In January 2015, the People’s Bank of China gave approval to nine corporate entities to develop pilot credit systems within six months. The notice claimed that the move would aim to “standardize the social credit market and positively impact the real economy.” 

In the months that followed, Tencent, a China based global tech giant and Ant Financial, an affiliate of Alibaba with 588 million users of its online payments platform, rolled out respective points systems. Ant’s Sesame Credit issued a press release stating: “credit is precious, and the accumulation of it is key.”

In China, social credit is a term which generally describes both private sector incarnations and government-implemented blacklists that resemble rewards systems. In the case of private companies like WeChat and Ant Financial (founded as Alipay), apps can aggregate and analyze scores from the financial data of users. 

Most coverage in the West has focused on painting the system as abusive and Orwellian, a dark harbinger of big data’s worst excesses. Within China, where social credit is quite popular, the story couldn’t be more different. Rather than wondering if the system should exist, journalists tend to wonder how you can beat it.