Moving Data - Moving People: Reorganizing Trust through China's Social Credit System

Moving Data-Moving People examines the role of the forthcoming Social Credit
System (SCS) in reshaping relations of trust for China’s many mobile people. Due
to be launched in 2020 across mainland China, the SCS has the potential, through a social credit score, create a more uniform governance of both the mobility of people and data about them. In Western contexts, the SCS is often described as a case of big data totalitarianism. According to the Chinese State Council (2014), however, the purpose of the SCS is to create a more ""trustworthy"" society. We see this large scale state digitalization project as having the potential to fundamentally alter previous ways of negotiating trusting relations, particularly for China's mobile population. Through locally embedded ethnographic fieldwork and document analysis, our project will provide early insights into the implementation of the SCS and what it means for relationships of trust between mobile people, local governments and local citizens