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What... God dammit is this fr? How is something so easy to check Such a widespread idea?
Western sources refuse to report on the truth, and any non-western source is automatically dismissed as biased disinformation propaganda etc
Can't counter a narrative if no accepted sources ever differ
As an educated libeal, I read things from outside my political bubble - to stay educated. This includes my home countrys leading left liberal newspaper, my countrys leading centrist newspaper and, of course, my countrys version of "Der Stürmer"
Honestly, it's not so easy to check, because a lot of people have no idea how many "reliable sources" will repeat US State Dept propaganda uncritically.
I think I worded that weirdly. I was asking genuinely, I had thought social credit was just a thing and was surprised something so big could be/was a lie. I too am uninformed.
It's cool, we've all been in your position at one point or another
It can honestly be a bit hard to keep track of all the lies
Very recently I caught myself believing that it was the Falun Gong who were saying the CCP was harvesting organs from Uyghurs but then I realized that it definitely wouldn't be the Falun Gong saying that as a criticism, they'd be celebrating it. Happens to the best of us.
It really happens more often than you think. Social credit score is probably the biggest outright fabrication about China but there's a lot of big misconceptions, like:
- Thinking China somehow is oppressing Tibetans (only partly true in the sense they oppressed Tibetan slaveowners) or the whole Uyghur Genocide lie, I think Western govs have stopped pushing the Uyghur stuff but a lot of people still think there's a million Uyghurs locked up in detention camps even after years of travel vloggers going to Xinjiang and showing how active it is with cultural activities, traditional and modern Uyghur architecture, festivals, etc.
- Not knowing the history of the Chinese Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War, how the KMT and Chiang Kai Shek especially played a role in creating Taiwan. A lot of people seem to think that Taiwan is some kind of independent country that China randomly laid claim to, not another government that claims to control all of China because they lost the civil war.
- Misunderstanding of their whole political system, in a bunch of ways. Lots of people think China is a country where people don't vote or have any input over how the government runs. The truth is that the CPC is way more receptive to input from the local, regional, and national bodies that govern it. It's a system that's closer to a direct democracy (granted, with a lot of intermediary bureaucracies) than Western liberal democracies where many national bodies are decoupled from regional and local governance.
years of travel vloggers going to Xinjiang and showing
showing how much better the place looks than all the cities I'm familiar with lol
Wikipedia does a pretty good job. Unfortunately, we were trained by our teachers to not trust Wikipedia so-
Your teachers were right. Wikipedia can be shady sometimes too
Here, from the Social Credit System article:
There has been a widespread misconception that China operates a nationwide and unitary social credit "score" based on individuals' behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. Media reports in the West have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.[7][8][9] In 2019, the central government voiced dissatisfaction with pilot cities experimenting with social credit scores. It issued guidelines clarifying that citizens could not be punished for having low scores, and that punishments should only be limited to legally defined crimes and civil infractions. As a result, pilot cities either discontinued their point-based systems or restricted them to voluntary participation with no major consequences for having low scores.[7][10] According to a February 2022 report by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a social credit "score" is a myth as there is "no score that dictates citizen's place in society".[7]
Our teachers told us not to trust Wikipedia because "anyone can edit it" but that's not the problem. Wikipedia has the same problems as any Western encyclopedia, but it's not uniquely bad or anything. The only time I've ever noticed problems is with history, because history is political and Wikipedia tends to stick to the orthodox Western canon like any other Western encyclopedia.