recent years. From playing whack-a-mole with pesky micro-bloggers, when Xi Jin Ping first took over in 2012, to today, the authorities’ relationship has matured as a) the net penetrates deeper into society than ever before and b) the information that can be harvested is more useful than ever before.
In the paper highlighted this week, delivered at the conference Digital Disruption in Asia: Methods and Issues, at the Univesity of Leiden in May, Rogier Creemers, a Post-doctoral Scholar in the Law and Governance of China at Leiden University elaborates on how the relationship has progressed from confrontational to symbiotic.
The main conduits for this change are the big internet companies like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba who’s respective bosses have been brought increasingly into the political process. Pulling these companies in is a government that’s recognized that information collected by such operators is very different from information collected by themselves in the past and then simply tabulated electronically.
Where’s this relationship heading? Among other areas almost certainly into the area of ‘Social Credit’. This is an idea that’s been floating around since the turn of the century and is the notion that a central database of ‘goodness’ both for citizens and corporate entities can be created. This isn’t as Orwellian as it may at first sound. One of the problems of economic development in China is how much of the economy is still clan-based. Dealing with strangers would be a lot easier if they came with halos burnished (or tarnished) by an independent analysis of their past financial and social dealings.
Aside from allowing the more effective pursuit of the social credit idea access to data from the private sector could help with planning, data collection, economic real-time monitoring and host of other issues important to the central government that their present data collection systems are inadequately purposed for.
There are data security issues to be worked out; but, this being China, those are unlikely to impede the further development of an ever closer union of big-government and big-data.
Knowing the above, if I were operating on the Chinese mainland, I’d be inclined to use cash a lot more and stay off social networks; the smart probably already do/are.
You can read the paper in full via this link Disrupting the Chinese State.
Happy Sunday.