‘Bottomline of Law’ Meets ‘Higher Moral Aspiration’: A Qualitative Analysis of State and Citizen Interpretations and Engagements with China’s Social Credit System Project

In 2014 the Chinese State Council released its Planning Outline for the Construction of the Social Credit System (referred to in this thesis as the Social Credit System Project (SCSP)), asserting that China’s rapid development had led to a social atmosphere in which agreements were honoured inconsistently and trust among citizens, between businesses, and in government was critically lacking. The SCSP leverages comprehensive surveillance, punishments, and rewards in an effort to ensure regulatory adherence and identify and restrict ‘untrustworthy’ entities and individuals. Presently little is known about how citizens in China interpret and engage with the components of the SCSP, however many western depictions of the SCSP characterise it as a techno-dystopian system of total control that is to be feared. The primary objective of this thesis is to shed light on this gap in knowledge of the SCSP, focusing on the historical, political, and cultural dimensions of the project to situate state and citizen perspectives. Using a four-phase iterative methodological process comprised of a qualitative discourse analysis of Credit China, the national website for the SCSP, and thirty semi-structured video interviews with residents from fifteen provinces and twenty cities in China, this thesis describes how the SCSP as a collection of formal trust institutions produces new civic stratifications and mechanisms for shaping moral conduct which citizens both enforce and contest. This thesis argues that rather than constructing some dystopian society where every movement is tracked and surveilled, the SCSP reflects distinct and culturally specific assumptions concerning the development of credit as a proxy for trustworthiness beyond financial sincerity. Indeed, in China, efforts aimed at upholding state endorsed moral norms and improving the overall ‘quality’ (suzhi 素质) of the population, are expected, understood as ‘common sense’, regarded by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elites as a ‘science’, and, if not pursued directly by the state, find expression in popular movements from below. The SCSP coheres with and builds from this tradition. The theses argues that the SCSP represents an example of hegemony through moral and intellectual leadership, what Antonio Gramsci terms the ‘integral state’, as well as China and the CCP as leadership of a state that is engaged in a process of passive revolution. If realised to the extent that some of its planners aspire, the SCSP will contribute to a moral hierarchy which takes the concept of ‘credit’ as its starting point, thus leading to the reshaping of social relations and class identities in China in line with the integral state’s passive revolution.