The Chinese Social Credit Score is Preventing People From Escaping

In a world where reality is stranger than fiction, the bar continues to rise in terms of our darkest fears coming to life.

While in the United States, the modern political discourse revolves around who should have the most power in our government, China has established a functioning totalitarian system that American media outlets – the bulwark for checks and balances over tyranny – have ignored.

According to BeingLibertarian.com, the Social Credit System, which is, “a system which rates the Chinese citizens based on actions they take in their daily lives,” and assigns them a score based off of their behavior, is already preventing Chinese citizens from leaving the country.

Offenses include everything from jaywalking, bad driving – casting a wide net over what is considered everything from criminal behavior to just annoying behaviors–  thus limiting the very rights we take for granted. The article continues to point out that, “in a recent report coming out of this, an estimated 17.5 million train ticket purchases are blocked due to ‘bad social credit.’”

The ruling party in China hopes to have this system fully established by 2020 where penalties could even affect citizens ability to be promoted to a prominent position within companies and even be denied bank loans.”

So while this system is being ignored by the mainstream media, what also is rarely discussed are the ongoing talks between Google and the communist Chinese Government to create a search engine which would also be capable of reporting the individual IP numbers to the Chinese government, thus reporting someone for doing something to downgrade their score.

Systems like this are the tangled web of authoritarianism born in the minds of socialist, communist, and fascist ideologies which try to control the behavior of free-thinking individuals. Meanwhile, the few US outlets which have chosen to discuss this issue, such as the Washington Post, publish stories stating fears of the Social Credit system adversely affecting the freedom of individuals is “overblown.”

In the absence of a press that refuses to shine a light on these threats to freedom, individuals domestic and abroad must arm themselves with the knowledge needed to call out acts of tyranny before their homeland begins to look more like George Orwell’s, 1984.