Confusion clouds China's social credit system

From penalising irresponsible dog owners to blacklisting dissenters, critics warn China's social credit system enables authorities to define "desirable and undesirable behaviour" and could allow unprecedented control of citizen's lives.

The fledgling initiative has sparked fears the authoritarian state is tightening its grip on an already heavily monitored public, ensuring that only those strictly adhering to Communist Party values can prosper.

The scheme, which China's State Council wants to roll out nationwide by 2020, aims to assess individual actions across society effectively standardising conduct through rewards and deterrents.

"It's a new type of totalitarian society control that allows officials unparallelled scrutiny over every minute of everyone's life," warned dissident writer Ye Du.

But so far, experts say there is no unified system in place and cities and villages have different criteria for measuring good or bad behaviour or "trustworthiness" as well as varying incentives and punishments.

Those with "good credit" have better chances of securing a government job or a prized seat at a public kindergarten for their toddler in Beijing. But in the small city of Qinhuangdao, the reward for good behaviour is a "model citizen's certificate" and a free annual medical check-up.

"One big myth is that there will be a single score for all citizens," said Jeremy Daum, a Chinese law expert at Yale.

"Social credit isn't really about a credit score at all, in fact it's...a vague idea that covers a wide variety of regulations -- the unifying feature in them all, to the extent that there is one, is that keeping records will help make people more honest and reduce misconduct," he wrote on his blog China Law Translate, that collates all government documents relating to the system.

Shazeda Ahmed, a PhD student at Berkeley who is studying China's social credit system, agreed explaining that currently there is only a "hodgepodge of local pilot projects without any clear definitions of what a nation-wide system would look like."