" social credit score"
What's this ?
The Social Credit System is a system of documenting all individuals' actions in numerous spheres of life to create a unified and all-encompassing numerical value assessing a person's trust-worthiness in relation to society, similar in principle to financial credit scores used almost universally elsewhere. It uses extensive data collection streams from financial transaction records, criminal records, camera feeds and human notation, and amalgamates it into a single database.
The law was first enacted by the State Council in 2014 (
) and can be thought of as a bit of an experiment in gamified group behavior modification. The higher a person's social credit score, the more benefits that person will receive in the form of lower interest rates on loans and more opportunities in academic and professional areas where the score is taken into consideration. Conversely, the lower a person's score, the more friction they will generally encounter. Because of this carrot/stick approach, people are encouraged to, essentially, be good citizens. Pay your bills on time, help others, don't litter or break laws, etc.
Here is a nice video put out by Xinhua from a few years ago describing it:
Critics of the approach tend to focus on the subversive effects such a gamified approach can have in terms of chilling free speech, etc. Likewise, some nationalists tend to react in an overly sensitive way and insist that the system doesn't really exist or is an invention of the China haters.
I personally don't care about any of that. The Social Credit System is real, and it is a behavior modification device, just like the financial credit system used elsewhere.
My purpose in mentioning it when talking about the Qwen 3 Max engine is to point out that the engine seemed to flag a number of topics as being sensitive that weren't really sensitive, and that Chinese users might get spooked by that. In other words, the AI engine seemed to be registering false positives for bad behavior.