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How can the US judge China’s social credit system when American consumers are chained to big tech?
- Before Washington makes an issue of Beijing’s surveillance net, it must examine how big tech has commodified Americans. If the Chinese are becoming cogs in an ideological machine, Americans have been transformed into monetisable data
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Why you can trust SCMP
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As we move into 2020, expect China’s implementation of a social control system that leverages cutting-edge technology to keep tensions high between Washington and Beijing.
China watchers have realised this effort is highly efficient, just as they finally understood last year that Beijing never had any intention of implementing political reforms along the lines many Westerners had envisioned.
It’s understandable that this, too, was difficult to digest. For many years, as China’s economic reforms gathered momentum, ideological purity seemed impossible. Differing viewpoints and individual pursuits that in no way supported the Communist Party began to flourish, hidden in the eddies of a sociological mainstream projected by state broadcaster CCTV.
That is, until a system of surveillance and social credit, driven by artificial intelligence, began making it increasingly difficult for anyone in China to undercut the party’s dominance. According to the Post’s China Internet Report, there are now more than 13 million people in the country whom the system of social credit has deemed untrustworthy.
But before America’s policymakers make an issue of this, they should, as China’s foreign ministry loves to advise, look in the mirror.
In the United States, technology is now enabling what corporate interests have long sought – the transformation of citizens into economic units – just as in China the Communist Party is transforming nearly a fifth of the world’s population into ideological units that will not question the party line.
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