I am delighted to be able to participate, with a large number of my extremely talented colleagues, in the 2025 Annual Conference of the European China Law Studies Association. It is being hosted this year at University College Dublin with great thanks to our host, Mark Poustie (Professor of Law and Dean of the School of Law), and his incredible staff. For the Conference Program here: Programme 2025 Conference
I will be presenting my paper, “Smart Regulation, Smart Society, Smart Courts, and Smart Party: The Ideology of Chinese Social Credit and its Dialectics.” European China Law Studies Association Annual Conference 2025, University College Cork, Cork Ireland, 20 September 2025. My object is to wrestle with the forms and consequences of tech enhanced measures operate and drive the management of human collectives in political. social, and economic spaces. The Chinese focus on what was formally designated as social credit, and then the diffusion of the techniques of that project throughout management spaces suggests some of the challenges and opportunities, as well as the trajectories of development that one might expect to see further developed in the near term. These raise,in turn, the fundamental issue of regulatory autonomy of automated systems of governance, systems that may have been initially coded by humans but which might follow the logic of its programming in directions that humans no longer directly control. That, in turn raises the fundamental issue of investing in "smartness" through automated regulatory systems and the challenges of accountability and coordination in social spaces.
Abstract: On 31 March 2025, the Chinese authorities released what might be understood as the first major theoretical development of social credit systems since the State Council White Paper of 2014 in the form of 中共中央办公厅国务院办公厅关于健全社会信用体系的意见 [Opinions of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council on Improving the Social Credit System]. The release of the Opinion might have come as a surprise to those who had begun to envision the social credit project as increasingly narrow, technical, and embedded in traditional Chinese regulatory structures. These remarks examine social credit in the light of that Opinion and in the wider context of the much broader Chinese dialectics of new quality production as a central element of socialist modernization after the 3rd Plenum of the 20th CPC Congress. To those ends it is first necessary to take a deep dive into the 31 arch 2025 Opinion in the shadow of the development of social credit as such since 2014. One might then consider the evolution of social credit and its forward-looking aspirations in light of the core objectives of New Era socialist modernization. That requires considering the social credit project as a functionally differentiated aspect of a much broader undertaking that is meant to develop a Marxist-Leninist structure for the incorporation of tech based governance within the core political project of the CPC in its guidance and leadership role of the nation through the governing apparatus. Social credit, as smart (high quality innovative) regulation becomes a part of a larger dialectic of norms and means for perfecting the economic, social, and political order of the nation. Section 2 (Deus ex Machina) provides a historical context for social credit as a governance project and as a premise of institutional operation. That context includes a consideration of the overarching conceptual premises of smartness (Zhìnéng (智能) and Zhihuì (智慧)). Section 3 then suggests broader themes and trajectories in the Opinions around the core themes of structure (外儒内法); and norms (信). This section offers a deep dive into the Opinions. Section 4 then considers the implications of the Opinions for social credit within smart regimes. Section 5 then examines emerging regimes of smart courts (‘Zhi Hui Fa Yuan’ (智慧法院)) within these regimes of smart governance and social credit sensibilities and aspirations. Section 6 then offers brief conclusions.
Prepared for delivery at the European China Law Studies Association Annual Conference 2025
University College Cork, September 2025
Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)
W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs
Pennsylvania State University, 239 Lewis Katz Building, University Park, PA 16802 [DJR1] * 1.814.863.3640 (direct) * lcb11@psu.edu
Abstract: On 31 March 2025, the Chinese authorities released what might be understood as the first major theoretical development of social credit systems since the State Council White Paper of 2014 in the form of 中共中央办公厅国务院办公厅关于健全社会信用体系的意见 [Opinions of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council on Improving the Social Credit System]. The release of the Opinion might have come as a surprise to those who had begun to envision the social credit project as increasingly narrow, technical, and embedded in traditional Chinese regulatory structures. These remarks examine social credit in the light of that Opinion and in the wider context of the much broader Chinese dialectics of new quality production as a central element of socialist modernization after the 3rd Plenum of the 20th CPC Congress. To those ends it is first necessary to take a deep dive into the 31 arch 2025 Opinion in the shadow of the development of social credit as such since 2014. One might then consider the evolution of social credit and its forward-looking aspirations in light of the core objectives of New Era socialist modernization. That requires considering the social credit project as a functionally differentiated aspect of a much broader undertaking that is meant to develop a Marxist-Leninist structure for the incorporation of tech based governance within the core political project of the CPC in its guidance and leadership role of the nation through the governing apparatus. Social credit, as smart (high quality innovative) regulation becomes a part of a larger dialectic of norms and means for perfecting the economic, social, and political order of the nation. Section 2 (Deus ex Machina) provides a historical context for social credit as a governance project and as a premise of institutional operation. That context includes a consideration of the overarching conceptual premises of smartness (Zhìnéng (智能) and Zhihuì (智慧)). Section 3 then suggests broader themes and trajectories in the Opinions around the core themes of structure (外儒内法); and norms (信). This section offers a deep dive into the Opinions. Section 4 then considers the implications of the Opinions for social credit within smart regimes. Section 5 then examines emerging regimes of smart courts (‘Zhi Hui Fa Yuan’ (智慧法院)) within these regimes of smart governance and social credit sensibilities and aspirations. Section 6 then offers brief conclusions.
1. Introduction
With 中共中央办公厅国务院办公厅关于健全社会信用体系的意见 [Opinions of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council on Improving the Social Credit System] (the “Opinions”),[1] a high level organ of the political central authorities delivered, for the first time in over a decade, a major conceptual writing on social credit and its systems (hereafter the “SCS”). Perhaps it was time. The 2014 germinal opinion of contemporary social credit and its systems[2] established both the conceptual basis for a broad understanding of social credit, its relation to the ruling ideology, and its pathways to implementation.[3] And it spawned a decade of discussion about its nature as a theoretical construct, as a principle of governance, as an institutional apparatus, and as an administrative methodology that required deeper embedding within the simultaneously emerging systems of Chinese Socialist Rule of Law code complexes, including administrative and civil procedure law.
By 2025, however, more than the interpenetration of a social credit apparatus within Chinese legality had occurred. And much of the discourse around what had been at the heart of the generation of social credit had moved on to “smart” systems. One spoke as much about smart cities, smart courts, and more generally about a smart society, and more discretely, a smart Party, than about social credit. And one could have been excused for wondering whether the social credit enterprise of 2014 had become a specialty area focused exclusively on the strategic rationalization of consumer and business credit and its use in the disciplining of both to make them for useful for the realization of State policy objectives.
And yet the imperatives of transforming Chinese governance through the incorporation of technology-enhanced methods and operations, and the utility of these tech based operational approaches for enhancing the fundamental imperatives of modernization continued to serve as a central element of the modernization principles of the Communist Party as it continued to perfect its New Era Marxist Leninism.[4] And indeed, it might have been a coincidence that the Opinions were delivered only months before the 3rd Plenum of the 20th Party Congress and its further elaboration of a now more mature approach to socialist modernization and with it of its focus on high quality production with a significant tech tilt.[5] To understand the “Opinions,” then, it may be useful one must understand post 3rd Plenum Socialist Modernization and especially its role, in the first instance, in the further elaboration of a High-Standard Socialist Market economy.
It is from this perspective that the reflections that follow are oriented. Section 2 (Deus ex Machina) provides a historical context for social credit as a governance project and as a premise of institutional operation. That context includes a consideration of the overarching conceptual premises of smartness (Zhìnéng (智能) and Zhihuì (智慧)). Section 3 then suggests broader themes and trajectories in the Opinions around the core themes of structure (外儒内法);[6] and norms (信).[7] This section offers a deep dive into the Opinions. Section 4 then considers the implications of the Opinions for social credit within smart regimes. Section 5 then examines emerging regimes of smart courts (‘Zhi Hui Fa Yuan’ (智慧法院)) within these regimes of smart governance and social credit sensibilities and aspirations. Section 6 then offers brief conclusions.
2. Deus ex Machina
Chinese Social Credit systems was once a "thing" both in China and in the West. The reporting and reaction was vast, intense, and ultimately of relatively short duration.[8] It served as a sort of fetish object into which societies could pour their hopes and fears of what they began to understand as the inevitability of the transformation of social relations in the face of technologically enhanced digitization of social actors and the digitalization of their interrelations. Not that people had not seen this coming--but it was generally left to science fiction writers in the 1950s-1980s[9] and (mostly French) philosophers (it was Foucault who reminded his audiences that individuals were necessarily going to be reduced to "populations" and "statistics")[10] and thus of little importance other than as markers of pretension or entertainment and both. But starting in the second decade of the 21st century, what was entertainment or pretension became substantially more real as technology (finally) revealed the possibilities for translating theory into operational systems.
In China, it appeared to offer the possibilities of seamless management of people, institutions, and systems. The operational objective was built around trust.[11] For a short time at least, it was allowed to appear to point toward the perfection of a sort of regulatory system of systems. This meta system was to be grounded in big data based algorithmic analytics. These were meant to create (eventually) sets of interlocking and coordinated (through the organs of the CPC administered through state organs) platforms in which large pools of data which were to be shared by institutions across a variety of sub platforms (criminal, consumer, finance, education, judicial, social, labor, administrative, etc.). The object was to consume this data through analytics that were meant to lead to judgments (social credit scores) that would, in turn produce consequences for sub-platforms. Those judgments (scores) and consequences, in turn, were also consumed as data that then contributed to further real time consequences and scoring for its subjects.
Taken together, and at its most ambitious, social credit appeared, at least initially, to harbor the ambition to design a system of systems the object of which was to prod everyone and everything to adjust their behaviors and in so adjusting move closer to the ideal (the ideal cadre, the ideal worker, the ideal parent, the ideal student, the ideal judge, the ideal enterprise, the ideal official, etc.). The interpretation of that ideal and its fulfillment, then, would become a core objective of the political vanguard through its CPC, one grounded in its application of Marxist-Leninist theory with Chinese characteristics in the face of the contemporary general contradiction at any stage in historical development.
In a very real sense, then, one might be excused for thinking at, at least in its beginning and especially before COVID, the ideal of Chinese social credit was to create, in virtual form, the complexities of social relations, and then to use the analytics that converted physical to virtual representations of social relations to manage--and modify, various aspects of those relations, behaviors, and the like through targeted interventions. It was, at its root, the beginning of an effort to digitize (eventually, and in its most ambitious versions) all of Chinese life and social relations, and then to digitalize these social relations through the construction of what might be understood as the hologram of Chinese life in all its respects. While similar ambitions were on display outside of China, the core difference was embedded in the difference between Marxist-Leninist and liberal democratic systems.
If the former the effort was meant to be undertaken under the leadership and guidance of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and to enhance the ability of such leadership and guidance to be most effective. It was centralized and a means of enhancing the ability of the CPC to undertake its basic line. In liberal democratic states it was driven in and through markets, by private natural and legal persons (and other collectives), in which the state (the vessel containing political authority however expressed) played a regulatory and usually antagonistic role (except to the extent the projects suited state officials of course). It was decentralized, and privatized, and driven by collective transactional interactions. In a sense, the Marxist-Leninist social credit project could be understood as essentially deductive and the liberal democratic project as inductive, in the sense that the former constructed social credit as an expression of its principles and objectives (with the State serving as the leading force), while in the later social credit initiatives contributed to the construction of principles and objectives (with the state holding up the rear).
But that has all changed now; even in China. The experiment has fractured, and the challenge from traditional holders of authority and the pull of traditional ways of managing social relations proved too much for a quick transition. More importantly, the fractious competition among organized officials, each in their own little silos, for control of the key aspects of the system: overwhelmed the ambitions of those who might have thought it possible to develop a comprehensive system for a more or less seamless mass management. At its core, the fundamental state assets worth fighting over were quite important both to the operation of the human centric Marxist-Leninist apparatus, as it could be to the operation of its digitalized version: data, data management and use, coding, coordination, algorithms, punishments and reward, and the like. At its core, then, the “problem” of social credit was its inability to overcome the contradictions inherent in systems of law grounded in exogenous interventions and those of social credit grounded in endogenous and coded biopolitics.
Nevertheless, social credit and its systemicity has not died. Indeed, it has thrived, though after 2016 or so now well tamed within the web of social relations within which it was to serve in a decisive role. Some of it has been peeled away into other, more siloed, and less ambitious endeavors--in the form of smart cities, smart courts, smart finance, etc., and perhaps, after the 3rd Plenum of the 20th CPC Congress's further development of socialist modernization and its high quality production principle, in the form of a "smart" Party apparatus. It makes sense from the perspective of a principles lead system. One must first develop all the component parts of a comprehensive system before it might be coordinated into existence through the CPC's coordinating mechanisms. That preserves the structures of power relations even as it shifts its locus from officials and institutions to the algorithms and data that serve them. And one must ensure that all such component systems conform to law--reminding people (and especially senior CPCP leaders) that the ultimate element in the constitution of a comprehensive coordinated system of "smart" governance will have to involve the automation or the digitalization of law and its rule, and thus perhaps, as well to some extent, of the forms in which the CPC's guidance and leadership must take.[12]
To that end, one might do well to consider the notion of smartness—as (Zhìnéng (智能) and Zhihì (智慧)) within the context of social credit itself. When one considers social credit systems, then, it may be useful now to embed them within the conceptual universe of smart systems. More than that, I will speak to smartness within highly coordinated systems in which the political leadership and guidance function has been delegated to a vanguard of social forces organized in and as a Communist Party, the Basic Line of which includes overseeing modernization that contributes to the realization of the long march on the Socialist path. To that end, it may be necessary to consider the contradictions, as Mao Zedong understood that term of developing smart administrative organs without a correspondingly smart political apparatus.
We start with the idea of “smart” or “intelligent” or “wise.” In English, the word smart derives from ancient German (schmerzen) meaning to cause pain, or to be painful, and is aligned to its Latin cognate mordere. In North American English it is also a reference to quick-witted intelligence—perhaps that which bites, but earlier also suggested action or movement quickly and deftly executed. It acquired its reference to devices behaving as though guided by intelligence from the 1970s.[13] In contrast, the term intelligence, the English derived from the Latin, suggests capacity—principally the capacity to comprehend stimuli and rationalize them into something that could be understood. It references both its object (the notion of intelligence as data gathering) and the process by which it is given meaning (the faculty for understanding), as well as the meaningfulness of the meaning (the understanding or derivation of truth from facts).[14] Wisdom, on the other hand, referenced a condition rather than a capacity—it is the condition or property of being wise. To be wise is, in English, to be invested with the power of judging or discerning rightly. In its Old English sense, it incorporated the notion of awareness, and also of showing the way.[15] That sets up the tension/contradiction that is then embedded in both the aspiration and the concept. Aligning tech to courts can be understood in the sense of smartness (efficiency of execution), of intelligence (capacity to undertake an action or decision), and wisdom (the power/authority or status of judging or acting correctly). Each of these aspects is then replicated in the debates around the alignment of technology to something else—a court, a city, a phone, or a vanguard ruling party.
Similar to other languages, Chinese adds layers and nuance to the concept. One might start with the root--Zhì (智). The term is commonly translated as wisdom or intelligence (though note the two are not the same things), but also wit and resourcefulness. One might then consider two ways of thinking about intelligence or wisdom. One looks to 能 (néng) and the other to 慧 (hui). The first, 能 (néng), references ability, capacity, expertise, or skill. The second, 慧 (hui), refers to intelligence or wisdom, and especially discernment or perception. Zhìnéng (智能), then, might be understood to reference the capacity to actualize something smart or intelligent. Zhihuì (智慧), on the other hand might be better suited to reference the capacity to understand and use a thing, process or object. The first touches on capacity and its technologies. One speaks of smart phones as Zhìnéng shǒujī (智能手机), or smart appliances as zhìnéng jiādiàn (智能家电), or artificial intelligence as réngōng zhìnéng (人工智能). Here the focus is on technological capacity. The second, perhaps more on utilization through the application of moral, normative or empirical knowledge. One speaks of smart cities as zhìhuì chégshì (智慧城市), and one speaks of smart courts as Zhihui fayuàn (智慧法院). Here the focus is on analytical capacity that includes moral, political, and spiritual elements—not the tech, but the judgment is centered, one which may be expressed from out of zhinéng but requires capacity beyond tech; it requires a capacity to judge and apply (hui).
Whether that capacity remains human, or can be delegated to humanity in its virtual form remains to be seen. Within the Chinese conceptual universe, for the moment at least, the hope, expressed through text, is that collective institutions remain human—that is, that hui is an essentially human characteristic, for which other forms of intelligence lack capacity and wisdom. Smart courts are smart or intelligent in the sense of Zhihui (wisdom capacity) precisely because at its center, or perhaps as a mediating element is the individual judge, and the collective of judges. Thus, the object of wisdom, the capacity to use and not be used by technology or technological intelligence, lies with its object—the court (法院) which might in a more literal English produce the overtones of an institution or organ for law or regulation. What one can discern conceptually, then, in social credit, is a desire for a union of technology, which is smart and intelligent, with behavioral norms (trust), which are neither, but that may, with intelligent and smart tech, become wise(r) or at least better behaved in the sense of enhanced trustworthiness.[16] In its ideal form smart courts are expected to use smart and intelligent tech to enhance their capacity to make wise decisions.
3. Social Credit and a Shared Future for Mankind
All of these trajectories have found echoes in the 31 March 2025 release of 中共中央办公厅国务院办公厅关于健全社会信用体系的意见 [Opinions of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council on Improving the Social Credit System]. The core object remains the same--trust as the organizing object/characteristic that drives system building.[17] Its scope and methods now reflect a new and perhaps less ambitious reality grounded in its contribution to socialist modernization (社会信用制度是市场经济基础制度 [The social credit system is the basic system of the market economy])--an object that also appears in liberal democratic states[18] in the development of economic relations, broadly construed. At the same time, its detail suggests that social credit remains a foundational method for the management of social relations with ambitions that exceed a narrow construction of markets and economic activity. One speaks here of social credit as the means of digitally managing in innovative ways, both market relations and trust as its basic characteristic.
The document is organized around six opinions: (1) General Requirements [总体要求]; (2) Build a social credit system covering all types of entities [构建覆盖各类主体的社会信用体系]; (3) Consolidate the data foundation of the social credit system [夯实社会信用体系数据基础]; (4) Improve the trustworthiness incentive and dishonesty punishment mechanism [健全守信激励和失信惩戒机制]; (5) Improve the supervision and governance mechanism based on credit [健全以信用为基础的监管和治理机制]; (6) Improve the marketization and socialization level of the social credit system [提高社会信用体系市场化社会化水平]; and (7) Strengthen organization and implementation [加强组织实施]. Let's consider each very briefly.
3.1 General Requirements [总体要求].
These situate social credit squarely within the ideological development of Chinese Marxist-Leninism in its New Era, but also specifically as a manifestation of new and high quality productivity at the heart of socialist modernization theory as memorialized in the documents produced in the 3rd Plenum of the 20th CPC Congress in July 2024. Of particular interest perhaps was the reminder to "adhere to the general tone of work of seeking progress while maintaining stability, fully and accurately implement the new development concept, adhere to government guidance, market drive, and social co-construction, adhere to the promotion of integrity culture, adhere to the mutual integration of public credit information and market credit information, adhere to reasonable and legal credit rewards and punishments." The melding of social credit and the important objectives of the creation of a Socialist Rule of Law state are presented here as both form and object.
3.2 Build a social credit system covering all types of entities [构建覆盖各类主体的社会信用体系].
This part of the Opinion was divided into five parts: (1) Deepen the construction of Government credit; (2) Strengthen the credit construction of business entities; (3) Accelerate the credit construction of social organizations; (4) Promote the credit construction of natural persons in an orderly manner; and (5) Comprehensively strengthen the credit construction of the judicial law enforcement system. This section suggests that the ambitions for social credit as outlined in the 2014 State Council paper[19] has not diminished, but that the approach to its realization is now more cautious and more deeply embedded in contemporary patterns and forms of (human centered) governance through law.
In some sense it plays to the notion of 外儒内法 (Confucianism on the outside; legalism on the inside) but with Marxist-Leninist characteristics.[20] At the same time, the scope of focus remains economic transaction-oriented even as its reach touches on all critical fields of social relations--governmental (including judicial), enterprises, social organizations, and individuals (in markets at least). The focus on judicial credit, grounded on trustworthiness, may be worth quoting in full:
Strengthen the construction of judicial credibility of courts and procuratorates and improve judicial credibility. Increase judicial openness in accordance with the law and safeguard the people's right to know. Strengthen the credit construction of judicial law enforcement personnel, and establish a credit record and credit commitment system for law enforcement personnel. Increase the cost of false litigation, illegality and dishonesty. Strictly implement the identification procedures for dishonest persons subject to enforcement, and optimize relevant dishonest punishment measures.[21]
It is only a small step to move from the internal legalism of each of these five parts of this portion of the Opinion to the larger normative framework: government, business entities, social organizations, natural persons, and the judiciary represent the great pillars of Socialist Chinese society. It is to their coordinated and orderly operation that the encoding of perfection, and the legalism of systems of rewards and punishments are directed. But at the level of the Party, those legalisms are merely the instruments of the embedding of normative values that are necessary for socialist perfectionism at each stage of historical development leading (eventually) to the establishment of a communist society in and as China. While the legal state is directed toward the state apparatus and all social collectives,[22] it cannot apply to the vanguard Communist Party, whose own internal structures of legality are subject to its own authority. In this sense the delightful ambiguity appears to serve those constituencies which center legality, as well as those constituencies that favor the coded manifestation of Party core leadership to avoid social “abnormality,” a condition that must be defined and internalized among the great centers of collective life.
3.3. Consolidate the data foundation of the social credit system [夯实社会信用体系数据基础].
This part is also divided into five parts: (1) Establish a comprehensive, complete and accurate credit records; (2) Strengthen the collection and sharing of credit information; (3) Establish a unified public disclosure system for public credit information; (4) Promote the open circulation of public credit information in an orderly manner; and (5) Strengthen the security protection of credit information. This is, in large measure, a reaffirmation of the old social credit core. It is effectively impossible to develop a coherent and effective social credit system—an integrated system of punishments and rewards built around the CPC’s elaboration of aspirational perfection—without the basic fuel of that system, that is, of data. To that end the Social credit system must focus not just on data, but its construction in something like usable form, and its warehousing and distribution in ways that are structurally meaningful for access by those organs involved in the production of assessment, and of coordinated systems for the distribution of punishment and reward.
Of critical importance here may be the focus on the coordination of digitized data flows within a central platform overseen by and through State organ(s).
Strengthen the “general hub” function of the national credit information sharing platform for credit information collection and sharing, adhere to sharing as the general principle and non-sharing as the exception, uniformly collect credit information in various fields, provide credit information services to relevant departments according to needs and regulations, and regularly conduct collection and sharing quality and efficiency evaluations.[23]
The 3rd Plenum emphasized the need for coordination, especially in the economic field, including it seems, data and data sharing (which is to be distinguished from the organization and coordination of data platforms through markets, an idea heavily criticized in official discourse). Much of the rest of this section touches on coordination and fulfillment of existing law and regulation. The issue, of course, is coordination where various aspects of law and regulation are vested in different organs of the administrative state apparatus.
3.4 Improve the trustworthiness incentive and dishonesty punishment mechanism [健全守信激励和失信惩戒机制].
This section has three subparts: (1) Strengthening incentives for trustworthy behavior, (2) Carrying out dishonesty punishment in accordance with laws and regulations; and (3) Improving the unified credit repair system. The focus, as it has been especially since 2014, remains fixed on notions of trust, trustworthiness and its performance within the larger projects of socialist modernization in economic and then social relations. That object has not changed. But its expression and coordination with the project of building a rule of law state has modified the means toward its fulfillment, In a sense, one might think about this as a means of disciplining coders and analytics by alignment them more closely with the processes and forms of law. That still leaves open the sometimes vast spaces left to exercises of administrative discretion (to be taken up by generative A.I.?). But still, it represents a means of both coordination among objectives and a form of at least some sort of discipline in the process of moving from digitization, to digitalization of conduct and its consequences.[24]
Of particular interest, perhaps, is the breadth of context in which systems of (lawful) punishments and rewards are to be developed. At its limit it is meant to align the social totality of the social credit system, reaching all aspects of social relations (Opinion 2) with the legalist technologies of implementation. But these are written in the form of instructions to coders. Government officials, and certainly lower level cadres, would have very little to say about the substance of this section, with the exception of the small space for discretionary decision input which Opinion 4 largely implies is to become automatic and exogenous to the control of the bureaucracy, except for the generation of data and the compliance with rewards and punishments. This last is particularly relevant to the last of the instructions in this Opinion 4: the therapeutic mechanisms for trust/credit repair. Yet this is a task assigned to the National Development Reform Commission. That suggests an initial focus on economic behaviors, but also that the NDRC may house the coders and the analytics necessary for compliance.
3.5. Improve the supervision and governance mechanism based on credit [健全以信用为基础的监管和治理机制].
It ought not to be surprising that this section is divided into six subsections: (1) Implement hierarchical and classified supervision based on credit evaluation; (2) Establish and improve the credit commitment system; (3) Promote the in-depth application of credit reports; (4) Strengthen the credit supervision of contract performance such as government signing and guiding the signing of contracts; (5) Promote credit empowerment of grassroots governance; and (6) Improve the laws, regulations and systems of the social credit system. In a sense here is where the regulatory sausage is prepared. Administrative organs are assigned disciplinary, supervisory, and coordinating tasks. Some of the elements of smart cities are encountered, especially in the context of governmental systems of review and approval of credit based decision-making. Perhaps of greater interest in this section is subpart (3):
Promote the in-depth application of credit reports. Promote the full use of credit reports in public management fields such as market access, administrative approval, government procurement, investment promotion, and qualification review. Vigorously promote the use of special credit reports to replace certificates of illegal and irregular records. Encourage the use of credit reports in market transactions such as bidding, financing and credit, and commercial transactions.[25]
Read narrowly, of course, it suggests maximizing the value of credit reporting within the contours of socialist modernization goals. Read more broadly, it suggests the greater use of credit scores--that is of the determination of a judgment about the aggregate factors that went into producing that score--on a host of interactions with the state. All of this, of course, is to be undertaken in accordance with law--a law that must (in the context of the fundamental dialectics between social credit and law systems) be adapted to social credit objectives to protect the integrity of both systems. "Promote the promulgation of the Social Credit Construction Law and promote the inclusion of credit rules in relevant special laws and regulations. Strengthen comprehensive evaluation before the promulgation of credit policies to prevent the generalization and abuse of credit management measures." [推动出台社会信用建设法，推动将信用规则纳入相关专项法律法规。加强信用政策出台前的综合评估，防止信用管理措施泛化滥用。].
3.6 Improve the marketization and socialization level of the social credit system [提高社会信用体系市场化社会化水平]
This Opinion consists of four parts: (1) Vigorously cultivate the credit service market; (2) Deepen the promotion of credit financing and credit transactions; (3) Strengthen credit construction in the platform economy; and (4) Serve high-level opening up. This section suggests the role of private enterprises within the project of developing social credit. It also reaffirms the reversal from the early stages where private enterprises were expected to lead; the sense now, a sense reflecting recent discussion of the relation between the private and state sectors in China.[26] This underscores a complementary and gap filling role for private enterprise under the direction of state organs charged with overall coordination. The section also suggests that the project of digitization and digitalization (the platform economy) remains a central objective under the 3rd Plenum's innovation driven approach to socialist modernization. It is also meant to align with the recent renewal of efforts to encourage foreign invest in China and project Chinese foreign investment abroad.[27] It also may be fashioned as an instrument for broadening the internal markets in the context of implementing dual circulation strategies. This is especially important with the re-election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency.
3.7 Strengthen organization and implementation [加强组织实施].
This section recognizes the state of administrative governance in China, and the fundamental division, at an operational level, between the Peoples Bank of China on the one hand, and the National Development and Reform Commission on the other. It also recognizes as it must, the more daunting task of coordinating from the top the activities of lower level actions, regulations, etc. at the provincial and local levels. Nothing new here, but the challenge (and likely points of coordination friction) are acknowledged.[28] It will be for the core CPC leadership to sort that out as and to the extent it makes sense. But what is clear is that social credit as understood here is, in the first instance, a critical element in the construction of the new socialist market economy,[29] and in that sense is understood in a quite specific and narrow way, one confined to the Social Credit law itself, but not to the concept of social credit as something far more (potentially) ambitious.
4. Where Does that Leave SCS?
There may be a few initial propositions worth considering in the shadow of the 中共中央办公厅国务院办公厅关于健全社会信用体系的意见 [Opinions of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council on Improving the Social Credit System].
1. While the Opinion devotes a substantial amount of space to the technicalities of legalism, its principal value may in the way in which it may seek to use social credit (understood broadly as a set of ways of managing or governing) to more intimately align administrative legalism with the overall objectives based policies of the CPC itself. That is, that the social credit methodologies may serve as a bridge between the operations of an administrative nomenklatura and its caste of bureaucrats and officials, with the overall direction of CPC. Consider in this respect the embedding of "Eight Provisions" [八项规定] into the working architecture of state and private organs.[30]
2. SCS might also be deployed as a digitalized mechanism for the elaboration of critical dialectics in the operation of the policies developed to propel the nation along the Socialist path.[31] As the General Secretary noted, there is a need for the coordination (1) of the relationship between effective markets and effective government; (2) of the relationship between aggregate supply and demand for stability of a coordinated economy; (3) of the relationship between old and new technologies of production around the concept of new and high quality production in socialist modernization; (4) of the relationship between incremental and comprehensive improvements; and (5) of the relationship between quality of production and production volume in ways that augment the frits of socialist modernization.[32] All of these are fodder for the Opinion. As I have suggested elsewhere:
It finds its greatest expression aligned to another significant area of theoretical evolution—that of socialist modernization and the relationship between the development of productive forces and the guidance role of the CPC. One might speak now of the dialectical coordination of socialist modernization. And that dialectical coordination touches all aspect of social relations in which the obligation to develop productive forces is found—in the economic, social, cultural, environmental, and political fields of social organization. In this sense, dialectical coordination serves as a nexus point for the material expression of the unity of these concepts—dialectical materialism, democratic centralism, socialist modernization, and the nature of the material expression of the leading role of the CPC.[33]
Its expression in the Opinions is straightforward and ambitious: “Build an SCS that covers all kinds of subjects, unifies institutional rules, and is co-built, co-shared and co-used. Promote the deep integration of the SCS and all aspects of economic and social development to provide a powerful pillar for accelerating the building of a unified big market, maintaining fair and orderly competition market order, and promoting high-quality development.”[34]
3. SCS may be one aspect that a set of techniques that will eventually be as important for the disciplining of the Party as it is for the nation.[35] In this respect SCS forms a critical component of socialist modernization of the structures of socialist collectivity and the techniques for its discipline. As I suggested elsewhere:
The 3rd Plenum of the 20th CPC Congress made it quite clear that Chinese style socialist modernization had moved again to the center of policy. With it, and as one of its essential elements was the objective of high quality production. Socialist modernization is meant to apply to all of the productive forces of the nation. And those productive forces all must engage in some process of self-revolution; for economic enterprises that focuses on innovation; for social collectives on high quality engagements with social and cultural practices for state organs it might focus on efficiency and technological innovation to ensure that its functions fulfill the expectations of the CPC and the masses; and for the vanguard party, the CPC, it must necessarily focus on self-revolution.[36]
4. The development of trust in the nation and the CPC, especially through the assessment and data driven mechanisms of SCS may serve China’s international policy objectives.[37] In that respect, China’s use of SCS techniques serves an international agenda that produces win-win situations with respect to alignments with certain global expectations now emerging, including for example, ESG (environmental, social and governance reporting).[38]
5. The Opinion appears designed to please everyone. For the legalists and the legal academic establishment, it provides a bridge between the analytics of social credit and its focus on data, and the traditional modalities of governance (traditional at least since 1978 in its current form). For the normative and Party centered elements, it offers the mechanisms for coordinating the ecologies of perfection—in the economic, political, administrative, and social spheres. Though the focus appears to be on the economic, and with it on the traditional core of socialist modernization, it ought to be remembered that after the 3rd Plenum socialist modernization has become a broader instrument for comprehensive change.
6. Taken as a whole, one might consider the extent to which the document furthers the CPC’s role as a cultural leader. Here it suggests the way that socialist rule of law operates even within emerging technologies. One night read the Opinion as a whole for the proposition that it suggests a culture of governance, with the Party at its core, that comprehensively articulates the forms of behavior through the lens of socialist modernization in the new era.[39]
7. Lastly, consider the elements of the Opinion. First, social credit must adhere to and express the ideological political-economic framework within which it is an instrument and an expression.[40] Within that framework, social credit will be undertaken comprehensively in all the key areas of Chinese collective and individual organization.[41] That system is, in turn, grounded in data, whose production, protection, and deployment must be coordinated through the state under the guidance of the Party and within the specifications of law created for that purpose.[42] All of this effort elaborates the still fundamental starting point for the elaboration of a social credit based system(s), the notion of trust, now understood in its political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions, though elaborated principally through the lens of socialist modernization (but again understanding that within socialist modernization is the principle that everything is a productive force).[43] These measures directed toward those ends will fail in the absence of strong quality control measures.[44]
It is in this sense that one might reach at least a preliminary conclusion that social credit serves no useful purpose if it is not intimately integrated into the improvement and deployment of productive forces in every sphere of social relations, but, given the imperatives of the contemporary general contradiction, which must be focused on economics and social behaviors.[45] Thus understood and directed, social credit becomes useful when appropriately utilized and implemented.[46] Put in this way, one might note the way in which the social credit regimes discussed will serve as template for every aspect of organized life whether within the state, private, or social sectors, and with equal application to domestic and international engagement. The challenge, of course, will be to transpose these theoretical engagements into something operational. And it is to those ends that much of the detail in the Opinion is devoted.
8. And thus the essence of the Opinion, like that of the socialist modernization within which it is embedded, and through which it is both empowered and constrained, social credit is an all-around concept, an important means of rationalizing the entirety of the project, overseen by the Communist Party of China, to develop all the productive forces of the Chinese nation toward the ends of establishing a communist society for the nation.[47]
These considerations then frame the challenges that the Opinions expose. The first touches on the significance of SCS. To a large extent, the Opinions suggest that the core utility of SCS (however understood or applied) is as a tool of discipline, and as a mechanism for accountability. These primary objectives both measure the effectiveness of SCS in any context by means of the fulfillment of the stability function which was at the center of Opinions No. 1. These can then be understood in their constitutional dimension. That, certainly is true enough. And yet, it might be taken as a basic element of Marxist-Leninism that it is a dynamic rather than a stabilizing process. While stability is important, certainly for the fulfillment of objectives at any stage of historical development. It is also quite clear that stability is not an end goal but a means, and risk aversion as a means of minimizing the burdens of change rather than avoiding them. In this sense SCS must be understood as a high quality innovation for the basic goal of moving society, and its productive forces, along the Socialist Path and towards its goal—the (eventual) establishment of a Communist society in China. This produces the possibility of contradiction that must be confronted.
Second, it is clear that while SCS, within its webs of Socialist Legality, Socialist Modernization, and Socialist Internationalization targets the administrative apparatus, social collectives, and the masses (as individuals and in societal organs), SCS in that guide does not reach the structures, operations, and working style of the CPC itself. That is not to say that there is no SCS for the Party; it is rather to suggest that, at least within the purview of the NDRC and the Central Bank of China, which together have been tasked with the coordination and implementation of the Opinions generally, that purview does not extend to the work of the CPC itself as a political leadership and guidance organization. That raises the issue of the way in which the CPC will itself apply the techniques and technologies of SCS to its own disciplinary and behavior projects.
Third, it is not clear what is driving policy. It is possible to see in the Opinions the role of ideology in driving SCS functionality. AT the same time, it is possible to reverse polarity, and also see in SCS the driving force of ideology. That touches, in turn on an inherent contradiction of new quality productivity within Marxist-Leninist theory. That contradiction turns of the primacy of new or high quality production at the heart of a more comprehensive understanding of New Era socialist modernization. In this sense, at least, SCS would constitute an expression of new quality production, and as a means of elevating an innovative approach to the utilization of productive forces. Nonetheless, SCS is also not just an object of socialist modernization in that sense but also its expression. SCS is in that respect a fulfillment and the character of ideology.
Fifth, the Opinions, not unexpectedly, leaves key issues unresolved. The principal issue in need of resolution touches on the definition of SCS. SCS could be understood as a regulatory tool; or it could be treated as the methods developed to manage systems of data based rewards and punishments generally. Yet that issue also touches on a more difficult issue—that is on the issue of the strategically narrow definition of SCS as a subset of a much larger pool of related techniques and approaches to regulation, but one designed to limit the issues of coordination with Socialist legality, modernization, and internationalization in what may be inconvenient ways for the State. And, needed, one understands that SCS may be constructed from out of the cocktail of legalities to which legality may be applied. As for everything else, other legalities may be relevant. Thus, SCS is to be distinguished from, for example, smart city projects.
The Opinions, however, appear to paint SCS more broadly than it appeared to have been narrowed after 2014. The inclusion of governmental SCS may be an example. On the one hand governmental credit may be defined quite broadly to include the disciplining of the entire scope of the administrative apparatus of state. And yet, the language in the original is as easily restricted to certain public institutions—hospitals, state owned enterprises, and other public mechanisms for the delivery of services in fields in which private service providers also operate. The former would represent a broadening of SCS, and with it the application of Socialist legality. The later would evidence the continued vitality of strategic fracture.
Sixth, the extent of SCS as an ideologically relevant driving force is unclear. Treating SCS as mere technique—as the sort of high quality productive innovation at the root of 3rd Plenum modernization—serves those who would continue to privilege the fundamental position of human administrative organs in the operation of the state. Nonetheless, SCS might also be understood as a subset, as an ideological space, within or through which the broader concepts of Socialist Legality, Socialist modernization, and Socialist Internationalism may be developed. It is in this sense a New Era expression of both the mass line, of the operationalization of democratic centralism through the digitalization of democratic centralism now bound up in the algorithms through which policy objectives are fulfilled, and in the digitalization of coordination which is a primary function of the central authorities with respect to the state sector and the leadership of all other forms of human collective relations in China.
Lastly, the Opinions raise, but do not confront, the fundamental ideological issue within Chinese Marxist-Leninism of the “the problem of the problem.” This issue underlies the conceptual turmoil within which SCS itself is signified as problematic, even as it is deployed as a resolution of the problem against which it is deployed. At the root of the turmoil is dissonance. This dissonance reflects a conflict (and the contradiction, in Chinese Leninist terms) between the old humanizing techniques of control (on the one hand) and its virtual transformation (on the other hand). Connected to that is the dissonance between the pathways and linkages of digitalized regulatory environments and those attached to the human. Even if one could confront these contradictions--and especially its core dilemma, that is in what space, real or virtual, does regulation occur—SCS represents a moving target (and again invoking the dissonance between the ideology of high quality development and the bureaucratic embrace of the superiority of stability in a Marxist-Leninist environment that tends to be risk-averse). SCS is a human and artificial construct over a dynamic process of the movement from the physical to the virtual and from the qualitative and exogenous to the quantitative and endogenous. That last is a contradiction the resolution may well need to wait until China enters into its next stage of historical development—that is it may be a problem for the Post-New Era Chinese Leninist theorists.
5. Smart Courts Between Social Credit and Smart Regimes.
Chinese has assumed a leading role in what appears to be a global movement to align the forms and functions of technology with those of the courts, to produce, in synergy something greater for both. The global nature of this movement to align tech and courts ought to be underscored. The 2020 Strategic Plan for the U.S. Federal Judiciary speaks to the need to harness technology’s potential to “increase productive time, and facilitate work processes. . . improv[ing] access to courts, including information about cases, court facilities, and judicial processes.”[48] The European Commission speaks to the “Digitalisation of Justice” proposing a toolbox of measures to improve access to justice and efficiency.[49] By 2024, Morocco, Tanzania, and Egypt had introduced technology into their judicial framework, including A.I. driven technologies.[50] And so on.[51]
China has given this movement a name—or at least rebranded the product of the alignment of technology and the courts. Under the rubric of “smart” courts, perhaps better in the original Chinese-- ‘Zhi Hui Fa Yuan’ (智慧法院). The name suggests an alignment on the ground that is both linguistic and textual in the operational spaces of courts. Over the last decade or so, and through its Supreme People’s Court, Chinese officials have led a national effort to modernize the judicial system through the use of emerging technologies. Like other modernization pathways elsewhere, the goals include enhancing access to justice and ensuring that access provides pathways toward just outcomes.[52] Since December 2024, these efforts also include an artificial intelligence platform to help judges improve work efficiency.[53] The technology enhanced work of Chinese courts has also been aligned in some respects with forms of social credit, especially with respect to efforts to build trustworthiness through blacklists and more generally systems of nudging preferred behaviors among classes of persons who have dealing involving courts.
Names, however, are sometimes a distraction. And that appeared to be the case with Chinese smart courts. The name became a vessel into which people could pour their larger fears about the transformations they feared most—that the people would no longer be their own masters but would serve technology even as technology appeared to serve them. In effect, and like that glorious episode from the Twilight Zone television series of the mid 20th Century—what appeared to be the glorious innovations offered by generous space aliens, turned out to be the means by which humanity could be better prepared and managed for consumption, all in the service of a cookbook that gave humanity hope but was its doom—“To Serve Man.” The notion of innovation as a cookbook and humanity as its object is certainly old, but appears intensified when one worries about “robot courts,” and autonomous virtual analytics which, through the machinations of simulacra, might wrest all autonomy from humans and human institutions. It is no surprise, then, as Susan Finder relates in her examination of the Supreme People’s Court 2024 Work Report to the National People’s Congress, that the term “smart courts” (智慧法院) appears to have been dropped.[54]
Nonetheless, the function and object of courts, the work of which is enhanced by or through technology, remains unchanged. In the tech context, those nightmare transformations, even if far into a future, might be grouped into something like a three-course meal. First, the courts themselves are consumed. Here the object of “smartness,” the courts, are consumed by the technology that serves it and in the process the court is transformed into something else. It is here that one can elaborate stories of robot courts, or of courts in which non-human intelligence appears to oversee the human in tech based courts, as my first slide’s visual of the court in the television series “Futurama” illustrates. Courts serving the State becomes courts serving its programming. It might be better to speak here not of robot courts but instead of zombie courts. Second, courts consume its litigants, judges, and lawyers. Here the reference earlier to the moral of the Twilight Zone television series’ “To Serve Man” episode becomes the appropriate illustration. One encounters here a jurisprudence detached from its humanity—from its human sources and objects—the court becomes an object and process the object of which is closing cases in accordance with law. It is not otherwise attached to the welfare of the core judicial stakeholders. Last, the courts consume themselves. Here the courts are devoured into and become a digitalized space for the settlement of disputes that technology makes possible. Courts become a platform observing forms of dispute settlement but are processed through predictive and input mechanisms
Still, as a conceptual matter, the name, in every language, is worth keeping. Its honesty rather than its precision provides a starting point for considering, in more technically precise terms, (1) what one means by technologically enhanced judicial function, and (2) provides a cognitive baseline for better embedding this amalgam of tech and state organ, into its larger environment. That focus, in turn, requires some sort of conceptual semiosis, that is a means of signifying the object “smart-court” in a way that accords with the way that society would understand the object. In this case, it requires a basis for aligning the “smart” with the “court” to produce an aggregated singularity, the smartcourt, a kneading of conceptual objects each of which remains true to themselves while creating something that is its own conceptual object removed from the kneaded objects from which it derived, and which together may serve as an instrument or object of social credit operations.
Though “smart” or “intelligent,” or “wise” courts can be approached from many perspectives, in the context of the interpenetration of smartness and social credit it may be useful to start from the ordering premise that these “smart” courts can be understood as an object, and also as a symbol or signified conception, and lastly as the set of objects and behaviors that produces its own meaning through its own dialectical phenomenology—that being by doing. This amalgamation of objects and symbols is a matter central to the continued evolution, in human society, of the notion and practice of judging, and of institutions of judging to which it is both attached and to which it lends meaning; but an object and symbol of what? Well the courts themselves have let us know worldwide.
To do that, it may be necessary to consider the essence of both parts of this subject of study in themselves and within the wider conceptual spaces which give them form and direction. To that end it may be worth considering the essence of being “smart” and of the performance of “smartness” not merely as confined to the realm of the judicial, however that term is understood and performed. Rather, my object is to consider the object-concept we can identify as “smart courts” within deeply coordinated systems in which it forms a crucial, but not necessarily, the core part. While the focus is generally on smart systems, the special focus will be on the political-economic system of China in this, its new era of historical development on its unavoidable journey along the Socialist Path toward the realization, eventually, of a communist society in and for the nation. I will speak, then, to smart systems. More than that, I will speak to smartness within highly coordinated systems in which the political leadership and guidance function has been delegated to a vanguard of social forces organized in and as a Communist Party, the Basic Line of which includes overseeing modernization that contributes to the realization of the long march on the Socialist path. To that end, it may be necessary to consider the contradictions, as Mao Zedong understood that term of developing smart administrative organs without a correspondingly smart political apparatus.
For the moment, the issues are largely theoretical. Despite vast progress in the development of techno-intelligence systems and the enlargement of the capacity for the use of simulacra, in the form of descriptive and predictive modeling, to move from technical capacity to analytical capacity, the project of techno-modernization remains in its formative period. That period is marked by the realization of the potential of technology through the collection of data. Digitization, rather than digitalization, remains the crucial issue of this first era of techno-revolutionary intelligence. And that becomes evident in the resources and infrastructure still necessary to transform a sort of techno-medieval approach to the collection and storage of data, much less the construction of pathways for their use, into something like markets for raw materials. Issues of data quality, issues of producing data that may be useful across platforms, issues of ownership and control, including the power to destroy or change data, issues of the rights to exploitation, and issues of alignment with law, economic, and political systems for which data on the scale now possible was both impossible to conceive and to use in pre-tech (or analog) systems.[55] Digitalization is still currently at a primitive stage. Courts focus on virtual processes for access for filings, court hearing, records and records retention, and the like. Much of that is still data-centric. The focus remains on the harnessing of techno-processes and capacity to enhance current performances and behaviors of or in courts by reference to the perfection of pre-tech forms. Still, systems on the horizon will make it possible to use data for more sophisticated modeling, especially of caselaw, and then to rely on that modeling for guiding the work of judicial officials.
Yet the model suggests two significant contradictions, or challenges in the Western sense. The first touches on the problem for the courts—or rather for the human systems expressed in and through the courts, and thus as a signifier of all human collective organs—of technology that is no longer an instrument but becomes a driver of judicial functionality, including the function of decision-making (in cases) and judicial policy (in general). The second, and perhaps more immediate, problem touches on problems for the system of Socialism with the Party at its core. More specifically it concerns the impossibilities of a “smart”, “intelligent” and “wise” state apparatus overseen by a Party apparatus that is none of those things. Here the problem is of a vanguard political organ that is functionally incapable of supervising and discipling its own administrative apparatus because it lacks “smart” or “intelligent” capacity to do so. A “smart”, “intelligent” or “wise” court and court system is rudderless if the apex political organ under and through which its establishes its own meaning and sets the parameters for its own operations is incapable of overseeing either. Let us briefly consider each in turn.
With respect to the first, the challenge for the courts, and also for other “smart” institutions, ought to concentrate on the ordering of smart tech instrumentalization (Zhinéng) and the structures for exercising wisdom (Zhihui). That is triggered where the technology moves from being “smart” to “wise,” especially where the technology develops the capacity to be intelligent, and then ultimately to develop a self-awareness sufficiently complete to be autonomous—that is to develop self-generative capacity dependent on data and analytics, to be sure, but no longer dependent on human coders, data harvesters, or humans who transform analytics into decision. Technology is already at the cusp of achieving these transformations. It is no longer merely an instrument without capacity; and through analytics, and the wonders of evolving virtual models and comprehensive simulacra of the human world through descriptive and predictive analytics, may develop an autonomous capacity for wisdom in the ancient sense of judging correctly. At its limits, the role of the human and the techno-intelligence reverses—no longer an instrument to enhance human judgment and action, it now serves as the means by which humans become the instruments of its own capacity to move humans (in disputes or through policy) toward whatever state of efficient perfection was coded into its program as the ultimate or foundational objective of its activities.
This challenge becomes acute when it is transposed to the CPC and its own necessary efforts to become a smart (Zhihui) Party through innovation in smart (Zhinéng) programs and practices. At an advanced enough level it is possible to query whether tech or people begin to drive the development of Chinese Marxist-Leninism, and certainly the transposition of that driving -forward movement along the Socialist Path in specific policy. Much more specifically, the challenge revolves around the operational legitimacy of democratic centralism where the discussion may be either driven or enhance by or through advanced analytics and self-aware intelligence programs. The issue is a critical one where, under conditions of Chinese Marxist-Leninism, the CPC must constantly respond to changing conditions, now including the conditions of technological interventions in the processes of Party work. While the CPC must drive the overall situation within the Supreme People’s Court, through and with technology, the issue of who or what drives ideology in China under similar conditions, and its capabilities within ecologies of smart tech in administrative organs of State remains substantially unexplored.
It is at this point that the second challenge becomes threatening. Institutional hierarchies are constructed and maintained on the basis of the assumption of human control and agency. Institutions are not guided, disciplined, assessed, held accountable and managed—people are and by other people. Where techno-systems become a critical element in the operation of human systems, from digitized systems of efficiency and access oriented instruments, to more complex systems grounded in descriptive or predictive analytics, the chain of responsibility and accountability is at best disturbed, and at worst severed. That disturbance occurs both within the institution, and between the institution and its own supervisory organs up the chain of authority on social and political systems.
That hierarchical inter- and intra-penetration[56] is in turn structured within the cognitive cages of the ruling ideology. Like many innovations undertaken in China, the project of smart courts 智慧法院 comprises several parts, all of which operationalize important strands of the contemporary Basic Line of the CPC under conditions of the current general contradiction, and guided under the leadership of the CPC toward those ends. Substantial focus on smart courts tends to concentrate on their operation, and on the consequences of that operation for other, related areas of governance and policy with their own operational imperatives. In this sense, the study of smart courts focuses on functionality as a function of objectives: efficiency, justice, consistency, predictability, transparency, etc. It also focuses on the way in which smart court rules and operations may impact other rule/operation systems—data integrity, platform governance, artificial intelligence regulations and the like. These are important areas for the study of the “thing/object” itself—the smart court and its operational system. Nonetheless, the smart court system is itself the manifestation of a deep and dynamic process of interpenetration manifesting fundamental principles with Chinese characteristics. A Chinese smart court, for all its “intelligence” will serve no purpose if it is not, first, a socialist “smart court” and if that smartness (Zhinéng) is not a faithful reflection of the guidance and leadership (Zhihui) of the CPC as it is expected to be manifested in every aspect of the operation of the judicial function.
In this sense, smart courts are perhaps best signified as the dynamic manifestation of current concepts of Chinese Leninism and more particularly as the expression of the maturing vision of Chinese Leninism in its new era. That, in turn, blends two Leninist theoretical pathways—the first and better known, is the pathway towards a new era ideal of Socialist Legality or Rule of Law, the official version of which found expression in a portion of the General Secretary’s Report to the 20th CPC Congress. The second is bound up with the elements of socialist modernization, the further development of concepts of productive forces, and the incorporation of high or new quality productivity within them. Their application to the judicial system provides a space within which judicial system perfection becomes a function of the socialist modernization of law through innovation. Smart courts must be smart because the CPC has guided all of its productive assets toward the realization that new or high quality productivity is the essence of a socialist modernization. Socialist modernization, in turn, might be understood as the foundation for the overcoming of the current general contradiction of the current stage of Chinese historical development. Now the irony: tech, then, is a critical modality for this progression, the result of which may produce the great contradiction of the succeeding stage of China’s historical development, the contradiction between human and virtual direction of the nation along the Socialist Path. Tech balance within the CPC’s work style, then expand to include guidance and leadership of tech-based administrative organ, as well as self-governance. One speaks here of tech that enhances high quality productivity of the CPC’s work in agenda setting, quality control, political judgment, the role of the Socialist Path, the character of guidance itself (case versus system guidance for the courts), and always shaping tech and tech enhancement by the ideological imperatives of modernization through innovation.
This changes the focus of the contradictions and challenges of smart court development from the court and from tech to the role of the CPC and CPC authority enhancing tech. This may also be understood in two senses. The first of these touches on the leadership and guidance role of the CPC with respect to its judicial organs—serving as a sort of quality control function This operates in two important ways. One is with respect to ideological baselines that must be incorporated into the judicial practice. Both the operation of the judiciary and its product must be monitored to ensure quality in the form of adherence to the CPC’s basic line and more specifically its contemporary policy and objectives. The other is with respect to the judicial product. This may take the form of assessments around issues of the extent to which judges are applying the correct law in the correct way. To those ends, AI serves as a disciplinary and perhaps nudging mechanism. So does the penetration into the judicial function and operations of both digitization (the conversion of analog data into digital form) and its digitalization (the integration of digital technologies, including AI, into judicial operations to optimize the objectives specified by the CPC in its leadership and guidance roles). Both digitization and digitalization permits a more seamless interpenetration between the judicial and CPC functions.
The second of these focus on the CPC as the critical driver innovation in judicial structure, operation, and substance (its end product objects). This may be undertaken by CPC guidance/leadership driving principles and application of innovation in law, and in the character and cultures of the judicial function. That, in turn, may be undertaken through its oversight of the mechanisms of judicial production and of the judiciary itself. That might require a focus on the role of digitization/digitalization (perhaps especially through AI mechanisms and functions) in shaping the environment in which the judicial function operates and in the shaping of its decisions (in the aggregate). For this function to be undertaken to fuller effect, the CPC itself must undertake the sort of socialist modernization of high quality production it has developed for the courts, and to deeply integrate that digitized-digitalized capacity (including through the use of AI) in its leadership/guidance/oversight responsibilities. Smart courts require a smart vanguard with equal or superior capacity. The misalignment of these forces creates the sort of asymmetry that could produce an upending of leadership from the analog Party to the digitalized apparatus it was meant to oversee.
And thus the nature of the interpenetration and its challenges— the smart courts are both an instrument of delivering dispute resolution and law enforcement services applied to the masses and at the same time they are an instrument by which those services are shaped. In this sense, the smart court signifies the mass line, sociability modernization, and new quality production within its functionally differentiated sphere, which is, itself, an object and expression of the Socialist rule of law that it is meant to manifest. In that context, and in an analog form, the relationship between the vanguard and its judicial apparatus could be framed and understood in traditional personal-bureaucratic forms. In that sense there was an equivalence in the apparatus of interpenetration. But that structure, balance and initial form of interpenetration acquires a quite different aspect in the face of digitization and digitalization. Technology does not change the basic objectives but does significantly alter the character and intensity of interpenetration from the judiciary to the CPC and then back again. The smart court project is effectively incomplete in the absence of a smart Party that itself can deploy the emerging technologies to more deeply integrate its administrative apparatus (and not just the courts) within its guidance framework. To those ends the CPC must, with an eye toward the effective oversight of the courts and their tech, embed tech in its own operations and decision learning processes, and connect these to its oversight of tech enhanced courts. One speaks here of smart tech, guiding tech, assessment tech, analytical tech, and judgment tech. It is not clear that this can be done by people alone. And thus the challenge for the CPC—how to become a smart Party which drives technology but is not driven by or through it; a variation of one of the nightmare scenarios of tech and the courts.
This brings one back to the larger issue of nature of interpenetration. Within the Chinese political-economic model there are clearly issues that are unique to it. Nonetheless, the Chinese model does provide a template for more general consideration of the nature of the challenges that digitization and digitalization pose, not just within the specific models of Chinese governance, but more generally elsewhere. The line between interpenetration and interference is one that haunts all systems (in China perhaps characterized by the line between application in a specific case to the interpretation of the law to be applied). Another is the fundamental issue of the character of digitalization—instrument or sentience. That is the way in which what appears to be an instrument serving human collective functionality in a specific field may, with predictive analytics and generative intelligence operating autonomously, become the driver the instrument of which are the courts.
That produces a third issue—the fundamental character of court production in the age of big data tech—it is possible to understand courts and their functions as a generator of data, both with respect to inputs (the claims) and outputs (the decisions) and structures (the processes and institutions through which inputs and outputs are generated and their own input/output consequences). Courts serve themselves, of course, but in two distinct respects: first they convert their inputs into outputs that continue to drive the system as intended, and second, they provide the baseline assessable data for assessment of the operation of the political line at any point in time. To the extent that courts become data sources, in China for example, the role of the courts as an input for the proper operation of the mass line may become more important than the generation of output within the judicial system. In this sense big data tech may serve to instrumentalize courts as means of political/policy expression. And in that sense it may be possible to develop high quality production methods with respect to the management of democratic centralism and more generally of whole process democracy. For other systems the transformation of court cases as data sources could have similar effect, but, as one sees in the United States, perhaps driving changes in the balance between the judicial, executive and legislative roles. All of this is in the future, of course. Yet it is likely that the time to begin to consider the revolution in the delivery of judicial services from the perspective of its interpenetrative consequences and roles might not be avoided for long. What ought to be avoided, perhaps, is an insistence of treating functionally differentiated organs as isolated in their differentiation. Big data tech now makes that presupposition harder to realistically maintain, in practice or for analysis.
It is in this sense that the project of smart courts, that is, of technology enhanced judicial functioning, becomes a manifestation of the larger issues of the reassertion of the authority and guidance of the CPC within a tech infused environment in which the human has, to some extent, been displaced, and inter-tech coordination will be required as a virtual replication of the human structures that together constitute the political and administrative structures of the Chinese state around the CPC. The acuteness of the challenges for Chinese Marxist-Leninist systems may be understood in two core respects. The first looks to challenges to the operational realities of the Communist Party as the core and central element of the political-economic order. The second looks to the contradictions between (1) the imperatives of high quality productivity driving the fundamental obligation to push forward the project of Socialist modernization, an imperative that sits at the normative center of New Era Chinese Marxist-Leninism, on the one hand, and (2) the consequences of that modernization of the ability of the Communist Party to effectively lead without itself matching if not exceeding techno-driven modernization both in its own internal operations and in the mechanics of its guidance and leadership over the political apparatus of the nation—including its courts.
The second touches on “smart” or “intelligent” asymmetries among interlinked organs within political and social systems, that can destabilize or upend the ordering of that system. More specifically, a developing asymmetry between an administrative apparatus that is “smart” or “intelligent” (courts, cities and the like) and the apex holder of political authority in a Marxist-Leninist system—the Communist Party of China and its apparatus. Systems grounded on the interface of human and tech based out-input relations do not function unless all the elements of each of the interpenetrative platforms (courts-Party) function effectively within themselves and among each other. These, then, suggest the contours of the post-New Era general contradiction, one built on the consequences of successfully meeting the challenge of New-Era Socialist Modernization through high quality production/productivity—the contradiction between tech based and human driven forms of guidance and leadership and with it, the re-conceptualization of the interpenetrative engagements between virtual and human intelligence in the arena of guiding human development.
Ultimately, one must come to understand, or at least consider the plausibility, of a principle that under New Era Chinese Marxist-Leninism, the state apparatus can only be as “smart,” “intelligent” and “wise” as it is in the capacity and operations of the Party to do likewise. In the presence of asymmetry two fundamental contradictions must be addressed. The first is the contradiction between the leadership of the Party and its capacity to lead. The second is between the techno-instruments through which Party capacity is undertaken and the ability of the Party apparatus to steer, guide, assess, control and utilize these instruments in the performance of its own duties and responsibilities. The fundamental issue of instrumentalization and capacity remains undisturbed—the more autonomous the tech, the greater the risk that the relationship between instrument and its wielders will be reversed, at least in part. In the absence of a capacity to understand and manage those contradictions, either organs better capacitated to wield techno-instrumentalized applications and processes will drive human collective systems, or human collective systems may become an instrument through which techno-wisdom intelligence may realize its own vision for techno-human perfectibility.
6. Concluding Thoughts
SCS remains very much a work in progress. Nonetheless, a decade or more after its quite splashy appearance within the official pronouncements of the Chinese core of leadership, SCS appeared to have been sidelined. The 2025 Opinions discussed in this essay might be best, and most straightforwardly understood as a signaling that SCS is neither dead nor has the 2014 vision been abandoned. Nonetheless, that vision now required coordination. The first of that coordination is ideological, between SCS as an expression of an ideology of regulation and of the methods by which the CPC can lead the nation on the Socialist Path, and other critical ideological developments that mark the fundamental characteristics of Chinese Marxist-Leninism in the New Era: Socialist Legality, Modernization, and Internationalization. The second of that coordination element is operational. SCS is not so much driving change as its forms and operations are being consolidated in the form that they have taken since 2014.
That does not necessarily mean that SCS will be confined to its current condition. Indeed, it is clear that SCS as a conceptual rather than operational construct is far broader and more vibrant than its appearance within the administrative apparatus. At the same time, the (re)focusing on SCS is a reminder of the critical role of SCS within the regulatory framework of virtually every collective organ (and with respect also to individuals) within China; of the critical role of data and data management for that regulatory framework; of the equally critical role of normative values built around a broader conception of trust for the activation of data based governance broadly applied; of the centrality of an apparatus to deliver value for SCS methods; of the still central need to more deeply embed SCS sensibilities and expectations within the social relations of the nation and abroad; and of the critical role that distinctions between bureaucratic and Party measures are to be understood for the fulfillment of whatever promise of SCS that the CPC deems worth pursuing. What follows is the only certainty that can be gleaned from the Opinions document—that SCS is neither being abandoned, nor is it necessarily confined to operational matters driven by other forms of regulatory structures. But its sensibilities, its operating style, and its tech enhanced modalities are being diffused throughout the apparatus of State in other forms and by other names. Chinese smart courts suggests that trajectory. When to all of this is added what appears to be an emphasis on stability (within which experimentation and risk taking may be possible) but under an assessment regime that appears to be risk-averse, then, for the moment at least, one can expect movement toward consolidation and coordination, rather than a focus on innovation and new forms of high quality SCS production, and its dispersal within other programs.
[1] 中共中央办公厅国务院办公厅关于健全社会信用体系的意见 [Opinions of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council on Improving the Social Credit System] (31 March 2025), available https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/202503/content_7016535.htm (last accessed 15 September 2025).
[2] State Council Notice concerning Issuance of the Planning Outline for the Establishment of a Social Credit System (2014-2020), State Council Release (2014) No. 21, https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/socialcreditsystem/ (hereafter State Council White Paper 2014). The PowerPoint is available online at https://www.backerinlaw.com/Site/podcasts/powerpoint-presentations/.
[3] Larry Catá Backer, China's social credit system: Data-driven governance for a 'new era', Current History 118(809):209-214 (2019).
[4] Xi Jinping, Hold High the Great Banner of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Strive in Unity to Build a Modern Socialist Country in All Respects, Report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (25 October 2022), available https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202210/25/WS6357e484a310fd2b29e7e7de.html (last accessed 10 September 2025).
[5] Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Further Deepening Reform Comprehensively to Advance Chinese Modernization (21 July 2024), https://www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/xw/zyxw/202407/t20240721_11457437.html (§II (Building a High-Standard Socialist Market Economy)¶7 “We will also improve the social credit system and related oversight institutions.”)
[6] “中国社会的政治密码：外儒内法,” [The political code of Chinese society: Confucianism on the outside and law on the inside], https://www.wenxuecity.com/blog/202406/44445/965.html.
[7] See Larry Catá Backer, Trust platforms: The digitalization of corporate governance and the transformation of trust in polycentric space, Regulation & Governance (2024) doi:10.1111/rego.12614.
[8] See discussion in essays posted to Law at the End of the Day, Social Credit.
[9] See, e.g., Metropolis (1927), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Westworld (1973) and The Terminator (1984),
[10] See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, and Population: Lectures at the College du France, 1977-1978 (edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell, originally published 2004, translation into English published in 2007).
[11] See, e.g., Larry Catá Backer, Next Generation Law: Data-Driven Governance and Accountability-Based Regulatory Systems In The West, and Social Credit Regimes in China, Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 28:123 (2018).
[12] See, e.g., Larry Catá Backer, Social Revolution (社会革命) as Self-Revolution (自我革命) and the New Quality Production of CPC Modernization: 习近平 深入推进党的自我革命 [Xi Jinping, Deepen the Party's Self-Revolution] (Part of a speech at the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection on January 8, 2024)).
[13] See Etymology Online “Smart” available https://www.etymonline.com/word/smart; Oxford English dictionary online, available https://www.oed.com/dictionary/smart_adj?tl=true#22355876.
[14] Etymology online, intelligence, available https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=intelligent.
[15] Etymology online, wise, wisdom, available https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=wise; see also OECD, available https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=wise.
[16] See generally Larry Catá Backer, “Social Credit “in” or “as” the Cage of Regulation of Socialist Legality,” (2024) 24(3) China Review 71-106.
[17] Larry Catá Backer, Social Credit “in” or “as” the Cage of Regulation of Socialist Legality, The China Review 24(3):71-106 (2024).
[18] Larry Catá Backer, Trust Platforms: The Digitalization of Corporate Governance and the Transformation of Trust in Polycentric Space, Regulation & Governance (2024) doi:10.1111/rego.12614.
[19] State Council White Paper 2014, supra.
[20] For Context see Qin Hui 秦晖, The China Story, https://www.thechinastory.org/key-intellectual/qin-hui-%E7%A7%A6%E6%99%96/.
[21] [全面强化司法执法体系信用建设。加强法院、检察院司法公信建设，提高司法公信力。依法加大司法公开力度，保障人民群众知情权。加强司法执法人员信用建设，建立执法人员信用记录和信用承诺制度。提高虚假诉讼违法失信成本。严格失信被执行人认定程序，优化相关失信惩戒措施。]
[22] See, e.g., China to pursue reform in sync with rule of law, NCP Website, http://en.npc.gov.cn.cdurl.cn/2024-07/25/c_1007719.htm (“The country must "see that all major reforms have a solid legal basis and that the reform achievements are elevated to law in a timely manner," according to the resolution” citing to the Resolution of the 3rd Plenum).
[23] [强化全国信用信息共享平台信用信息归集共享“总枢纽”功能，坚持以共享为原则、不共享为例外，统一归集各领域信用信息，根据需求按规定向有关部门提供信用信息服务，定期开展归集共享质效评估]
[24] Marianne von Blomberg, The Social Credit System and China’s Rule of Law, in Oliver Everling (ed) The Social Credit System and China’s Rule of Law (Springer, 2020), pp. 111–137.
[25] [推进信用报告深度应用。推动在市场准入、行政审批、政府采购、招商引资、资质审核等公共管理领域充分使用信用报告。大力推行以专项信用报告替代有无违法违规记录的证明。鼓励在招标投标、融资授信、商业往来等市场交易活动中使用信用报告。].
[26] 习近平：民营经济发展前景广阔大有可为 民营企业和民营企业家大显身手正当其时 [Xi Jinping: The development prospects of the private economy are broad and promising. It is the right time for private enterprises and private entrepreneurs to show their talents] and the Maturing of the two unwaverings [两个毫不动摇] policy), https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/i92U-PATFdZkDkGey8ygbg.
[27] Discussed in Larry Catá Backer, Coordinating the Two (Dual) Circulation Economy: General Secretary Xi Meetings with Foreign Business and Commercial Officials, Law at the End of the Day (30 March 2025), https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2025/03/coordinating-two-dual-circulation.html.
[28] These might be best understood in the context of the 2022 encounter with social credit, 中共中央办公厅 国务院办公厅印发 《关于推进社会信用体系建设高质量发展 促进形成新发展格局的意见》[ General Office of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council "Opinions on Promoting the Construction of a Social Credit System with High-Quality Development and Promoting the Formation of a New Development Pattern"], https://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2022/content_5686028.htm.
[29] Consider in that respect the following: 中共中央 国务院 关于新时代加快完善社会主义市场经济体制的意见 [Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Opinions on accelerating the improvement of the socialist market economic system in the new era]; (CPC Central Committee and State Council On Creating a Healthy Environment for Entrepreneurship) 中共中央国务院关于营造企业家健康成长环境 弘扬优秀企业家精神更好发挥企业家作用的意见; 中共中央办公厅印发《关于加强新时代民营经济统战工作的意见》The General Office of the CPC Central Committee issued the "Opinions on Strengthening the United Front Work of Private Economy in the New Era" ; An All-Around Cultivation of Socialist Morality--中共中央 国务院印发 [Issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party]: 《新时代公民道德建设实施纲要》[The Outline of the Implementation of the Construction of the Moral Citizen in the New Era]
[30] See, e.g., 中央党的建设工作领导小组召开会议 研究部署深入贯彻中央八项规定精神学习教育工作 蔡奇主持并讲话 李希出席并讲话 [The Central Party Building Leading Group held a meeting to study and deploy the study and education work on the in-depth implementation of the Central Committee's eight regulations. Cai Qi presided over the meeting and delivered a speech. Li Xi attended the meeting and delivered a speech]; see also 国家开发银行党委研究部署深入贯彻中央八项规定精神学习教育工作 [The Party Committee of the National Development Bank has studied and deployed the study and education work on the in-depth implementation of the spirit of the Central Eight Regulations], https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/EAi9wZ_RweNEo8LHtOkluQ.
[31] 习近平, 经济工作必须统筹好几对重要关系 [Xi Jinping, "Economic work must coordinate several important relationships"]. It was published to Issue 2025-1 of Qiushi [求是]
[32] Ibid.
[33] Larry Catá Backer, Economic Dialectics Must be Coordinated! Brief Reflections on 习近平, 经济工作必须统筹好几对重要关系 [Xi Jinping, "Economic work must coordinate several important relationships"] and Marxist-Leninist Phenomenology in Socialist Modernization, Law at the End of the Day (15 March 2025), https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2025/03/economic-dialectics-must-be-coordinated.html. See as well, 习近平 深入推进党的自我革命 [Xi Jinping, Deepen the Party's Self-Revolution] (Part of a speech at the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection on January 8, 2024)).
[34] Opinions, supra, Section 1.
[35] 习近平：健全全面从严治党体系 [Xi Jinping: Improve the system of comprehensive and strict governance of the Party], https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/W5Qqpb_RlABkYiwdHNfnZQ.
[37] Address by Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang's at World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 (as published in China Daily).
[38] Larry Catá Backer, ESG Along the Socialist Path: China's Long March to an Institutionalized ESG Reporting System; The Original Text of the New (Trial) Basic Standards 企业可持续披露准则——基本准则（试行）, Law at the Endo f the Day (7 January 2025), https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2025/01/esg-along-socialist-path-chinas-long.html.
[39] 宋月红, 坚守党的文化领导权和中华民族的文化主体性 [Adhere to the Party's cultural leadership and the cultural subjectivity of the Chinese nation].
[40] General Requirements [总体要求].
[41] Build a social credit system covering all types of entities [构建覆盖各类主体的社会信用体系].
[42] Consolidate the data foundation of the social credit system [夯实社会信用体系数据基础].
[43] Improve the trustworthiness incentive and dishonesty punishment mechanism [健全守信激励和失信惩戒机制]
[44] Improve the supervision and governance mechanism based on credit [健全以信用为基础的监管和治理机制]
[45] Improve the marketization and socialization level of the social credit system [提高社会信用体系市场化社会化水平]
[46] Strengthen organization and implementation [加强组织实施]
[47] 《红旗文稿》2024年第23期 Red Flag Articles (2024:23)
[48] Judicial Conference of the United States, Strategic Plan for the Federal Judiciary (Sept. 2020), available https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/federaljudiciary_strategicplan2020.pdf, last accessed 1 July 2025.
[49] Communication from The Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee And The Committee Of The Regions Digitalization of justice in the European Union A toolbox of opportunities COM/2020/710 final (2 December 2020).
[50] Artificial Intelligence and The Future of Judicial Systems in Africa Report (2024) by the Lawyers Hub
[51] Legal Services Corporation, Report of the Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice (2013), available https://www.lsc.gov/sites/default/files/LSC_Tech%20Summit%20Report_2013.pdf.
[52] Han Qin, and Li Chen, “Virtual Justice or Justice Virtually: Navigating the Challenges in China’s Adoption of Virtual Criminal Justice,” (2025) 56 Computer Law & Security Review 106112; Changqing Shi, Tania Sourdin, Bin Li, “The Smart Court – A New Pathway to Justice in China?,” (2021) 12(1) International Journal for Court Administration 4 , available https://iacajournal.org/articles/10.36745/ijca.367.
[53] Supreme People’s Court, Press Release: “China launches artificial intelligence platform to boost judicial efficiency,” available https://english.court.gov.cn/2024-12/05/c_1053706.htm, last accessed 1 July 2025 (“Zhang Chengbing, another official from the People's Court Press, said . . . "The platform can analyze and compare information from a large number of electronic files, with a quicker response to catch key points and extract outlines, so as to further improve judicial efficiency," he explained.”).
[54] Susan Finder, “What’s New in the 2024 SPC Report to the NPC (28 May 2024), available https://supremepeoplescourtmonitor.com/tag/npc-work-report/, last accessed 1 July 2025.
[55] In Europe, see, e.g., CASE OF SHIPS WASTE OIL COLLECTOR B.V. AND OTHERS v. THE NETHERLANDS
App. No(s). 2799/16; 2800/16; 3124/16; 3205/16 (1 April 2025); available https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-242521%22]} .
[56] Interpenetration here is understood in multiple senses—as perichoresis (περιχώρησις) from the Christian engagement with the relationship among the three elements of the Christian Trinity; as "perfect interfusion" (yuanrong, 圓融) from Huayan school (華嚴) of Buddhism and focusing on the phenomenology of reality grounded in mutual containment and consequential permeability of Dharmadhatu ( 法界) the realm of objects and action; as structural coupling in systems theory among deeply intertwined subsystems in dynamic and hierarchical arrangements; in Marxist-Leninist principles of the four Cardinal Principles operationalized within concepts of the mass line, democratic centralism, and people’s democratic dictatorship; and in the fundamental concepts of object-signification-interpretation within semiotics and its phenomenological interplay. ,
[DJR1]Double spaced, remove one.
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