Tracing the origins of China's social credit system, this book argues the system is a fragmented, evolving experiment shaped by the Chinese Communist Party's broader technopolitical vision for the role of technology in governing society.
China's social credit system is one of the most ambitious governance initiatives of the twenty-first century. At its heart lies an aspiration Adam Knight terms the smart state: a mode of rule that promises to engineer trust and social order through data and infrastructure.
Rather than treating the system as a sudden rupture, Knight traces its origins and architecture across a century of Chinese technopolitics, showing how its designers drew on earlier projects of state-building while borrowing selectively from global models of risk assessment, digital reputation, and financial credit scoring. Sitting at the intersection of ideology, legal enforcement tools, and digital governance frameworks, the social credit system becomes a revealing case study in how authority is exercised in an age of big data, authoritarianism, and algorithmic regulation.
Moving beyond alarmist narratives, the book offers a grounded, empirical analysis of how the system was conceived, how it actually works, and what its intended and unintended consequences tell us about the future of informational governance – in China and beyond.