Week 15

• Anne S.Y. Cheung and Yongxi Chen, “From Datafication to Data State: Making Sense of China’s Social Credit System and Its Implications,” Law & Social Inquiry, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 1137-71
• Darren Byler, “Surveillance, Data Police, and Digital Enclosure in Xinjiang’s ‘Safe Cities,’” Chapter 14 in Xinjiang Year Zero, edited by Darren Byler, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere, ANU Press, 2022

the data state: a governance model enabling the state to comprehensively monitor, evaluate, and control its subjects through datafication and data-driven techniques, thereby severely restricting their autonomy.

two peculiar features:

1. comprehensive access to, and evaluation of, citizens’ lives,
2. the dominance of the data self over the bio-self

brief history: social credit system first introduced as a financial credit system in the early 2000s; In 2014, the central government released the Planning Outline 2014–2020 for the Construction of a Social Credit System (Planning Outline); national authorities have since issued numerous related policy documents rather than enacting laws; As of the end of 2020, regulations governing the SCS had been enacted by the legislatures of only nine provincial-level regions and were pending in another seven.

3 prominent functions:

1. the provision and regulation of financial credit rating;
2. market regulation and social governance;
3. the promotion of state-endorsed values.

2 core mechanisms:

1. combined punishments and incentives carried out by the state and
2. a unitary, state-run data infrastructure

inherent defect: undermining the protection of fundamental rights and contradicting government efforts to uphold the rule of law →distorted concept of credit and decontextualized evaluation+state interventions that result in semi-automation of combined punishments and ingrained disproportionality(1151-56)

Byler’s chapter is a condensed version of In the Camp.

“full-throated settler colonialism” from Byler’s Terror Capitalism: “At the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the population of Han-identified inhabitants of the region was around 6 percent, with Uyghurs comprising roughly 80 percent of the population. Today Uyghurs make up less than 50 percent of the total population and Han more than 40 percent” and “the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Ch: bingtuan), were pulled into the borderlands through a combination of economic incentives and ideological persuasion. Initially, the primary goal of this project was not to assimilate Muslim populations but rather to transform Kazakh pastureland into irrigated farming colonies, redistribute the population of former soldiers, and secure the territorial integrity of the nation” (xiv preface).

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