Social Credit

A score for citizenship, piloted abroad, patented everywhere.

China's social credit system is real but less unified than reported — a patchwork of financial credit, court blacklists (the documented travel bans for judgment defaulters), and local pilots. The Western folklore version (one score ruling all life) misdescribes the present while naming the direction critics fear CBDCs and smart-city data could assemble. Both the reality and the exaggeration are in the file.