No your article explicitly states that the systems still exist they just don’t have teeth because of all the other covert surveillance systems China has in place.
So your argument sucks and so does your idealization of China.
All of this does not mean that the SoCS is benign. It also does not imply that China’s broader surveillance apparatus is a myth – quite to the contrary. However, public debates typically do not focus on these aspects. Rather, the interest in the system often stems from broader anxieties about digital technologies, as reflected in the UN pledge and similar actions taken by other countries. Often, the SoCS is merely invoked as a metaphor: either to depict some technological threat at home or to portray a techno-dystopian China.
This is symptomatic of a tendency to see China not as a real place with real people, but as an abstract “negative opposite” of “us”. While our discussions on tech in China remain overshadowed by largely fictional scoring, we ignore real threats of surveillance to exactly those people in China. And when we use the SoCS to invoke the image of a technological threat at home, we lose sight of potentially acute technological threats much closer to reality.
By 2019, China’s central authorities were stating explicitly that they were not happy with the idea. They issued formal clarifications that scores could not be used to penalize citizens and that only formal legal documents could serve as grounds for penalties. Pilot cities quickly followed suit: Wenzhou, having made ambitious plans in 2014, made a full 180 degrees and in 2019 released an encouragement-only scheme instead. Rongcheng issued a revision in 2021 that required voluntary application and could only issue rewards. Many other scoring plans never materialized at all.
No your article explicitly states that the systems still exist they just don’t have teeth because of all the other covert surveillance systems China has in place.
So your argument sucks and so does your idealization of China.
No it doesn’t? They tried it in a few provinces, everyone hated it, so they discontinued it.