U.S. corporations are sounding the alarm about the fact that China intends to treat them precisely the way they are treating their employees and customers:
The social credit system is a vast database that monitors Chinese citizens for “good behavior” and aggressively punishes those who fall short. Anything from poor spending habits to ideological impurity can produce a low social credit score, with consequences that might include the unfortunate citizen suddenly discovering he is no longer allowed to board airplanes or trains.
The social credit system has a business component as well, monitoring corporate behavior in much the same way it keeps tabs on individual citizens. Companies with poor social credit scores can face heavier regulatory scrutiny, higher taxes, reduced access to business loans, or an outright ban on doing business in China.
Bloomberg News provided the example of China Railway Construction Corporation, a company that covered up some fatalities on a railroad project in Mongolia, got caught, and was banned from doing business for a year as well as being “subject to more inspections, limits on bidding for public projects and restrictions on issuing bonds and shares.” And those were only the immediate consequences – there is no telling how long the demerits fed into the social credit system will haunt the company and its managers across every province of China.
“The system will be widely used in China to oversee domestic and foreign companies, and firms have to assign resources to keep a real eye on making sure their records are clean,” noted Andrew Polk of the Trivium China consulting firm.
Trivium is currently charging corporate clients $2,500 an hour to consult on the social credit system and $50,000 for a complete audit. Bloomberg News suggested other U.S. and European firms are offering similar services.
Other expert observers pointed out that the rules governing the social credit system are notoriously vague and clearly subject to political tweaking from Beijing, making it quite easy for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to punish or blackball foreign corporations unless the foreigners bend over backwards to maintain good relations with CCP officials.
The Chinese government is not shy about warning that American companies could be blacklisted as part of the trade war, or in retaliation for U.S. criticism of Chinese policies such as the internment of Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps. Publishing the CCP’s thus-far secretive blacklist, as Chinese state media has threatened to do, could cause big problems for American firms in other countries, and would almost certainly produce immediate black marks in the social credit system for every listed entity.
Wait, didn’t the Chinese understand that their people were supposed to be the slaves of the corporations and not their masters? Once again, we see that even communism is better for a nation than globalist corpocracy.