The ACLU’s website reports on how China’s communist government is working with some of the country’s biggest corporations to insitute an Orwellian system to “score” every citizen:
Everybody is measured by a score between 350 and 950, which is linked to their national identity card. While currently supposedly voluntary, the government has announced that it will be mandatory by 2020.
The system is run by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say.
In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tienanmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse.
It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them. Imagine the social pressure against disobedience or dissent that this will create.
Anybody can check anyone else’s score online. Among other things, this lets people find out which of their friends may be hurting their scores.
There’s even more terrifying details at the link. Also, it’s worth noting that at least one big American tech company is already a party to this nightmare. Yahoo still owns about a hefty chunk — $23 billion — of Alibaba stock, one of the Chinese companies administering this if-you-read-it-in-a-dystopian-YA-novel-you-wouldn’t-believe-it scheme.
As I previously noted in a feature I did on how the American media are complicit in covering up Chinese human rights abuses, Yahoo was allowed to purchase a big chunk of Alibaba pre-IPO wayback in 2006, less than a year after, at the ChiComs request, Yahoo voluntarily coughed up the identity of a Democracy activist who was using an anonymous Yahoo email address. Journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaking Chinese Propaganda Department’s directives showing they were suppressing attempts to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. I’m sure government approval of Yahoo purchasing a stake in Alibaba was in no way affected by their willingness to throw Shi Tao under the bus for the crime of wanting to live in a free country.
Now letting Alibaba assign “citizen scores” will literally reduce the financial prospects of 1.3 billion people — a billion of which are living in abject poverty as it is — to a number controlled by arguably the most murderous and oppressive regime in human history.
It would be nice if the American government and Yahoo’s customers and business partners cared that the company was set to make billions profiting off Alibaba and what it’s doing here.
