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Is your guilt or innocence down to the whim of the CCP in China?No, the CCP has better things to do than worry about your guilt or innocence. They’re busy guiding the country, so they set up the most trusted legal system in the world. Here’s how it works (from Chapter Seventeen: Law and Virtue, Why China Leads the World: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom:When he launched his anti-corruption drive in 2012, President Xi promised to govern by virtuous example, hide zhiguo, and to create a socialist spiritual civilization, jingshen wenming. Four years later, in language that would have pleased Confucius, he reminded a judicial study group that law and ethics are inextricably bound:Law is virtue expressed in words, and virtue is law borne in people’s hearts. In the State's eyes, law and virtue have equal status in regulating social behavior, adjusting social relations, and maintaining social order. The rule of law must embody moral ideals that provide reliable institutional support for virtue. Laws and regulations should promote virtuous behavior while socialist core values–prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity, and friendliness–should be woven into legislation, law enforcement, and the judicial process.Even today, members of the National Family still address older strangers as ‘aunty,’ ‘uncle,’ ‘grandfather,’ or ‘grandmother,’ every adult assumes responsibility for every child, and clans and families law settle ninety percent of disputes. Would-be criminals must struggle against family, friends, workmates, classmates, and neighbors who counsel, mediate, and compromise to keep them on the path of virtue. Families use persuasion, education, and individually tailored solutions that they can enforce far more effectively than the police.So effective is mediation that Congress now requires villages to maintain People’s Mediation Committees, courthouses to maintain mediation offices, and lawyers to become certified mediators. In 2019, mediators handled six million disputes and reduced the national legal bill to one-tenth of America’s.Penal law still plays a minor role in everyday life and the judicial process–originally designed to protect the State from the people–remains a work in progress.As in France, magistrates are regarded as neutral truth-seekers who interrogate suspects, examine evidence, hear testimony, render verdicts, and determine guilt and innocence pre-trial. A Shanghai Trial Spot provides defense lawyers for all criminal defendants but elsewhere, they are mandatory only for juveniles, the disabled, and those facing life imprisonment or death. If evidence for conviction is insufficient, magistrates suggest that the procurate either reduce the charges or investigate further. Since most casework involves paper depositions, the Western custom of cross-examining witnesses under oath before a judge is uncommon but, while American defendants lose their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination if they testify, Chinese defendants may say whatever they wish in their defense or refuse to be cross-examined, without prejudice. If the investigating magistrate decides that the defendant is guilty, the case goes to a sentencing hearing and, even if a defendant confesses and wishes to end the matter, the magistrate must hold an open hearing and ask the defendant to confirm his confession publicly.Though lawyers’ reputations in Chinese society have always been poor, the profession was boosted in 2012 when Li Keqiang, an expert on English common law, became Premier, and the Supreme Court’s internship program began attracting top students. Next, President Xi suggested establishing independent judicial committees with non-Party members to select judges based on merit and professional track record. By 2019, every province had an independent judicial committee to minimize local government interference, establish and oversee judges and prosecutors' work, and punish professional misconduct. Shanghai’s committee expelled a High Court prosecutor, two sub-prosecutors, the Vice President of the Provincial Supreme Court, and a senior circuit court judge. National appeals courts now re-hear cases, overturn wrongful convictions, order restitution, and require lower courts to study their reversals.The Supreme People’s Court’s website, with five billion visits, offers online courses on every element of the law, invites criticism of new regulations, and provides an artificial intelligence interface to its six-hundred-thousand recorded trials. Its website invites citizens to email the Chief Justice, whose answers begin cheerily, “Hello! We received your question, and after consideration, we respond as follows…” and end with, “Thank you for your support of the work of the Supreme People’s Court!”Since their ethical duty transcends their legal responsibility, the courts ultimately answer to the Party which, as the arbiter of national ethics, blocks unethical decisions. Chief Justice Xiao Yang explained, “The power of the courts to adjudicate independently doesn’t mean independence from the Party at all. On the contrary, it embodies a high degree of responsibility vis-à-vis the Party’s [dàtóng] program”.Citizens can video police, who must publish the status of all arrestees online. Police, prosecutors, and court officials are responsible for wrongful prosecutions until the day they die, but, though unarmed, police have powers of which their Western colleagues dream. Instead of removing miscreants from society, they can issue temporary restraining orders and mandate home confinement–which provides wrongdoers an opportunity to discuss solutions with their families. Convicted criminals, who can prosecute prison staff for breaching their rights, must receive humane levels of material comfort and dignity from arrest to release. Sentences are typically short, prisoners must participate in career, legal, cultural, and moral counseling, and even murderers are expected to repent, reform, and rejoin society.TV programs regularly explain new laws, while schools, offices, factories, mines, and army units discuss concepts like excluding illegally obtained evidence. After the success of a weekly TV show, I am a Barrister, the Legal Channel screened The Lawyers Are Here. Each episode introduces a legal issue, ranging from child custody to healthcare negligence, and experts offer opinions and advise real litigants on air.Online Trial Spots are reducing legal costs, promoting equitable outcomes, and lightening the burden of enforcement. One app bundles free mediation, dispute settlement, and legal aid and connects plaintiffs to thousands of lawyers, notaries, and judicial appraisers. Another verifies plaintiffs’ and defendants’ IDs and combines face and speech recognition with electronic signatures, allowing them to go to trial without leaving home. Using voice-to-text, it submits their files, transcribes their testimonies, and stores their case records in case of appeal.Beijing’s Internet Court provides an artificial intelligence-based risk assessment as a public service and automatically generates legal documents, applies machine translation, and simplifies settlements through oral interaction with its knowledge base. In 2017 Hangzhou, home of Alibaba, launched the first cyber court exclusively for online e-commerce complaints, loan litigation, and copyright infringement. In its inaugural case, TikTok sued Baidu for ownership of user-generated video content.With unarmed police, two percent of America’s legal professionals, and one-fourth of its policing budget, the Chinese have the world’s lowest imprisonment and re-offense rates. When Harvard’s Tony Saich surveyed them about their greatest worry, they ranked ‘Maintenance of Social Order’ highest, and when he asked which government service pleased them most, they again chose ‘Maintenance of Social Order.’In 1982, as consumption began driving the economy, Beijing launched Consumer Rights Day. Vendors took to the streets, experts discussed product quality, and TV screens showed fake merchandise being shredded, crushed, and burned. Though consumers are more sophisticated nowadays, one element of the program remains popular: CEOs of cheating corporations are hauled before a billion gleeful viewers to beg forgiveness and promise to change their ways. Most CEOs are local, but Apple persistently ignored China’s two-year warranty law, Tim Cook apologized publicly and changed the policy. Volkswagen and Nikon's CEOs also took the Walk of Shame, groveled gratifyingly, and altered company policies.Congress mandated ethical manufacturing, truthful advertising, secure distribution, honest payment, and reliable delivery, but consumers remained reticent to transact business on the Internet, so legislators required retailers to accept returns unconditionally within seven days, pay doubled fines for false advertising, and refund three times the price of counterfeit goods. Nike, which had lobbied for the law, urged consumers to profit from it–and online counterfeits disappeared.In 2014, the State Council issued its Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System by 2020 and launched the most significant national attitude adjustment since the Cultural Revolution, “Declining trust has transformed us from a community of acquaintances into a society of strangers. Our integrity system is weak, and we suffer from unhealthy social phenomena like economic disputes, telecommunications fraud, mistrust, and indifference to human feelings. Integrity systems must begin with government honesty, promise-keeping, and respect for morality and customs. Next, we must make genuine efforts to strengthen the integrity of our entire society”.Warning that officials and corporations would be the first Social Credit targets, the Academy of Social Sciences encouraged Trial Spots to discourage corruption, cheating, debt-dodging, shoddy products, irresponsible medical treatment, commercial fraud, tax evasion, and product piracy. The People’s Daily called for publicly accessible corporate credit dossiers to promote sincerity, chengxin, and trustworthiness, yongxin, and planners proposed a timeline: establish fundamental laws, regulations, and standards for social behavior; construct a social credit information system for the entire society; build credit supervision and management systems; then foster a social credit service market with mechanisms that encourage honesty and integrity.Social Credit, SCS, is a data-sharing service, “Founded on laws, regulations and standards, based on a complete network covering the credit records of members of society and credit infrastructure, supported by the lawful application of credit information and services, it aims to establish a culture of sincerity, to keep trust, encourage traditional virtues, and employ incentives and constraints against breaking trust”.The first phase focused on government and corporate transparency, and watchdogs discovered one-thousand government officials on the list of violators. By 2019, one-hundred towns and cities had been listed as dishonest, their credit ratings downgraded, and their senior officials blocked from taking high-speed trains, visiting golf courses and expensive hotels, and purchasing real estate. Blacklisted companies’ corporate officers are banned from heading other enterprises for three years and must submit to increased inspection frequency, and increased discretionary penalties and business-to-business and business-to-consumer platforms must alert users if they are listed. Professionals, like pharmacists, are simply de-registered. In its first full year of operation, SCS blacklisted seven thousand enterprises, denied air travel to ten-million deadbeats, and blocked four-million credit abusers from buying high-speed rail tickets.In 2017, the Ministries of Finance, Customs, and Ecology cooperated to lower the wages of sin. They blocked crooked corporations from issuing bonds or receiving government subsidies, tax breaks, permits, and loans, purchasing real estate, owning land-use rights, exploiting natural resources, and issuing IPOs. They blocked crooked executives from company directorships, job promotions, asset ownership, establishing financial companies, receiving stock options, participating in government procurement, and working in high-trust sectors like food, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals. The system also blocked them from first-class travel, hotels, restaurants, resorts, nightclubs and golf courses, foreign holidays, sending offspring to private schools, and even buying homes and automobiles.By 2020, sixty-one-thousand companies and government agencies had been penalized. Counterfeiting and food and drug violations had fallen dramatically, and the EU Chamber of Commerce in Beijing warned members:Under this far-reaching system, your company and executives will be subject to a series of rewards and punishments, with firms at risk of being blacklisted for non-compliance. The system has started monitoring the behavior of Chinese companies abroad–particularly those involved in the Belt and Road Initiative–in an attempt to safeguard the country’s interests and reputation. Monitoring of European companies’ behavior in other markets, including their cooperation and business relationships with Chinese companies–even if they are not present in China–is possible in the future.Consumers, officials, and corporations now interact with SCS through innovative apps using data from the National Credit Information Sharing Platform to help the market weed out bad actors. It crowdsources commercial supervision and acts as a neutral record keeper that consolidates government files into a central database and integrates and regulates data exchanges and information sharing across geographic regions and professional fields. It incentivizes trustworthy conduct and punishes untrustworthy behavior, increases reliance on credit evaluations in transactions, and employs these mechanisms, along with moral education, to foster a trusting social environment.***With the government and corporate program bearing fruit, planners turned to individuals. Professor Zhang Zheng explained the program simply, “There are two kinds of people in this world: good people and bad people. Now imagine a world where the good ones are rewarded and the bad ones are punished, and untrustworthiness in one place leads to constraints everywhere”.When statistics revealed that a staggering seventy percent of individuals and organizations evaded enforcement or failed to perform court-ordered obligations, the Supreme Court ruled that their identities could be listed publicly for up to two years. The first targets were debt defaulters, laolai, so the People’s Bank of China incorporated court records into credit reports, revised its penalties, and created The Deadbeat Checker, a public blacklist searchable by agency, department, institutional, and individual name.Dengfeng’s laolai Trial Spot used automatic recordings to warn callers, “The person you are calling is listed as dishonest by the Dengfeng People’s Court. Please urge them to fulfill their obligations”. Henan's court featured local laolai in video clips set to dramatic music and claimed its first victory when a deadbeat saw himself onscreen at a local movie theater and promptly paid his $78,000 judgment. By 2020, SCS had blocked laolai from fourteen million flights and high-speed train trips.Individuals with good SCS scores receive cheaper loans, upgraded flights, no-deposit rentals, no-wait hospital visits, and desirable schools for their offspring. Japan and the Netherlands offer expedited visa processing for travelers with scores above 750, and landlords waive deposits if they’re over 800. China Daily regularly talks up the benefits: “After graduation, Zhang Hao, 28, found a job at a Hangzhou securities company. On his mobile app, Alipay, he saw an apartment he liked. Alipay rates users’ credit based on their consumption and investment habits and Zhang had a high score so was exempted from the $1,000 security deposit and the $200 broker’s fee. The experience not only saved Zhang time and energy in renting an apartment, which is often complicated, but also gave him a positive impression of the city where he was about to build his career”. One young man posted his high score and a video of himself collecting a Ford SUV from an unstaffed automobile vending machine for a three-day test drive, along with a discounted loan offer to buy it.Jiangsu’s Suining County (pop. 3.3 million) launched a personal Trial Spot in 2007 that gave each citizen a thousand credits and deducted points for legal, administrative, and moral infringements. Drunk driving convictions cost fifty points; having a child without family planning permission lost thirty-five, and delinquent loans lost up to fifty. Miscreants could recover points after two to five years, depending on the infraction's gravity, and participants were categorized A-D based on their scores. A-class citizens received preferential access to employment opportunities while other applicants were scrutinized for government jobs and contracts, subsidized housing, social welfare, business licenses, and permits. The trial provided valuable data on the effects of naming, shaming, and rewarding citizens for compliance with local regulations but, when the county published the entire list of names and scores, critics compared them to the hated Good Citizen Cards issued by Japanese occupiers during the war.Public nuisances, like unleashed dogs and uncouth passengers, are popular targets. A railway Trial Spot penalizes fare dodgers, vandals, smokers, scalpers, and people who use false ID or invalid tickets. Some Trial Spots are controversial. A private university refused to enroll a Zhejiang businessman’s son because his father had not repaid a $30,000 bank loan. The father promptly paid. Some netizens condemned this as collective punishment, while others argued that children should not enjoy privileges like private universities if they are purchased with unpaid debt.To allay people's fears that Social Credit will become oppressive, government information on individuals will neither be considered in evaluating their credit nor crafted into a unified score. Nor will SCS collect public or market credit information on individuals’ religion, genetics, fingerprints, blood type, or medical history.Provincial trials are developing a public appeals process for credit restoration if miscreants stop their negative behavior and work to undo its impact. Others are experimenting with credit objections, repair, appeals, and protection of civil rights, and the media are playing a critical role:From: Gao Lu, editorial writer, Qianjiang Evening News,Date: July 30, 2019Re: Wulian No. 2 Middle School, Shandong Province.Recently, a teacher's severe punishment by the school authorities and the local education department–for using corporal punishment to discipline two students for skipping class–has drawn public concern. According to official documents issued by the school and department, at the end of April this year, students Li and Wang (actual names withheld), from Class No. 3 of the Wulian No. 2 Middle School, skipped classes to go to the playground. Upon discovery, as punishment, their class teacher, Teacher Yang, beat them with textbooks.As a result, the Wulian No. 2 Middle School suspended Teacher Yang for a month, issued a formal apology to the students and parents, and bore the students’ medical and other expenses. These reparations all seem well and good, but the controversy lies in the additional sanctions for Teacher Yang proposed soon after. As issued by the Wulian County Education and Sports Bureau on July 2, the other sanctions proposed were:1. Deducting Teacher Yang’s performance-related pay from May 2019 to April 2020; 2. Directing the Wulian No. 2 Middle School not to renew Teacher Yang’s employment contract; 3. Adding Teacher Yang to the Wulian County credit information evaluation system (credit system) blacklist from July 2019.Among these additional sanctions, the last is most controversial. As is well known, a credit information evaluation system, narrowly defined, refers to the credit system of the People’s Bank of China, and the appraisal of the borrower in the context of behavior such as the non-payment of bank loans, overdue credit card payments, overdrafts, and so on. However, in some places, the definition of “creditworthiness” has widened to include social behavior, thus a social credit system. In these places, jaywalking, spitting, and other uncivil behaviors are deemed detrimental and included in the credit system. This issue is not limited to just Wulian County. At least 20 other cities are developing credit systems to restrain personal conduct.Although using corporal punishment to discipline students is almost certainly a failure to adhere to the teaching profession’s ethical code, that relates somewhat to a teacher’s trustworthiness. It is a different thing from staining their sincerity and honesty. Instead, it is already possible for the authorities to sanction teachers according to existing regulations. Those who exceed their authority can also be investigated under the law–there is no need to rely on the credit system.The credit system is not the solution to every social problem. What kind of mess would it be if administrative and law enforcement offenses resulted in a loss to creditworthiness? The system would no longer be the traditional credit system we recognize. As implemented, a person’s actual credit circumstances would be submerged within other systems. How useful would this be for the banks and financial institutions that only want to evaluate the person’s ability to repay?Why would they want to use the local credit system? If they used it, the banks and financial institutions would exceed their legal authority (by taking into account matters unrelated to the applicant’s ability to repay). If they did not, the local authorities would have succeeded in creating a penalty system with no relation to financial behavior. Is that useful?In some places, this is nothing more than a weapon used to intimidate and reduce resistance to control. Peace of mind from credit evaluation gives way to paralysis by intimidation. The crux of the matter is this: the credit system can be misused to violate citizens' rights. In modern society, correctly evaluating credit is critical. For us, the public interest is at stake, and we must be cautious.On July 28, the Wulian County People’s Government announced that the Wulian County Bureau of Education and Sports had withdrawn the decision to seek additional sanctions for Teacher Yang. The Wulian County People’s Government did not explain, but it is certainly worrying that one could be included or excluded from the credit system blacklist, just like that. We hope this incident spurs local authorities to approach creditworthiness more prudently and hope that more local governments recognize the problems inherent in building a credit system that preserves its citizens' legal rights.Hundreds of Social Credit Trial Spots will parade their data in 2021, and, once public approval reaches ninety percent, legislators will integrate SCS into the social fabric and we will witness the most ambitious social experiment since the Cultural Revolution: digitally enhanced Confucian virtue.Ask any Chinese about SCS and they will usually enthuse, “Just what we need! Perfect for us Chinese!”