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It was a neighbour who turned Mr Yang in. The flat compound’s management were told he had been to Wuhan and that he had not reported it. They ordered him to self-quarantine for 14 days. He had no symptoms typical of the coronavirus, Covid-19, and was worried his machinery component business would suffer if he self-quarantined. “Big data would have gotten him anyway,” one of his family members says; the Transport Bureau called about his trip two days after he and his family began their 14-day flat confinement.

Had Mr Yang lived in the city of Hangzhou, which has one of the most sophisticated social credit systems in China, he would not have gotten off so lightly. Hangzhou is among the many local governments that have been carrying out their own social credit experiments. The umbrella term of “social credit” is not always a useful way to understand initiatives which take very different forms region to region, bound together only by the idea that keeping files on companies and individuals could deter bad behaviour and encourage good.


In Hangzhou, it involves blacklists. Authorities there have published nine people’s names and part of their ID numbers for fudging their travel history. Their information will stay public for one year on the Credit Hangzhou website, where anyone can search and view their details. Once a year of public shaming has passed, offenders must sign a commitment to stay honest and take part in volunteering if they want to fix their credit listing, even though there are no further explicit ramifications for being on the list.

Hangzhou is under pressure, as are many other economically developed cities that rely on migrant labour. The local government must manage the return of workers, to gear up the world’s largest economy, which the virus has stymied. It must also keep numbers of new virus cases down.

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It is not the only one. Other cities across China have also expanded their social credit-related regulations to include spreading rumours that disrupt efforts to control the epidemic, hoarding, upsetting market order, making fake or poor quality masks and other medical supplies. Donations of money or materials to support epidemic-related work increases scores in Rongcheng, Shandong province. In the small city of Zhucheng, in the same province, medical staff on the frontlines also get a bump up. But severely untrustworthy behaviour leads straight to a C-level personal credit rating, which stays static for three years. Other penalties dealt out to C-rated individuals have seen them banned from opening businesses, blocked from government jobs, and also from leaving the country. But it doesn’t say what happens if you don’t want to do any of these things.

“It’s not surprising that the social credit system has been thrown into the scene. All parts of the government naturally must pitch in, or at least appear to be doing something,” says Dai Xin, a law professor from Beijing. While individuals may be facing social credit regulations that try to control their behaviour, local governments are trying to live up to their own performance assessments, calibrated to Party priorities, the foremost of which is now virus prevention.


The complicated truth about China's social credit system China The complicated truth about China's social credit system

But they are up against people like Mr Yang, who do not think they are ill. News reports have said that milder cases of coronavirus can be cured by staying at home, and individuals may not want to worry their family members. Those not among China’s white collar workers, who staff the country’s factories or work zero hour contracts, don’t have the economic flexibility to work remotely: they want to get back to work.

Being on a social credit blacklist is a far less immediate concern. Some workers who were awarded “red” ratings by a government health code system, which is powered by Alibaba, discussed ways to circumvent it. One option was borrowing someone else’s account. Social credit blacklists may not be a sufficient deterrent; since the outbreak police bureaus in various cities have had to bring investigations or criminal sanctions against individuals that deliberately avoid quarantine, or hide their symptoms. And since some people have economic motives to do the things that are deemed bad by social credit systems, are such strict punishments warranted? Reporting a sniffle on city apps is enough to be told you should stay at home for quarantine.

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The application of social credit systems has implications for another worry of the Chinese government: the economy. Businesses are falling sick. China’s corporate social credit system has evaluated 33 million businesses, issuing ratings based on their credit records. But companies are struggling to operate in an environment where quarantines are interfering with normal operations, whether that’s following through on commitments to deliver goods to users, or paying back loans. This is behaviour that would usually hurt their credit records; corporate social credit systems may be “loosened up as a way to bail out businesses,” Dai adds.


Even if they aren’t the technocratic magic wand that the government wants, what happens to the data collected during the outbreak? This is an emergency situation, and a no holds barred, privacy-regardless approach is more easily justified. Gao Feng, director of Open Data China, thought it was worth asking: “Should we code this into law afterwards? And under what kind of circumstances is such practice allowed and acceptable?”

There are other considerations. “Whether social credit systems should be able to expand, without restrictions, to the social sphere is a crucial question,” says Lu Hufeng, public law professor at Guangzhou University. “Systems should proceed with caution. For untrustworthy behaviour to include both the illegal and more besides creates a real problem.”

On Chinese social media, people have watched from their homes as officers broke up gatherings of bored residents playing cards, who are ignoring orders to stay at home and avoid socialising. While big tech is held up as the answer, some residents are sceptical about the claim that big tech brings efficiencies. One Shenzhen resident said that to enter his local Walmart, he had to input his details into an app. So did other shoppers, leading to a sizable gathering of people outside – exactly what the government wants to prevent.

Residents stuck in quarantine report that the neighbourhood committees may be the ones keeping people stationary. If the gates of apartment compounds are locked, people can’t physically leave. If blockades are in roads and public transport is closed, they have no way to move. It seems at a time of coronavirus, when it comes to monitoring or controlling behaviour, social credit can’t compare to a beady-eyed neighbour or a simple lock on the door.

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