I am writing a book, more specifically, an ethnography of a Chinese social credit system.
Metricocracy (metric-ocracy, rule by metric) offers an unprecedented ethnographic account of China’s social credit system—not as a dystopian surveillance apparatus, but as a fragile, fragmented, and often performative bureaucratic project. Based on extensive fieldwork in “Meritown,” a northern Chinese city that pioneered one of the country’s most ambitious local credit systems, the book reveals how quantification that intended to promote behavioral compliance and bureaucratic oversight ends up producing selective, fabricated, and ultimately mirage of data. Through close observation of the daily work of street-level bureaucrats and their interactions with citizens, Metricocracy traces how numbers are negotiated, manipulated, and invested with conflicting meanings, often at odds with the state’s official narrative of comprehensive social governance.
Rather than reinforcing state power, the book shows how quantification can generate institutional strain, symbolic contestation, and even cynicism among bureaucrats and citizens alike. By illuminating the political, organizational, and relational dynamics behind the production of scores, Metricocracy challenges dominant accounts of China’s authoritarian capacity and adds new depth to global debates on data-driven algorithmic governance, quantification, datafication, and state legitimacy. It not only demystifies a system misunderstood in Western media but also offers a powerful lens for understanding the contradictions at the heart of quantification regimes worldwide.