China's social credit system

To get deadbeats to pay up, a court in eastern China has turned to one of the oldest forms of incentives: bounties. The Jianggan district court in the city of Hangzhou said it would send targeted social media ads to people close to debtors, including family, friends and colleagues, offering money for those who manage to make the indebted pay up. This is another step in China’s national program to crack down on deadbeats, which includes putting them on a blacklist to prevent them from booking plane tickets or train travel under the country’s developing social credit system. The ads can be generated through an application on WeChat, a popular all-in-one messaging app in China, the court said i

Move over, Thanos. A Chinese city has decided that deadbeats are a more urgent matter to take care of. A court in the eastern Chinese city of Lishui has teamed up with local theaters to make Marvel fans watch a video about bad debtors before they could watch the latest Avengers movie. People who bought tickets to a midnight premiere of Avengers: Endgame on Wednesday in the city in Zhejiang province were first shown a minute-long video shaming 60 “untrustworthy” people who failed to pay their debts. The naming-and-shaming campaign is the local authorities’ answer to Beijing’s call to build a nationwide social credit system that aims to enforce what the state deems correct behavior in the soci

China is developing a controversial social credit system of rewards and punishments meant to encourage people and businesses to abide by rules and to promote integrity and trustworthiness in society at large. The government aims to have it in place by 2020, and so far its most visible applications include a ban on people from booking express trains or flights if they appear on various “blacklists”. While there are still many questions about how the system will be implemented, at least one company is setting its sights on making money out of social credit. Check out our video, above, for more.

David Kong felt shattered after a recent business trip to Chongqing. It took him more than 30 hours to travel to the city from Beijing, on a hard sleeper known in China as the “green-skin train” for its distinctive dark olive hue. The same 900-mile journey would have taken just three hours by air, or about 12 hours by high-speed train. But Kong could not take either, as he was a “deadbeat.” As one of 13 million officially designated “discredited individuals,” or laolai in Chinese, 47-year-old Kong is banned from spending on “luxuries,” whose definition includes air travel and fast trains. This class of people, most of whom have shirked their debts, sit on a public database maintained by Ch

17 million: the number of times people in China were banned from buying plane tickets for being “untrustworthy.” China has been working to build a social credit system that aims to enforce what the state deems correct behavior in the social, business and political arenas. Currently, there’s no national system that assigns scores to everyone. But regulatory bodies in China have been putting together a blacklist of people and companies identified as discredited. People can be blacklisted for all kinds of offense – such as evading tax, defaulting on loans or taking controlled substances onto trains. Firms can be deemed untrustworthy for making faulty vaccines, false advertising or polluting th