Foreign firms unprepared for China's 'life-or-death' rating system: chamber

davfor

This sounds like a useful tool for China to be adding to its trade war tool kit:

Foreign businesses in China are ill-prepared for the tough sanctions and constant surveillance demanded by a social credit system to be rolled out this year, a European business group warned Wednesday.

Under this new system for ranking businesses, both foreign and domestic companies will be required to install surveillance cameras in their premises and share the data with the government.

They will also be rated on their tax record and compliance with a range of existing laws, including customs or environmental regulations.

Those who violate rules will be placed in "blacklists" and subjected to "immediate and severe punishments", the EU Chamber of Commerce in China said in a report published Wednesday.

https://news.yahoo.com/foreign-firms-unprepared-chinas-life-death-rating-system-111744283--finance.html

Edmond

To me, it looks like one more reason why supply-chains should be moving out of China...

Can't we agree that if a country makes it harder to do business within its borders, it would expect to lose business to other countries who make it easier to conduct business?

China is our supplier. The world is full of billions of people outside of China, many of them willing to work for less, and without the heavy hand of Emperor Xi and his neo-Fascist Communist Party inserting itself into commerce, ensuring that everyone demonstrate sufficient placid servility to the well-connected.

The "credit score" is "P.C." carried to its logical conclusion. It is the antithesis of freedom.

davfor

@Edmond Yes. It is all rather chilling...1984 come to life (even extending itself into the corporate world). That is partly behind the Hong Kong protests...not wanting to succumb to being forced to live in a surveillance state.

Another quote from the article states that a low social credit system score could slow down the flow of imports into the country. That provides a fairly direct link to trade war tactics.

The sanctions are not limited to penalties but also include more frequent inspections, customs delays, not getting subsidies or tax rebates and public shaming, the report added.

Old_Joe

The quintessential big brother state. Very scary... they're already more than halfway there. Add in rigid internet control/monitoring/censoring, facial recognition technology, and Xi's command/control philosophy and it really is 1984. Yes, the people in Hong Kong feel the chill in their bones, knowing that they are trapped like rats with no escape. Slow but sure assimilation. Resistance is futile, but they are giving it a good shot.

Old_Joe

A bit more on this- Excerpts from a current article in The Washington Post:

HONG KONG — With her city facing an abyss, in her words, Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam strode to the microphone this week and reasserted that urgent steps were needed to pacify protests that have plunged the Asian financial hub into its worst crisis in decades.

What she must not do, she said, is compromise. She wasn’t ignoring protesters’ demands, she said. She was rejecting them outright.

“It is not a question of not responding; it is a question of not accepting those demands,” she said.

As Hong Kong’s political upheaval stretches on, the refusal of Lam and her government to entertain any concessions that might restore calm has surprised even pro-establishment voices and moderates. Her stance has left many wondering whether Lam is unable — rather than unwilling — to make decisions on the most pressing matters affecting the semiautonomous Chinese territory.

“Beijing thinks the protests will burn out as a result of the regime’s intransigence and provocations,” said Kenneth Chan, a political science professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and a former pro-democracy lawmaker. “The ultimate game is to imbue in society a collective sense of hopelessness [by] stonewalling the protests.”

(Bold emphasis added)