Beijing's Totalitarian Social Credit Control

"The unified rewards and punishment system significantly increases the potential for one violation to snowball across your operations until you have this avalanche of penalties that make it impossible to operate until you solve that one thing."
Kendra Schaefer, Trivium China, consulting firm

It occupies a spot next to Black Mirror and Big Brother in popular imagination, but China’s social credit project is far more complicated than a single, all-powerful numerical score.STR/AFP/Getty Images

Good citizens in Beijing's social credit system never have to face being blacklisted by their government; rewards for never causing problems, for accepting all government edicts, for expressing profound respect for the Chinese Communist Party, for being completely obedient to all government expectations, and above all, never questioning anything. Citizens deemed to be averse to all of this or merely running afoul one way or another, of government authorities can expect all manner of indignities and denials of what they may feel as their rights as citizens.

From being blocked from making travel arrangements by rail or air, from attending theatres, from staying at the best hotels, from making bank loans, from starting up new businesses. They run the risk of being publicly named and shamed, of having their beloved dog confiscated, facing difficulties in finding employment, their children banned from attending schools of choice, even interfering in  Internet speed. Life can get very complicated.

As it did for Loren Fei, 30, daughter of an owner of a silk factory, now on a blacklist of businesses, their owners and their families. Her father, unable to pay his bills, her bank accounts were frozen, and she was denied the ability to travel. Her family's silk factory was given dispensation by local government authorities for years, to break environmental rules in the greater local interests of economic growth. But, on the national agenda of getting a grip on befouling the natural environment, the factory was shut down by authorities.

Ms. Fei had been on a work trip in late 2017 and discovered she was unable to acquire a train ticket to return home. Following this, her bank accounts were frozen. And she was fired from her employment as a financial analyst. She had signed for a loan on her father's behalf. And because her mother is a shareholder in the family business she too is on the blacklist, and her monthly pension payments have been frozen. Leaving the family deep in debt and now Ms. Fei sells goods on the Internet, eking out a living.

Students sing the national anthem at their school in Shanghai.,

AFP/Getty Images

The social credit system initiated in 2014 by the government in Beijing has been a useful experiment for the country, which is now turning its attention increasingly outward. Having tightened control over its 1.4 billion population, it is toward the global business world that Beijing now turns its attention, satisfied that its citizens understand how beneficial it would be to their credit standing to become a member of the Communist Party.

Chinese companies are graded as well as those who run them. Low grades can be instrumental in banning companies from borrowing money or simply involving themselves in ordinary business routines, to find roadblocks at the most unexpected junctures. It's a learning curve, and the Chinese are quick studies. Business owners or executives understandably fall into line when they are threatened with frozen bank accounts or are forbidden from travelling for business reasons.

United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines have received notification that their records will be receiving black marks on their credit rating should they fail to attend to wishes expressed by Beijing. The kind of pressure that has been applied to businesses anxious for entry to the huge and lucrative Chinese marketplace, where entry can be achieved at the cost of surrendering corporate autonomy and closely guarded business secrets.

Reward or punishment, a primitive but highly successful manipulation to bring individuals, groups and businesses into line with China's interests should they wish to burnish their own. The age of digital Big Brother has long since arrived, but in China it is blatant and impervious to any chafing by civil libertarians and proponents of human rights. China's central economic planning agency has completed its initial evaluation of 33 million businesses with ratings from1for excellent to 4 for poor.

China's credit rating system extended to foreign companies is geared toward commanding access to the world's largest market by making it clear to United, Delta and American Airlines, informing them that Chinese aviation officials warn their social credit score could suffer should their websites labelled Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan not identify those sites as part of China. A lower score could guarantee investigations, possibly frozen bank accounts, limitations on local employees' movements.

President Xi Jinping is intent on gripping the country and any who wish to take part in the wealth it is prepared to share at a steep price, in the iron grasp of conformity to CCP rules. And because the instructions come from the very top executive branch of the country's government there are no appeals and nor can anything be done to hinder enforcement. The other half of the grip is the installation of separate facial recognition technology as a monitor enabling dissent to be quelled and just incidentally crime as well.

There is a positive element in the situation, given the widespread pollution, rampant violations of labour laws, crime statistics and other problems, that would in one prolonged swoop clean up these areas of malfunction. There is in China no anonymity. Government sees all, knows all, controls everything. Nothing is opaque, transparency from the top to the bottom, but not, obviously, the reverse.

A demonstration of monitoring technology at the headquarters of Huawei Technologies in Shenzhen earlier this year.   Billy H.C. Kwok/Getty Images

Foreign corporations have the freedom to express their concerns over how their business partners in China could influence their own welfare. Concerns over social credit impacting as a weapon in trade wars between Chin and the United States recognize reality. The European Union Chamber of Commerce cited FedEx as an example, where the U.S. package carrier has been threatened by China of being placed on a list of foreign companies considered 'unrelable'.  It did, after all, break Chinese law in withholding a shipment of Huawei products.

National Socialism : The Fascist Left

"I would go to conferences on Nazi medicine and find the scholars always talking about the Big Four -- sterilization, the Nuremberg laws, the euthanasia program and the Final Solution."
"But the irony is that in this murderous regime, you also find the world’s most progressive anti-cancer policy. This has been totally ignored."
Robert N. Proctor, Professor, History of Science, Stanford University

"[The violent, left-wing antiwar demonstration in the 1960s he witnessed reminded him] of the storm troopers that marched through my childhood."
"[Student protesters adopted from fascists] their anti-intellectualism, their anger, their street theatre, their glorification of  youth, or their mysticism."
"[There was as well their] mob psychology [and] the militant antireason impervious to argument."
Peter Berger, conservative sociologist, Austrian-born survivor of fascism 

"At the CPAC conference, there was a dust-up concerning certain persons claiming to be the 'alt-right'.  One of the organizers of the conference said the people claiming to be the alt-right were not conservatives, but were 'left-wing fascists'. He also said they had appropriated the term alt-right. The term 'alt-right' emerged to represent a form of journalism in some ways evocative of the late Hunter S. Thompson, with right-of-center views and relying on non-traditional platforms. But, the term has come to mean extreme right-wing. My focus is on the term 'left-wing fascism'."
"In real time, Benito Mussolini and his movement – fascism or national socialism – was of the left. Mussolini was a great admirer of Karl Marx and Marx’s principle of revolutionary socialism. By 'revolutionary socialism', I mean to distinguish Marxist socialism from the democratic socialists and labor unions that were emerging in Europe."
"Mussolini, like Marx and Lenin, saw the party as the vanguard of the working class, a force from without the system that would usher in change. Mussolini was in fact a member of the socialist party of Italy, although he broke with the party on the issue of neutrality during World War I. It was later that Mussolini thought to combine socialism with nationalism, and form a new party. He called the combination 'fascism'. A fasces is a bundle of rods, each individually weak while the bundle is strong. Mussolini’s counterpart in Germany called the combination 'national socialism'. In Germany, where they like long words, this became 'Nationalsozialistische'. In America, where we like short words, this became 'Nazi'."
Clifford F. Thies, Professor of Economics and Finance, Shenandoah University 

Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists encircle counter protesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., USA on August 11, 2017. (Photo by Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

"Ideologically, the distinction between the 'Sozis' [Socialists] and Commies on the one hand and Nazis on the other, was probably only the internationalism of the Marxists and the nationalism of the Nazis."
"In every other respect they agreed on the evils of capitalism. [The connecting of Jews with capitalism fuelled the anti-Semitism of the Nazis]."
H. Pierre Secher, biographer, Bruno Kreisky Austrian socialist

Leftist 'progressives' have a good deal in common with Adolf Hitler; for he too was interested in all manner of socially progressive issues from healthful eating, to avoidance of drugs and alcohol and tobacco. He wanted the perfect society where people would be responsible for themselves and to society, where people would be law-abiding, and where science would solve all of the world's ills. That he was also a raving psychopath and felt obligated to rid the world of the presence of imperfect physical and mental human specimens, gypsies, gays, critics and Jews was a more infamous facet.

Nazis, fascists worked hard at delegitimizing those whom they considered their enemies. And their enemies were any who failed to appreciate how vital it was to the future of the world to support their fascist agenda of extreme nationalism, of conquest, of transforming the world in their image. Any who disagreed with them would be victimized by a slickly organized slander machine which derided and accused, deprived them of dignity and rights, reducing them to vulnerable elements within the larger society which became complicit in isolating them socially, then destroying them physically.

This is a tactic used almost exclusively now by the 'progressive' left whose agenda is to selectively support and defend those whom they identify as victims, while they victimize themselves any who view their programs of sanctimonious righteousness as hypocrisy. The left has made a defensive religion of climate and environment, of haven seekers, of defense of Islamists as being misunderstood and any who view them with suspicion as "Islamophobes", labelling and censoring their critics. They share, in fact, some of the rationale involved in Communism.

Universities and trade unions are now suffused with a leadership that glorifies the radical left, allowing them to fracture social cohesion and interrupt the normal flow of conversation between people with differing opinions. It is what totalitarian governments do; the only agenda feasible is their own. The anti-fascist (Antifa) movement on university campuses represents extremism in lock-step with that of white supremacists, as they adopt the same confrontational, libelous and violent mechanisms for control of public opinion.



The Antifa movement whose name is derived from 'anti-fascist' doesn't hesitate to use the very same public disruption tactics as those they say they're struggling against. They are the 'hard left' expressing an ideology that claims to support populations that are oppressed and any population where the infamous one percent representing great wealth and opportunities leaving a huge gap between the wealthy and the poor is by their definition of capitalism, oppressed; the wealth of corporations and elites impoverishing ordinary working people.

According to Antifa activists they are motivated by peace and inclusivity; government and capitalism fail both. The U.S. government's tightening of immigration is viewed as racism and rejected by Antifa. This is basically a millennial movement, a movement embraced by those who live on the fringes of society, including undocumented immigrants, transgendered, low-wage workers and individualists, a movement that has huge appeal on university campuses. Antifa leaders waste no breath in denying their willingness to use violence in response to violence or racism; their goal is to eradicate hatred while practising it themselves.





Those who balk at accepting greater numbers of immigrants overwhelming society and culture, who refuse to continue to look the other way at the presence of millions of illegal migrants present in an underground economy, who decry the anti-fossil-fuel movement, manipulate situations by demonizing the nay-sayers; in the case of the environment, all those who fail to commit to eradicating carbon emissions, the very source of life itself, become 'climate change deniers', just as those criticizing Islamist jihadis become 'Islamophobes'.