TECHNOLOGY OF GOVERNANCE

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TECHNOLOGY OF GOVERNANCE

A poststructural discourse analysis of governmentality and the Social Credit System

Lina Stolpe

Uppsala University

Department of Government Spring Semester of 2019 Supervisor: Oscar Almén Word count: 11907 Page count: 38

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The Social Credit System, which is planned to be fully implemented by 2020, is a national surveillance and data sharing initiative which will rate organizations, corporations and citizens and calculate their trustworthiness score. Although the system has met a lot of criticism from Western countries, the approval of this system in China has been surprisingly high. In this essay I look into the governmentality that makes the Social Credit System a possible part of governance in China whereas in Western countries it tends to be understood as a tool of authoritarianism. The study consists of a poststructural policy analysis and a poststructural interview analysis, and uses a methodology inspired by Carol Bacchi. The results that are found in this study show that the understanding of and arguments for Social Credit System by the policy makers and the interviewees have many things in common, such as perceptions of societal problems and ideas about collectivism and unison. These similarities indicate that governmentality studies are relevant when looking into the case of China and the Social Credit System.

KEYWORDS:

China, Social Credit System, Governmentality, Governance, Social Management, Political Attitudes, Hangzhou, Foucault, WPR, PIA

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1. INTRODUCTION

In the age of digitalization, questions of freedom of speech, privacy violations and fake news are regularly brought up to discussion. Within the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was installed in 2018 as a measure to ensure the protection of individuals’ personal data and to strengthen fundamental rights (European Comission, 2019). Meanwhile, China is handling the case of personal data in a different way. In 2014, the Communist Party announced the building of a nation-wide Social Credit System (hereafter referred to as SCS). This system will rely on Big Data gathering and surveillance with the goal of assessing scores for several levels of society – organizations, companies and individuals – based on how trustworthy their performances are. The concept has met a lot of critique from Western governments and media, declaring that it is a violation of liberal rights. However, reports have shown that Chinese citizens are in fact rather approving of this system (Kostka, 2019, p. 1).

China often tends to be an exception to theories set out to explain social and economic development. According to the modernization theory, economic development increases the call for democracy. Similarly, Maslow’s “Hierarchy of needs” claims that as basic needs such as food and safety are met, people move on to self-expression values (Oskarsson & Widmalm, 2014). This also suggests that China, after the economic boom of the recent decades, ought to move towards more democratic, and self-expressionist values. However, as of 2019, Xi Jinping Communist Party of China remain in power with limited opposition in mainland China.

This paper will dig further into the citizens’ attitudes toward the SCS, trying to gain new perspectives on the similarities and differences between the policy as presented by the central government and how it is perceived by citizens. It is a theory-consuming case study, using semi-qualitative interviews based in the Chinese city of Hangzhou during the spring of 2019 as well as official documents concerning the SCS. A central theoretical concept will be that of Michel Foucault’s governmentality, which can be briefly explained as governing through discourses and social norms. The purpose is to explore the underlying ways of thinking that make the SCS possible and approved of in the Chinese context, whereas it is frowned upon by Euro-American states. Applying governmentality on non-liberal contexts is a growing, albeit debated, field of study (Sigley, 2006). I will try to single out important discursive practices and social norms present in the State Councils planning outline of the SCS and further place these

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discourses in relation to how citizen perceive the policy and their society. In order to have a clear and systematic method, I turn to Carol Bacchi’s WPR approach, which is specifically developed for governmentality studies and discourse analyses.

The paper begins with a section about purpose and research question, followed by a brief introduction of what the SCS is and the reactions that have emerged in response to it. In the chapter of previous research of the subject, a recent study on political attitudes among Chinese citizens is used as a starting point for this study. There is also a section on previous studies on Chinese governmentality. After a short presentation of the material and method, the analysis is completed with the help of Carol Bacchi and Susan Goodwin’s poststructural discourse analysis. Finally, there is a short summarizing discussion on what can be said about the relevance of governmentality in the case of the SCS.

2. PURPOSE AND RESEARCH QUESTION

The aim of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of the political attitudes affiliated with the SCS, paying special attention to the governmentality that allows the SCS to be implemented and approved of. The research questions of this essay are the following:

(1) What underlying ways of thinking – in terms of rationalities, technologies and subjectification – construct the governmentality relevant to the Social Credit System?

(2) How similar are the State Council Outline and interviewee responses in terms of the descriptions of, and arguments for, the Social Credit System?

(3) What can the answer to (2) reveal about how relevant the governmentality is?

According to previous studies, two of the main reasons behind citizens’ high approval of the SCS are the possible positive impacts on the quality of life, in combination with a high level of “hierarchical trust” (Kostka, 2019, p. 23). While this study will be influenced by Kostka’s conclusions, the purpose is to take one step further in analyzing citizen and policy makers’ views, and to find the underlying ways of thinking that makes the SCS possible in China. To achieve this aim, the study will take the form of a

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poststructural discourse analysis. Thus, the argument I am proposing is that the high approval of the SCS is closely intertwined with Chinese governmentality.

3. BACKGROUND

3.1 What the SCS is and how it works

The majority of information about the SCS in Western countries comes from the media, which often portrait it as an Orwellian system and often compare it to the black mirror episode Nosedive, in which an all-covering reputational rating system takes full control of peoples’ lives (Chen, et al., 2018, p. 5). With the purpose of writing a thesis on the topic, it is useful to have more factual and nuanced background knowledge about how the SCS works coming from academic research rather than only using the medias’

descriptions to define it. While the system as of 2019 still remains in its developing phase, there are some studies that have looked closer into the mechanisms behind it.

The SCS can be understood as a “massive national surveillance data infrastructure initiative[…] to monitor and rate the trustworthiness of citizens, firms, organizations, and government units” (Jiang & Fu, 2018, p. 374). In other words, it is a plan to centralize the surveillance of social behavior of different societal actors.

According to Das et al. (2018, p.416), the production of the scores can be divided into 3 phases: the data collection phase, the data aggregation phase and the data infrastructure phase. During the first phase, data regarding financial behavior as well as the data regarding travel information and social media use are collected. The credit information is uploaded to the “National Credit Information Sharing Platform”, and is then shared among government agencies and local governments (Chen, et al., 2018, p.

12). Finally, the data are algorithmized to create social credit scores which are used to surveil government affairs, judicial affairs, social activities and commercial behaviors (Das, et al., 2018, p. 416). What makes the SCS different from traditional data sharing is that it follows a principle of “collecting everything”. Instead of tracking specific data for a specific purpose, the SCS collects and saves all data with no specific intention (ibid.).

The way that the information is gathered is not yet systematic. There are considerable differences between the big urban cities relying on mobile phone

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payments, security cameras with facial recognition and passport controls; and more rural areas and smaller towns where neighborhood watches record and manually track the behavior of citizens (Das, et al., 2018, p. 419). There is also a difference between the national SCS, local pilot projects on provincial level, and private IT firms having their own scoring systems. Many local governments have formulated SCS pilots in their own regions (Kostka, 2019). Some firms such as Alibaba or Baidu use credit scoring to allow people rewards such as cheaper train tickets or hotel bookings without deposits (Pak & Chong, 2019). This paper will focus mainly on the national SCS.

3.2 Responses to the SCS

The predicted impact that the SCS will have on China in terms of its authoritarian rule can be divided into two camps. Scholars with the critical approach believe that the digital technology most certainly will become a “tool by which authoritarian regimes can strengthen their repression” (Zheng, 2016, p. 1446). Internet censorship will be used to shape and constrict public opinions.

In addition, as Das et. Al. points out, the algorithms calculating scores are designed to predict social behavior, rather than allowing authorities to act post hoc, which could lead to a problem of “customized profiling” (Das, et al., 2018, p. 419).

Some people will be targeted even without having committed any crimes. This could create big divides in the population and threaten minorities. Chen et. Al (2018, p. 3) points to a conflict between “rule of trust” and “rule of law”. The SCS produces a risk that the former undermines the latter. Because the concept of trust is vague and ill- defined, they argue, citizen equality before the law will differ between advantaged and disadvantaged groups (ibid.).

As a response to this, other scholars argue that the Western reports on the SCS are ignoring the cultural context of governance. Although not claiming that the policy will lead to a spread of liberal views, these voices argue that China’s society is experiencing a huge number of frauds on all levels of society. For example, after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, an outcry of critique arose regarding the poorly constructed school buildings, whose collapse cost the life of many schoolchildren (Burkhart, et al., 2012). An earlier example of bureaucratic fraud is that of wrongful reports on food production during the Mao era, which resulted in the Great Famine (Zheng, 2016, p. 1446). Moreover, top-down promotion of good moral behavior has

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had a long history in the country, and the SCS provides a way to maintain a disciplined society throughout a modernization phase where fraud and economic crimes have grown (Song, 2019).

4. THEORY

This section will introduce the concept of governmentality, coined by Michel Foucault, which has been further explored by Carol Bacchi and Susan Goodwin. The theory section and the methodology section of this study will be somewhat overlapping, as often tends to be the case with discourse analysis. Before explaining governmentality further, however, I will dedicate some time to sort out the definition of “discourse” and

“discursive practices”. Both terms play an important role in the analysis sections.

4.1 Discourse and Discursive Practices

Foucault distanced himself from the idea that discourses are to be understood in linguistic terms. Instead, he argued that discourses should be understood as “socially produced forms of knowledge” (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 35). Bacchi and Goodwin clarify that these knowledges in turn can be understood as a cultural product, or

“accepted truths” (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 35). Bacchi adds a more precise analytical tool than Foucault’s “discourse” which she calls “discursive practices”. If

“discourses” are understood as knowledges or “accepted truths”, “discursive practices”

are rules that explain how these things become possible to say or know (Bacchi &

Bonham, 2014, p. 180). In this case, the discursive practices are formed by the social, economic, geographic and linguistic context of China. These practices form a framework for what is possible to think or say about policies such as the SCS.

4.2 Governmentality

The theoretical concept that will serve as the backbone of this analysis is governmentality. The term was developed by Foucault in the 1970’s. It can be defined as “the way of thinking – or mentality – that allows the exercise of power by social authorities to manage populations in modern polities” (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 9).

Foucault distinguished between the power struggles of daily life, the disciplinarian

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exercise of power – i.e. the type of power practiced in prisons – and governmentality, where subjects are socialized into acting in a certain way. The outcome is that the governed are willing to participate in their own self-governance (Huff, 2013). Carol Bacchi and Susan Goodwin work closely with the concept of governmentality and are explicitly influenced by Foucault in their development of the WPR approach, which will be presented in the chapter on methodology.

When analyzing governmentality, scholars are often interested in three main dimensions: political rationalities, governing technology and techniques, and the subjects of governments (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 9). The first theme, political rationalities, is about the ways of thinking and logics that creates the possibility to govern. The rationalities are a combination of theories, ideas, philosophies and forms of knowledge that together form an intellectual heritage (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p.

43). Note that rationalities and discourses are very similar in this sense – both concerning “subjective knowledges”. The second theme, governing technology and techniques, are the mechanisms through which governing takes place (Bacchi &

Goodwin, 2016, p. 44). The final theme, the subjects of governments, refers to the making, or categorization, of subjects that is produced through the societal norms and disciplines that are created by the policy (ibid.).

A useful tool to examine the governmentality behind policymaking is the What’s the Problem Represented to Be (WPR) approach, developed by Carol Bacchi.

The WPR approach is a Foucault-inspired poststructural discourse analysis tool allowing researchers to analyze problematizations in governmental policies and practices (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 13). This type of analysis challenges the idea that the problems addressed in policies are pre-existing and simply waiting to be addressed by policy-makers. Instead, these problems are thought of as “created” by the policy-makers in questions, as are the conceptualizations of subjects, objects and places (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 14).

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5. PREVIOUS RESEARCH 5.1 Citizen attitudes and the SCS

The final product of the SCS is far from completed. Therefore, the available research concerning it is so far quite limited. Most articles that do study the subject are focused on the practical parts of the systems, i.e. how and to what extent the collection and analyzing of Big Data is possible. Other researchers have focused on the Western reception of the system and argue that the Western media has given a wrong depiction of the matter. Luckily, a recently published study by Genia Kostka turns focus towards political attitudes of citizens with regards to the SCS. She aims to answer the question of why the approval of the system is so high. Her study is relevant for this paper, and her results will serve as a starting point for the interviews held in the study.

The hypothesis that Kostka had before her study was that young, better educated citizens from the urban parts of the east coast would be least likely to approve of the SCS, having more liberal views than their counterparts. Kostka’s study consisted of both a quantitative survey and as well as a few qualitative interviews. From the survey she found that younger people were indeed slightly less approving of the SCS. She also discovered that wealthier and better educated people were significantly more approving of the system. Wealth and education had stronger impacts than the age aspect.

Moreover, people tended to be more positive toward the governmental SCS than toward commercial equivalents. Her conclusion from the interviews was that the approval for the SCS rests upon the fact that the system is understood as an “instrument to improve the quality of life and to close institutional and regulatory gaps, leading to more honest and law-abiding behavior in society” (Kostka, 2019, p. 21), rather than a violation of privacy or oppression of freedom of speech. Her results point to a “hierarchial trust”;

people have higher levels of trust in the central government’s SCS than commercial SCSs (Kostka, 2019, p. 23).

What these results suggest is that the approval of the SCS can, on the one hand, rely on the possibility to be directly in charge of one’s living standards. Through the SCS, each citizen can gain rewards that will raise his or her living standards. On the other hand, the approval can be explained by the view that the society is in need of more honest behavior and lower corruption.

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5.2 Governmentality in China

In addition to Kostka’s work on the SCS, this study will be inspired by previous research on governmentality in China. The concept of governmentality was developed by Foucault to explain Western liberal governance. Applying governmentality on China could therefore be criticized for being irrelevant or Eurocentric. Still, several studies have used this concept in combination with studies on Chinese governance. For example, Gary Sigley (2006) argues that governmentality studies, rather than being irrelevant, provide a possibility to avoid the “applied knowledge approach”, that is, applying theories developed in the West on other non-western or non-liberal contexts which are then merely labeled as footnotes or “the other”. He adds that, for this to be avoided, the critical analysis must allow for the original theory itself to be altered and not just the “perception of the foreign” (Sigley, 2006, p. 488).

A typical trait of non-liberal rationalities is that the idea of restricted government and the rule of law as necessary means to protect the rights of individuals is absent (Sigley, 2006, p. 493). Sigley uses the Deng Xiaoping era and the introduction of the socialist market economy as a breaking point for Chinese governance. The new market reforms caused a shift in the role of the state, from “planning and intervention”

to “regularization and overall supervision” (Sigley, 2006, p. 503). This does not mean that the State or the Party should be thought of as disappearing or becoming weaker, but rather that the governmentality has changed. The party-state is still considered the most crucial driving force behind national development, but there are also new neoliberal strategies to govern complementing the conventional socialist technologies (Sigley, 2006, p. 494). Since the 1980’s, the Chinese socialist governmentality is characterized by a “high status of technoscientific and administrative reasoning amongst officials and scholars and an accompanying belief in the strong necessity for the Party-state to remain the primary driving force behind national development”

(Sigley, 2006, p. 494). There is a new type of “planning mentality” that differs from the Socialist planning of the Mao era, accompanied by technocratic reasoning, corporate managerialism, and systems theory (Sigley, 2006, p. 501).

Sigley’s description of the shift in Chinese governmentality will be taken into account when analyzing the thoughts on the SCS and will be returned to in the final chapter of the essay.

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6. MATERIAL

In order to compare citizen attitudes toward the SCS with the central and provincial government’s view and evaluate the governmentality associated with the policy, the material of this comparative analysis consists of two parts. The first part represents the policy makers’, or the top-down, perspective and takes the form of the Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020)¹ released by the State Council in 2014 and The 13^th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China. The second part, representing citizen views of the SCS, are 8 semi-structured interviews of citizens who, according to the results from Kostka’s study, belong to a group that are likely to have a positive view of the new policy.

6.1 Hangzhou

The location of the study is the city of Hangzhou. Hangzhou has since the hosting the G20 in 2016 grown into one of China’s most technologically innovational cities. Two of the nation’s biggest IT firms, Baidu and Alibaba have developed their own credit systems and their headquarters are based in Hangzhou. Located in the Zhejiang province on the central East coast of the country, the city is home to about 10 million people. Due to its technological advancements, Hangzhou has become one of the top- rated cities in terms of Social Credit development (Wang, 2018). Conducting the study in Hangzhou is beneficial since a more developed SCS hopefully leads to more informed answers in the interviews, since the system is more likely to have had a noticeable impact on their lives. Of course, conducting the study in an urban and technologically advanced environment also means that the selection of interviewees cannot be seen as representative for all of China. Constructing a study with higher generalizability would require far too many resources to fit within the boundaries of this thesis.

6.2 Textual sources

A good starting point for the discourse analysis is official policy documents, which can then be complemented by interviews. The State Council’s Planning Outline for the

1 The non-official English version was translated by Rogier Creemers in 2015

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Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020), is the most comprehensive document of the construction of the credit system yet. It is divided into 6 main steps describing the background of the system as well as its focus areas and goals. This document has served as a basis for several previous studies (see for example Kostka 2019 and Chen et al. 2018). To complement the State Council Planning Outline, the 13^th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China will be used. More specifically, its section called “Better and more innovative Social Governance” will serve as a source. One obstacle to overcome when analyzing the documents are that they are written in a formal language, which has been translated from the original language. Moreover, they in many cases implicit rather than explicit, giving the policy makers room to make their own interpretations of the documents further on. This causes further difficulties for an outsider to interpret the meaning of the policy.

6.3 Interviews

Due to the limited amount of time and resources, the selection of interviewees was made with the help of a contact person of Zhejiang University. Relying on this contact person was necessary in order to increase the feasibility of the study, but also for ethical reasons. The focus of the study lies on people that, based on Kostka’s results, are likely to be approving of the SCS and are also in a socio-economically secure group. Kostka’s conclusion was that the strongest supporters of SCSs are highly educated with a high income and living in an urban location (Kostka, 2019, p. 24). These were the frameworks forwarded to the contact person, who then sought out suitable and willing interviewees. According to Kostka, gender and age also correlated with the approval of the SCS, where older, male citizens tended to be slightly more approving (Kostka, 2019, p. 24). However, these factors, being less significant than the previous factors, were not used in the selection of interviewees.

Attempting to isolate and interview a group of citizens that are likely to criticize the SCS would be difficult to achieve considering the Chinese censorship and also the surveillance society. Moreover, even if these people were to be found, questioning them about the policy might place them in a risky situation. While participation in the interviews is anonymous and no names will be published in this essay or elsewhere, the

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fact remains that the mass surveillance could cause problems for groups who are already in a vulnerable position.

A brief description of the interviewees can be found in a list attached in the end of the paper.

7.

METHOD

In order to isolate the discourses that are present in the presentation and reception of the Social Credit System, and to define the governmentality underlying it, Bacchi and Goodwin’s WPR and PIA approaches will serve as an operationalization tool. Both approaches consist of several questions to apply to the material. This section will introduce these questions, and finally give an overview of the limitations and general critique of the method.

7.1 What’s the problem represented to be?

The analyzing framework that will be used to investigate the state and the citizen’s reasoning is Bacchi’s “What’s the problem represented to be?” approach (WPR) to policy analysis, which is a Foucault-inspired poststructural discourse analysis. The WPR approach focuses on the problematization of policies, starting with the solutions that are presented – in this case the SCS – and working backwards to find their implicit problematizations (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 20). The strategy rests on the assumption that policy makers have to target something as a “problem that needs fixing” in order to introduce a policy (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 16). The following questions are suggested by Bacchi to untangle the governmentality of policy makers.

Table 1: Bacchi’s WPR questions

Question 1 What’s the problem represented to be in a specific policy or policies?

Question 2 What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the “problem” (problem representation)?

Question 3 How has this representation of the “problem” come about?

Question 4 What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the “problem” be conceptualized differently?

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Question 5 What effects (discursive, subjectification, lived) are produced by this representation of the “problem”?

Question 6 How and where has this representation of the “problem” been produced, disseminated and defended? How has it been and/or how can it be disrupted and replaced?

Step 7 Apply this list of questions to your own problem representations.

(Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 20)

These questions will serve as the analytic framework for the study of the policy makers’

perspective. Note that the aim of using the WPR questions is not to find the “correct”

problem or solution to the problem, but to interrogate the way the problem is represented in the policy. They will be discussed one by one in the following chapter.

The seventh step, however, will not be processed until the final discussion of the essay, combined with the comparison between the policy makers’ perspective and the citizen attitudes.

7.2 Poststructural interview analysis

In addition to the WPR approach presented above, Bacchi and Goodwin present an extra chapter dedicated to poststructural interview analysis (PIA), which is more suitable for interview answers than the WPR. The following questions are used to analyze the interview material:

Table 2: Bacchi’s PIA questions

Question 1 Precisely what is said in the interview?

Question 2 How was it or is it possible to say those things?

Question 3 Which networks of relations (discursive practices) are relevant to the interview topic?

Question 4 What do the selected “things said” produce as “subjects”, “objects”, and “places”?

Question 5 How do the interviewers and interviewees problematize “what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live” (Foucault, 1986)?

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Question 6 Which “things said” put in question pervasive ways of thinking?

Question 7 What political consequences follow from interviewers’ selection and distribution practices?

(Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 113)

These questions are, similar to the formerly mentioned WPA questions, based on Foucauldian discourse analysis. Since the poststructural discourse analysis opposes the idea that there are any objective “truths” or “realities”, using interviews has been thought of as counterintuitive in combination with this type of discourse analysis.

Bacchi answers to this critique by constructing these questions that focus not on “why the interviewee says what s/he says or analyzing the kind of ‘subject’ an interview has become”, but rather on “the kinds of ‘subjects’ it is possible to become” (Bacchi &

Goodwin, 2016, p. 115). Again, the seventh of Bacchi’s questions will be covered in the final discussion rather than the analysis section as it encourages self- problematization and reflection.

7.3 Limitations

Discourse analysis as a method has been criticized for allowing the researcher to create his or her own discourse framework and consequently being able to form the study in such ways that the desired conclusions can be drawn. It is important to note that the analysis will inevitably be influenced by me as an analyst. For example, being able to decide what questions to ask the interviewees allows me to form the agenda for what can be said and discussed.

In addition to the critique mentioned in the previous section regarding interviews combined with a poststructural perspective, one should also be cautious when drawing conclusions from interview answers in general. Power relations between the interviewer and the interviewee can cause biased answers (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 114). To some extent, this can be adjusted by thorough preparations of the interviewer. Several tips, such as choosing an appropriate environment for the interview and making sure that the interviewer is comfortable are ways to lower the interviewer effect. Another factor that may influence the interview answers of this particular study is the context of censorship and repression. It will be impossible to know for certain that the views expressed in the interviews are honest answers. However, since the

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purpose of the essay is not to decide if people approve of this system – this has already been done by Kostka – but rather to investigate the governmentality of the policy, this issue is somewhat minimized.

The final limitation of the essay is that of the restricted time. While it would have been favorable to include far more interviews in the study, the time period allowed only for 8 interviews.

8. ANALYSIS

In this chapter, the WPR and PIA questions will be applied to the State Council Outline, the 13^th Five-year-plan and the interview answers. The relevance of governmentality behind the SCS will be interpreted from these results and will be discussed in the following chapter.

8.1 The Planning Outline and the 13^th Five-Year Plan 8.1.1 What is the problem represented to be from the perspective of the policy makers?

The first of Bacchi and Goodwin’s question can be answered through identifying what behaviors or tendencies are presented as problematic in the policy. The two problems I have found to be the most prominent are those of the Chinese society’s pluralization and insincerity.

The Planning Outline opens up by describing the “overall way of thinking for the construction of a social credit system” (State Council, 2014). It gives a brief description of the current circumstances and the requirements, highlighting the transformation of society in terms of economic reform, as well as scientific and social development.

While not explicitly pointing to one specific social problem that needs to be resolved, or giving any demonstrative statistics, the State Council centers around the societal transformation of China of the recent decades and the consequences of this transformation:

Our country is in a crucial period of economic and social transformation.

Interest subjects are becoming more pluralized, various social contradictions are prominent, and social organizations and management

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methods are seeing profound change. Completely moving the construction of a social credit system forward is an effective method to strengthen social sincerity, stimulate mutual trust in society, and reducing social contradictions, and is an urgent requirement for strengthening and innovating social governance, and building a socialist harmonious society.

(State Council, 2014)

Through the social credit system, the government aims to keep the citizens of China together, reducing contradictions and heterogeneity. This can be interpreted as a problematization of new pluralized ways of thinking that have grown from the recent decades’ rapid economic development. What specific type of pluralist thinking the Outline refers to remains undefined, but since the goal is to build a “socialist harmonious society”, it could be interpreted as that voices opposing the socialist values are regarded a problem.

The 13^th five-year-plan also highlights the need to “build consensus, bring together different forces, and strengthen national identity, rule of law awareness, moral consciousness, a sense of social responsibility, and ecological awareness nationwide”

(State Council, 2016). The goal is to internalize the Socialist Core values so that people will act accordingly at all times.

The second main theme of the outline is, not very surprisingly, the ideas of sincerity and insincerity. The aim of the SCS is to reward sincerity and trustworthiness in all levels of society and to punish the opposite. In other words, insincerity is seen as a societal problem. By 2020, the State Council plans to have achieved:

[…] Having made clear headway in the construction of sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and judicial credibility, and a substantial rise in market and social satisfaction levels.

Having broadly strengthened the sense of sincerity in the entire society, achieved a clear improvement in the credit environment for economic and social development, and a market improvement of the economic and social order. (State Council, 2014)

The concepts of sincerity and insincerity are continuously present throughout the outline but are, as researchers have argued, difficult concepts to demystify (Chen, et al., 2018,

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p. 3). The Chinese word for credit, such as commercial credit, xinyong, which can refer to “to trust”, “trustworthiness” and “creditworthiness”. The blurry lines of the definition thus make the concept difficult to grasp and using the English translated outline might lead to misconceptions for foreign interpreters. Nonetheless, the lack of trustworthiness can be understood as one of the biggest problems of the society according to the State Council Outline.

The 13^th five-year-plan also mentions the idea building trustworthiness in the Chinese society. The sincere citizen can be expected to “perform their legal obligations, social responsibilities, and family duties, and to conscientiously observe and safeguard social order” (State Council, 2016).

8.1.2 What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the “problem”?

The second question calls for awareness regarding the premises that are taken for granted when presenting the previously mentioned problem representations.

The State Council Outline has an explicit goal to reduce the social contradiction that has resulted from the fast modernization process. Thus, there seems to be an underlying presupposition that China has a history of unity. The Outline hints of a “back in the days” tone, but it is difficult to pinpoint where in Chinese history these glory days of unified thought and solidarity belong.

One of the key concepts of the SCS is, as mentioned in the previous question, the idea of insincerity and lack of trustworthiness. One of the underlying presuppositions of the SCS is that sincerity has an objective and quantifiable meaning that can be effectively spelled out by the State. The algorithms calculating credit scores are still unknown to the public, and so it is impossible to study how they measure the trustworthiness of actors (Kostka, 2019, p. 24). A challenging position would be to understand trustworthiness, or sincerity, as a flexible and subjective notion. There may be cases where people disagree on what type of behavior should be considered more trustworthy. If, for example, a man living in poverty finds a wallet and keeps it, should his score be affected in the same absolute terms as if a billionaire does the same thing?

The questions of morality and ethics are interesting to keep in mind when reading the State Council Planning Outline, which provides limited depth to the concepts.

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The concept of sincerity in the 13^th five-year plan is slightly more explicit and easier to understand than the State Council Planning Outline. Here, ideas such as

“family duties”, “social responsibilities” and “social order” are included in the explanation. This suggests a consensus of roles in the family and expectations of citizens. It also invites citizens to be a part in the self-surveilling conduct, encouraging the “safeguarding of the social order”.

8.1.3 How has this representation of the “problem” come about?

Bacchi and Goodwin’s third question considers the process leading to the policy and how it has shaped the understanding of the ‘problem’. It is related to the previous question but focuses more on the actual context of the policy and taking into account the political and cultural practices and developments that have led to this specific understanding of the ‘problem’.

Producing the ‘problem’ of pluralization and social contradiction gains some support from history. During the Mao-era, the dang’an functioned as a social credit score document that could have major effects on people’s prospects and mobility. Jie Yang describes the dang’an as personal records documenting “information about each employee’s education (including reports from teachers), job history (including reports from employers), family background, political activities, achievements, mistakes, self- criticism and so on” (Yang, 2011, p. 506). The dang’an, then, shares some similarities with the SCS – collected data produced a personal record that could have huge impacts on people’s lives. While there certainly are differences between the two types, the fact that the Chinese society has a history of censorship can play an important part in what is seen as “normal” or at least “possible”. Censorship is not a radical new but has been present in China for a long time.

According to Rogier Creemers (2018), the “need” for the SCS can be explained through the situation following the Mao era. After Mao’s death, there was a need to rebuild the legal system of China. The legal system was not autonomous, but instead closely connected to politics and governance. In the 90’s, the need to establish a social credit system became more articulated and in the 4^th Plenum the need for improved

“implementation and compliance mechanisms” was stressed (ibid.).

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8.1.4 What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the “problem” be conceptualized differently?

The problem representations of pluralization on the one hand and insincerity on the other leave certain things unproblematic. Through question 4, the researcher allows him- or herself to explore alternative problem representations through cross-cultural comparisons or comparisons over time (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 22).

Following up on the problematization of “social contradiction” and “pluralized thoughts” as a result of modernization, there are some similarities to the debate of diversity and multiculturalism in Sweden. Both suggest a society with growing variations among its members. From a pluralist perspective, diversity is considered valuable and a necessity for democratic values, instead of a threat to the solidarity of society.

Insincerity is to be “cured” through top-down promotion of good behavior, combined with a reward and punishment system. There are no mentions of what might drive people to commit fraud, such as socio-economical vulnerability. Not repaying debts can be defined as insincere behavior on behalf of the debtors, but it could also be understood as victims of limited agency. “Insincerity” on an individual level does not have to be bound to a lack of morale but could be thought of as a structural issue.

Questions of freedom of speech and the right to privacy are the two themes largely left unexplored in the outline that could be further explored. The surveillance and data-collecting society is presented as a tool to keep law and order, but if one were to value the right to privacy, this would be considered a violation. Under the title of

“moving the sincerity construction forward in focus areas”, the Planning Outline illustrates the importance of:

…comprehensively mov[ing] government affairs openness forward, under the precondition of protecting national information security, commercial secrets and individual privacy, publish credit information obtained in administrative management according to the law, and establish effective information sharing mechanisms. (State Council, 2014)

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Hence, individual privacy is mentioned, but not explained thoroughly. It is possible that this individual privacy refers to keeping individual data from being shared with other actors than the state or credit companies. However, the product of the data aggregation, the resultant credit score, has reportedly been shared with other citizens. In some provinces, when giving a phone call to someone who has eluded his or her taxes, a recorded voice will encourage the caller to remind this person to pay his or her debts (Zeng, 2018). Such a scenario could be perceived as a violation of privacy in some contexts, but evidently not in China. There seems to be an inconsistency in where the boundaries of individual privacy lie. In the 13^th five-year-plan, privacy protection is mentioned once with regards to Big Data, but not thoroughly explained: “We will accelerate efforts to tackle key technological issues in fields such as massive data collection, storage, redaction, analysis, visualization, and privacy protection” (State Council, 2016). This vagueness provides the policy makers with the freedom of interpretation.

8.1.5 What effects (discursive, subjectification, lived) are produced by this representation of the “problem”?

Bacchi and Goodwin (2016, p. 23) argue that there are three important types of effects that are produced by the specific representation of the “problem”. These are discursive effects, subjectification effects and lived effects. When the problem is represented in a certain way, it will limit what can be said about society and shape people’s understanding of it, in addition to having a material impact on their lives.

By discursive effects, Bacchi and Goodwin refer to the new ways of thinking that are produced through the making of the policy (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). New policies generate limits on the things that are possible to think and speak. Since the SCS is an evaluative system with outspoken goal to preserve the “Socialist Harmonious Society” and minimize social contradiction the discursive effects are very prominent.

One could argue that the possibility of opposing the Communist Party of China was already before the SCS close to non-existing but through the policy the increased surveillance will make divergent behavior even more reduced. If one’s political views have a direct impact on one’s trustworthiness score, ways of thinking that are not in line with the “socialist harmonious society” will be silenced or diminished.

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In terms of the subjectification effects, ”policy analysts using the WPR approach have been able to shed light on how specific policies produce responsibilized subjects and with what effects” (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 73). Through the presentation of a certain policy, Bacchi and Goodwin argue, “subjects”, “objects” and “places” are artificially created. For example, the discrepancy between urban citizens and rural citizens is fabricated through the policies that treat them as separate types of citizens.

The fifth WPR question takes a closer look at the subjectification of the policy in question. In the Planning Outline, the lack of sincerity in Chinese society is treated by creating redlists and blacklist of “good” and “bad” citizens, respectively. These two categories can be interpreted as new types of “subjects”. The honest citizens will receive benefits affecting their mobility and agency, whereas the dishonest citizens will be punished. This categorization could also affect how citizens view each other. If the trustworthiness score of a person is public, the relationships between this person and others in his or her surroundings is likely to change.

The lived effects can be understood as the impact that the policy has on how people live their lives. The SCS, as understood by the State Outline, will lead to more systematic rewards or punishments depending on the trustworthiness of people’s behavior. The intended outcome of this is that people will be nudged to behave in a more trustworthy way and frightened from behaving in a less trustworthy way. Relating back to the “subjects” created, the “good citizen” will live an easier life with convenient rewards allowing travel and economic benefits. The “bad citizen” will experience the opposite. However, the actual lived effects are hard to deduce from the planning outline, since its discursive focus lies on the ideal world that the government envisioned while planning the SCS in 2014. To study the actual lived effects, it will be more beneficial to look at the answers from the interviewees.

The algorithms calculating the Social credit score have so far been hidden from public view. Being able to set the agenda of what will result in a good score versus what will result in a bad score is a powerful position which in the end will control the changes that occur in people’s lives.

8.1.6 How and where has this representation of the “problem” been produced, disseminated and defended? How has it been and/or how can it be disrupted and replaced?

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The sixth question allows the researcher to look into the “contestation surrounding the representation of the ‘problem’” (Bacchi, 2012, p. 22). Similar to the third WPR question, the researcher has to look beyond the policy itself, now turning the focus towards how the problem representation becomes legitimate through propagation and repetition.

A typical defense of the SCS is the arguments mentioned in the background chapter. Bing Song (2019) argues that the SCS fits well with the cultural context and expectations of China – something that tends to be overlooked by Western critics. He admits that there are risks with the system if handled improperly, but also responds by saying that the pilot projects are meant to “explore boundaries” (Song, 2019, p. 34).

Xinhua News Agency, the official state-run press agency in China, has several articles about the SCS. The system is presented as an effective way to “mitigate barriers of local protectionism” (Xinhua, 2017). Since the internet in China is carefully censored, there is no need for Xinhua to directly respond to Western critique regarding liberal rights. The only problem mentioned regarding the system is that it is not yet developed enough. The reason why rewards and punishments could, theoretically, be handed out unfairly is that there is still a lack of transparency (Xinhua, 2017).

8.2 The interviews

As would be expected from the results of Kostka’s study, almost all of the interviewee’s were overwhelmingly positive towards the social credit system. However, unlike the results of Kostka, the answers included only limited discussion of the personal benefits to be gained from the system. Instead, societal problems similar to the ones presented in the SCS outline were brought up.

Worth pointing out is that one of the interviews differed significantly from the other. The interviewee was very critical towards the system and explained that he considered it another way for the Communist Party to monitor citizens. His background, it turned out, differed from the other interviewees as he was born in Taiwan and also pursued his PhD in the United States. This explains why his views tended to be more liberal and more critical towards the SCS and the party.

8.2.1 Precisely what is said in the interviews?

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Bacchi’s first question focuses on the actual things said in the interviews, paying special attention to particular ways of thinking as well as “points of quantification or self- formation”, that is, the making of subjects and objects (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p.

115).

Every interviewee was asked to give his or her own interpretation of what the SCS means, why it is implemented and what effects it will have. The descriptions of the SCS varied in depth, and almost all included some appraisal of it. It is generally understood as a set of regulations to guide behavior. One of the interviewees, a male editor of a publishing press, describes the SCS as follows:

The Social Credit System is a system that will be composed by the government, companies, individuals and social organizations. They will act together for the establishment of governmental rules and laws to contribute to the system in the traditional use of morality, because now this social norm has been lost when entering the modernity age. So, laws enable the government to guide society, organizations, and companies. Especially financial credit is important. (Interview no. 2)

The example above is particularly similar to the idea expressed in the State Council Outline. There is a social norm of morality that has been lost due to the fast modernization. The concept of morality seems closely related to the idea of trust that permeates the State Council outline.

An interesting pattern in terms of the descriptions of the SCS was its relation to Western societies. Two interviewees explain that the SCS has been directly imported from the West to China. One of them explains the system as laws and regulations with the intent to steer social and economic activity in daily life, something that has been developed in the Western countries throughout a much longer period of time. The other interviewee asks me what happens if a person in Sweden does not repay his loans or debts. After a brief introduction to the Swedish Enforcement Authority, kronofogden, he nods in approval and explains that the SCS serves the same purpose:

The Social Credit System works in the same ways. If you commit a fraud, luxury services or items such as taking an airplane or staying in an expensive hotel will not be possible. (Interview no. 1)

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This connection between the SCS and Western laws and regulation is far from what is displayed in Western news and articles, and it highlights a difference in the perception of the SCS between the societies.

When discussing insincerity, or the type of behavior that is to be punished, all interviewees tend to focus on financial and economic insincerity. Many examples that are given to illustrate a situation of insincerity consist of a person who is unwilling to repay debts. One interviewee also mentions an occasion where food was falsely labeled as organic and claims that this also belongs to the type of insincere behavior that would be punished according to the SCS. Nobody mentions political oppositions or pluralized thoughts as an insincere behavior.

8.2.2 How was it or is it possible to say those things?

The second analysis question is to distinguish the genealogies of what is being said, that is, how they are considered to be legitimate or “truthful” things to said (Bacchi &

Goodwin, 2016, p. 116).

When it comes to this question, it is impossible to ignore the political context.

Due to the censorship of society, the answers given by the interviewees tend to remain very close to the presentation given by the State Council. The society is described as moving fast and losing touch with its cultural values, including morality. As mentioned in the previous question, there is a tendency for the interviewees to exemplify using economic fraud rather than political opposition. The reason why could be that the latter is a more politically sensitive subject. One interviewee, a retired government official, used a recent incidence in Sweden to show what insincerity may look like:

A family of tourists pretended to fall on the floor of a hotel and wanted to be compensated. They were then expelled from the hotel and it became a big news story. This is not an honest action and is not compatible with citizenship. This type of action is common in China. The Social Credit System will fix this. (Interview no. 1)

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Choosing an example like this, rather than discussing how one’s political views might be converted into a credit score is much less likely to provoke. Political sensitivity thus seems to be a factor shaping the nature of the answers.

8.2.3 Which networks of relations (discursive practices) are relevant to the interview topic?

The third PIA question is about “how discourses ‘practice’, how they operate to establish their knowledge credentials” (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). The aim of this question is to investigate how different discourses function in relation to each other.

Interviews tend to expand over several discourses, which calls for the analyst to look deeper into what social norms and behaviors are produced within these discourses.

Relationships between different actors in society is a discursive topic that stand out in many interviews. The idea of kinship is, for example, very strong in China. One interviewee, a president of a real estate company, mentions that the idea of guanxi, translated below as “a society of relations” by the interpreter, is present in many aspects of Chinese life – from business to politics:

In Chinese culture there is a greater emphasis on emotion, and it has a history of a “society of relations”. Important values in the Chinese culture are emotion and feelings between each other; and friendship, kinship and neighbors are valued. In the European culture, there is an emphasis on simple and rational behavior. (Interview no. 4)

The concept of guanxi can briefly be described as social relationships of shared interests and benefits (Johnson Cheung, 2016, p. 101). The former government official explain that family ties reach all corners of society in China: businesses, corporations and politics. Having a relationship to a person is highly correlated to mutual trust, resulting in low levels of social trust among common people (Interview no. 6). The SCS can be interpreted as a solution to this lack of social trust between strangers which results from the guanxi society. When discussing the differences between Western countries and China, many interviewees distinguish between Western rationalism and individualism

TECHNOLOGY OF GOVERNANCE

TECHNOLOGY OF GOVERNANCE

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