Chinese Social Credit Systems

I am a leading scholar of the Chinese Social Credit System Project (SCSP). My work has systematically deconstructed the global narrative of SCSP with empirical and theoretical rigorousness, replacing the image of a unified Orwellian monolith with a complex reality of fragmented, competing systems. Through national surveys, discourse analysis, and ethnography, I trace how these systems are built, implemented, and contested, demonstrating the power and the inherent limits of state control in the digital age.

My published research in this topic could be organized by the following questions. All my articles are open accessed:

Is there one unified “Big Brother” system?

Many assume the SCS is a single, centralized database. My early research (2019) corrected this misconception by mapping the institutional landscape of Chinese credit governance. I show that the SCS is not a monolithic Orwellian tool but a fragmented collection of initiatives – financial credit scores, national blacklists, and local municipal experiments – each operating with different logics.

Liu, Chuncheng. 2019. “Multiple Social Credit Systems in China.” Economic Sociology: The European Electronic Newsletter 21(1):22–32. [download]

How is a SCS designed and implemented on the ground?

My more recent work focuses on the sociotechnical realities of local implementation. Through a detailed case study of a model municipal SCS metric, I demonstrate how local policy design can moralize existing inequality, subjecting government employees to intense surveillance while structurally disadvantaging rural residents. Based on interviews with policymakers, I also examine why high-tech tools like machine learning often fail in local governance despite their success in private finance, primarily due to a lack of data variety and clear administrative goals.

Liu, Chuncheng, and Akos Rona-Tas. 2025. “Trusting by Numbers: An Analysis of a Chinese Social Credit System Governance Infrastructure.” Critical Sociology 51(6):1247–65. [download] [A brief summary]

Liu, Chuncheng. 2025. “A Tale of Two Social Credit Systems: The Succeeded and Failed Adoption of Machine Learning in Data-Driven Infrastructures.” P. 385 in Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning, edited by C. Borch and J. P. Pardo-Guerra. University of Oxford Press. [download]

How do citizens navigate and respond to the SCSP?

Using national survey data, I reveal that public support for the SCS is surprisingly high but internally complex; counterintuitively, Chinese Communist Party members and high-status individuals often show more skepticism toward state surveillance than the general public. With Alexander Trauth-Goik, I use mixed-method to examine how the state attempts to weaponize social networks via blacklists and how citizens often “grey” the black-and-white labels the state assigned.

Liu, Chuncheng. 2022. “Who Supports Expanding Surveillance? Exploring Public Opinion of Chinese Social Credit Systems.” International Sociology 37(3):391–412. [download] [a brief summary]

Trauth-Goik, Alexander, and Chuncheng Liu. 2023. “Black or Fifty Shades of Grey? The Power and Limits of the Social Credit Blacklist System in China.” Journal of Contemporary China 32(144):1017–33. [download]

Why does the West see the system so differently?

Myths of SCSP need not only debunk but also careful analysis. With Marianne von Blomberg, I analyze how US media utilizes the “SCS imaginary” as a form of Techno-orientalism - portraying a high-tech Asian "Other" as a threat to Western values. This narrative often serves as a rhetorical mirror for Western audiences to articulate their own domestic anxieties about technology and control rather than reflecting the ground-level reality in China.

von Blomberg, Marianne, and Chuncheng Liu. 2025. “Techno-Orientalism in the US Media: The Case of ‘China’s Social Credit System’.” Information, Communication & Society. [download]

METRICOCRACY

Currently, I am writing a book, Metricocracy, an ethnography of a Chinese social credit system. It is under contract with University of California Press.

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.

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