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China penalizes 6.7 million debtors with travel ban / Financial Times (paywall)
The Supreme People’s Court of China released records yesterday showing that nearly 7 million people have been banned from purchasing airline tickets or boarding high-speed trains because they are in debt. A host of other misdeeds, including lying in court and hiding financial assets, can now land a Chinese citizen negative “social credit.” The system has been developed experimentally for some time (see an Economist article from last December, and a Tech in Asia article from last November), but the number of people on the blacklist and the government’s use of the list has been expanding gradually for over a year. For more on big data and its applications in China, see “Cashing in on dystopia,” a SupChina feature by David Bandurski.
- Opinion: Exit the dragon: Why China should stop supporting Venezuela / NYT (paywall)
- China ‘eliminating civil society’ by targeting human rights activists — report / The Guardian
- Police, pollution protesters clash in northern China city – Daqing citizens protest aluminum plant construction / ABC News
- China loses a friend, and leverage, with North Korean murder / Bloomberg
- He called China’s president ‘Xitler’ on Twitter. Now he faces jail / NYT (paywall)
