Marianne von Blomberg and Haixu Yu, "Shaming the Untrustworthy and Paths to Relief in China’s Social Credit System" (Modern China 17 Feb. 2023)

 

Pix Credit HERE

I am delighted to pass along the news about the publication of a fantastic article--Marianne von Blomberg and Haixu Yu, "Shaming the Untrustworthy and Paths to Relief in China’s Social Credit System" (Modern China 17 Feb. 2023). The authors (both at the University of Cologne) consider the connections between objectives of trust, the modalities of date driven regulatory management of mass behaviors, and the leveraging of social relations. That combination--perhaps aimed at better management, produces incompatibilities with the traditional normative parameters within which  a law based regulatory system is supposed to operate. 

Abstract: China’s social credit system (SCS) formalizes reputational regulation, thereby challenging traditional remedial paths. It adds trust assessments and their dissemination to the regulatory repertoire of Chinese state agencies across all realms. This use of adverse publicity, however, entails the loss of the agency’s control over the scope and intensity of the punishment as the punitive action is realized by information recipients, rather than the agency itself. Traditional legal controls are not fit for shaming. We map how the SCS innovates public regulation by implementing a strategy for regulatory shaming from the central level. In a second step, we discuss its consequences, specifically, how undue damages are remedied. Legal remedies for social credit shaming measures are regularly denied, as their position in the law is unclear. Other existing remedial channels likewise do not consider the particularities of shame sanctions such as irreversibility. Social credit reputational regulation might best be controlled by formulating an agency practice that retains control over the scope of punishment.

This is, of course, not a uniquely Chinese issue, or one especially confined to social credit regimes.  There is a long history of shaming techniques in Western law--from the stocks, to the publication of the names of the customers of prostitutes. Those techniques have tended to avoid the close inspection that a data driven system has generated (but see eg here)--and perhaps that is the reason. The scalability of shaming through the data rich techniques of social credit substantially intensify the effects. The authors' conclusion might well relate to both versions:

The SCS presents a case in which reputational regulation meets a legal system whose structures are not (yet) able to accommodate it. The ways in which these contradictions will be resolved will shed light on the future of the role of law in China. Further research is needed to explore whether the SCS’s reputation information mechanisms will help to realize “Chinese ‘new era’ pan-moralism” (Lin and Trevaskes, 2019: 44), or retract and develop into an extended open government information scheme in line with the current legal framework.

Yet it is also worth noting that misalignment does not necessarily suggest incompatibility.  It can as easily suggest the need for reform and alignment. 

The online text of the paper may be accessed HERE.