Having lived in China since 2008 with a Chinese wife, I can confidently say the "social credit score" system often portrayed in the West is a myth and Western propaganda. What actually exists are standard financial credit scores, similar to those in the US or Europe, used for things like bank loans and mortgages.
I’ve started to read that exact Wikipedia page just two days ago, and its second paragraph contradicts you and itself. It was written by somebody who consumes a lot of Chinese propaganda. The first sentence tells, that it was never that bad as written in Western media, then the rest of the paragraph tells that the Chinese government didn’t like that it was that bad. The cited sources are the exact same thing: Western media lied about that it’s that bad, but the Chinese government was right when it said that it had been really that bad.
It’s completely orthogonal that the government didn’t want to be that bad, that they changed it, or that they ditched the plans to implement nationwide in its (according to the government) bad form at the time.
I cannot understand how Chinese news consumers cannot see this. The doublespeak is so obvious, that I cannot think of anything else, that it’s just propaganda.
> I cannot understand how Chinese news consumers cannot see this.
What are they supposed to see? There are no news about it because it doesn't exist. You're free not to believe me but I guarantee that if you ask anyone in China about the "social credit score" as depicted in the West (e.g. "you lose points for jaywalking", or "can't go to certain places if your score gets too low", etc.), you will get blank stares. In fact, most people are probably even unaware that they have a "credit score", unless they have applied for a mortgage.
That said, I agree that the Wikipedia page is bad.
Isn’t that pretty much the case for the Chinese system too? There were a bunch of speculation around what goes into the score, but from current reporting it’s all financial related too.
