The Chinese government is taking the first steps in an evolving plan to employ big data to establish a nationwide system of mass surveillance of the entire population. This “social-credit system” would mobilize technology to collect information on all citizens and use that information to rate their behavior, including financial creditworthiness and personal conduct. The local experiments have provoked mixed reactions.

The declared aim of this ambitious plan for a social-credit system is to build a “culture of sincerity.” At this stage in China’s history, it is questionable whether the party-state can build any kind of culture. The center cannot effectively control local governments, a large share of economic profits is going to the wealthy, corruption remains widespread and neither the economy nor the populace will tolerate the absence of rule of law indefinitely.

The Communist Party, since it gained power in 1949, has endeavored to monitor and control the behavior and thoughts of the population. In the era of Mao Zedong it established “residents’ committees” in the cities and “village committees” in the countryside to monitor citizens’ behavior and report to local police. These continue to operate today, if in slightly different forms.

The current effort to expand control of personal conduct is the latest in a series of moves to control behavior that now include campaigns against corrupt officials, rights lawyers and others whose conduct and actions are considered “subversive” both in person and otherwise—such as in social media.

The new social-credit system may include “black marks for infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules,” according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. The article quotes planning documents stating that the system would “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” It is no wonder that one Chinese human rights-activist is quoted as saying “Tracking everyone that way, it is just like ‘1984’.” (The famous novel published in 1949 by George Orwell imagines a mythical regime that spies on all of its citizens using omnipresent surveillance.)

Current tentative steps to test the new system have raised questions about its implementation and reach. Obvious issues include defining the criteria that would be applied to rate citizens, the government and social institutions that would perform the ratings, and the impact of those ratings on citizens’ business and professional activities and on their lives in general. A key component of the new system will be taking traditional credit-scoring and adding other data points. Sesame Credit, an affiliate of e-commerce titan Alibaba, currently surveys online shopping habits and, if users consent, posts their education levels and legal records. Businesses and some individuals such as lawyers, accountants, teachers and journalists would receive closer scrutiny of their professional behavior.

People with high ratings can receive rewards, such as gaining access to express security inspections at the Beijing airport or being able to rent cars and bicycles without leaving deposits. The Wall Street Journal article describes the system as it is currently operating in a Shanghai neighborhood, where a database collects reports on citizens’ behavior provided by residential committees, and an office issues a weekly “red list of exemplary residents.”

A prominent example of business fraud that is noted by The Wall Street Journal article is frequent violation of food-safety regulations, which are now experimentally monitored on touch-screens in restaurants in the Shanghai district mentioned above. At the same time, the experiment demonstrates some of the difficulties in creating the social-credit system: In one restaurant, the touch-screen was intentionally obscured—because the restaurant’s health rating had been erroneously downgraded, but the error had not been corrected.

The experiment has already encountered criticism and resistance. A project in Suining County in Jiangsu Province awarded citizens with points for good behavior (including being classified as a model citizen or worker) and assigned demerits for bad behavior such as causing a disturbance that blocks party or government offices, running red lights, driving while drunk, paying a bribe or falsely accusing others. Citizens were classified according to four levels ranging from A to D. The A-to-D classifications were abandoned after citizens objected, but social-credit scores are still being recorded under the plan.

A report in the Washington Post in late October stated that a rating involving a loss of points could determine “whether you can borrow money, get your children into the best school or travel abroad; whether you get a room in a fancy hotel, a seat in a top restaurant—or even just get a date.” It adds that a popular online dating site “encourages users to display their Sesame Credit scores to attract potential partners.”

Another story about Suining demonstrates that development of the social-credit-rating system is still in an experimental stage. Late last month an article in the Global Times, which is published by the state-run People’s Daily, criticized the Washington Post report for misinterpreting the system as “Orwellian.” The Global Times argued that the aim is to establish a “well-functioning credit system” that is needed for “a mature economy [and] is an assertive move for the common good.”

The Global Times labels the Suining experiment a “flash in the pan” that “met with public backlash” and is a warning to Chinese authorities. The inclusion of “people’s political positions, which have nothing to do with credit” led to the need for revision, and suggests that the system needs to be “meticulously restricted.” It should touch on the people’s economic activities and “part of their social life that are clearly defined and widely recognized.” It concludes that setting up a credit system “needs more wisdom to do it well at low political and economic risks.”

We still haven’t seen how broad the reach of the system might be, and how its procedures will be defined and constructed. Establishment of the system has been set forth in a policy document issued by the Central Committee of the Party and the State Council that is extraordinary in the extent to which it would mobilize government agencies and society at large.

At a time when economic development has expanded personal freedom for many, the party-state is paranoid about losing power. Using big data to control the populace makes Orwell once again seem prescient.

Stanley Lubman, a long-time specialist on Chinese law, is Distinguished Lecturer in Residence (ret.) at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He is the author of “Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao” (Stanford University Press, 1999) and editor of “The Evolution of Law Reform in China: An Uncertain Path” (Elgar, 2012).