In 2015, a 16-year-old student from Jiangsu, China, tried to board a train.
She couldn’t even purchase a ticket.
The student, Zhong Pei, tried enrolling in classes at her university. But she was not allowed to do that either.
Zhong had committed a serious crime: She was guilty of being related to someone else.
Her father had killed two people and died in a car accident. So the Chinese government blacklisted her as “dishonest.”
It took her four months before she was able to overturn the decision and go to her university.
What Zhong experienced was the result of testing for China’s new “Social Credit System.”
The SCS aims to be a unified program that provides a “social credit score” for every one of China’s 1.3 billion citizens.
The plan, however, does not stop there. And the Chinese government has already laid the framework for the dystopian future.
Laws from 2012 and 2016 require internet companies to retain customers’ real names and information.
- There will be no opting out from this future.
In 2020, the system will become the Social Credit System (SCS). And it will be owned and operated entirely by the Chinese state government.
The SCS will take into account not only purchases, but also hobbies, your lifestyle, and even who you hang out with.
If you raise a child, attend government events, or do well at your job – things considered ideal for a model citizen – your social credit score will go up.
However…
If you drink too much, play too many video games, or speak ill of the government – your social credit score will go down.
- It’s a national database that will hold information on every citizen.
It will assess information as innocent as whether an academic degree was actually earned. And as personal as if a female is supposed to be taking birth control.
Punishment is already happening on a broad scale. Chinese authorities have already banned more than 10 million people deemed “untrustworthy” from boarding flights and high-speed trains.
- The social credit system is a tool to get people to fall perfectly in line.
In the United States.
We have:
- The databases
- The digital surveillance
- The national credit score system
- The systems of reward and punishment
- The government-knows-best attitude
- The electronic purchasing data
- The ubiquitous social networks
Think about it. China started with Alibaba and Tencent.
In the United States, we have Amazon and Facebook and Google.
They know everything you read, see, search, buy, and say.
Your Android or iPhone already tracks your location and reports it hundreds of times per day.
And that information is already being used for complete censorship.
In 2018, Facebook began a program that assigns every user a reputation score, which predicts their “trustworthiness.” Sound familiar?
Here is how China implemented the Social Credit Score system in just under five years:
- They subjected all online behavior to intense study.
- They collected, stored and analyzed all social media and banking information.
- They began to severely regulate the freedom to travel.
And here’s what’s going on in the United States…
Police threat-scoring algorithms are used to determine who the police should be tracking and surveilling. Social media is already being used in these algorithms.
For the past decade, the NSA has been gathering information on people’s social media, locations, friends, and who they travel with.
The agency can enrich the data with bank information, social media information, voter information and even GPS location information.
The TSA has a rapidly expanding “no-fly” list. The list has no government accountability, and there is no recourse – unless, of course, you’re a powerful government official who ends up on it.
Indeed, a report from the World Privacy Forum indicates that in such a credit score system “error rates and false readings become a big issue.”
Never underestimate the currency butterfly effect. This has huge implications for the yuan, which is the currency of China. The Social Credit Score will have incredible implications on business, government and ultimately, the strength of the currency.
The world has never seen anything like this. And it’s only going to grow. China is the first country to implement this and certainly won’t be the last. You know others will do so to maintain power, increasepower and manipulate power.
Pay attention to this and it will be very important in the coming years, and will have significant indirect effects to your portfolio.
Last year, Chinese authorities said that part of the program would be to freeze the assets of anyone deemed to be “dishonest.”
Imagine all of your assets suddenly disappearing because a red light camera read your license plate wrong.
The infrastructure for this system is already in place in the United States.
It’s just not about train rides or university classes anymore.
Any individual not aligning with the current social and governmental norms will face poverty… homelessness… starvation… or worse.
Under the new system of life by government approval, survival becomes simple:
Obey… or die.
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