To the degree that citizens have a universal score, it's more of a financial credit score. This Chinese guy goes over his own score and shows how it works:
We have something similar in Russia, it is called "credit history". And I remember that it also exists in Israel, and most probable in other countries as well. It is apparently called "credit score" in US. Basically, if you have a poor credit history, you will have trouble getting loans and mortgage, and perhaps if you do get a loan, the interest will be much higher.
There is also a centralized online registration called "Gov-services". It's a public services app.
Here's more info about it.
Public Services Portal is a part of the infrastructure which provides data exchange and technological interaction of information systems used for rendering state and municipal services in electronic form.
At the moment registering in it became pretty much mandatory, also because it is more comfortable, and because otherwise you will have trouble receiving help from various essential social services. You can still go physically to the relevant gov office, but it will take much more time and effort. And some still ask you to register in the app. It also contains and gathers information from various governmental departments. It has info about property and vehicle registrations, any possible fines, court debts, taxes and such.
Obviously this way the government has access to centralized data about various activities of a person. Anything that requires application and registration. Some services do require registration in the app, and some are still optional, but more comfortable this way.
For example, if I sent a package and it is lost, and I want to create a searching request about its whereabouts, I can do it either by printing out a form, filling it and going to the post office, or I can do it through the "Gov-services" app, which implies that the data regarding the package will then be stored in the database.
Also, the covid vaccination is being managed by the app, and then electronic certification is being given. So in this sense they
are tracking a lot of social or business aspects of one's life, but there is no numerical rating value assigned to anyone, and most people don't mind because this kind of centralized system is much more comfortable, and you can still do a lot of things outside the app.
I do think that there is probably some value or an indication that is being assigned to the credit history, but this value isn't being disclosed to the person right away. Though it is possible to receive detailed information by making the request through the bank app. Nowadays in many cases it is possible to get a loan online (depends on the sum), and bank's AI checks the credit history and all the relevant data, and supplies the answer within minutes.
Don't know if the public services app is available in other countries, but made a quick search and can see that something like this is also
available in Vietnam.
So yeah, it does look like the "social credit" system in China isn't that much dissimilar from the ones that exist in other countries. Perhaps the main difference is the numerical value that is immediately visible to the person, while in other countries, even in the US, your credit score also has a numerical value, but you see it only after making a request for it.
Here's for example a screen of a credit score of some person from US.
It looks like in China's case they simply combine information from various social services departments (like fines, tax reports, business managment reports, etc) and banking data, and calculate the score based on all this data.
edition.cnn.com
