Beijing has been developing a globally unprecedented plan to give companies and individual people ‘social credit’ scores.
In a roadmap plan released in 2014, China said it would by 2020 create the system to reward or punish individuals and corporations using technology to record various measures of financial credit, personal behaviour and corporate misdeeds. “It is a very, very potent instrument of regulating, controlling and steering companies in a targeted way,” Bjoern Conrad, chief executive officer of Sinolytics, a consulting firm that helped draft the report, told reporters.
The chamber said the corporate social credit system is part of a “major shift” in China’s market access limits for foreign companies as the government enhances its ability to control firms’ behaviour even as it pledges to scale back on traditional constraints, such as joint venture requirements and restricted sectors for investment.
“Being a legal representative of a company in China means that your individual rating of the social credit system is directly related to the company and vice versa,” Conrad said.