Yet, owing to the political imperative of the time, the idea of turning individuals into enlightened citizens quickly gave way to the idea of producing a people who would adhere to the newly declared social and political order that was seen as vital to the survival of the nation. They vernacularized language for the masses and carried an education campaign to the countryside with the hope of turning the nation’s mass population into new citizens, making this period a sort of Chinese enlightenment (Lam, 2011, pp. Thus, during the 1910s and 1920s, many Chinese intellectuals spoke of the need to create a “new culture” based on science and democracy. They further emphasized that if China wanted to institute a modern political order, creating a functional society with politically awakened citizens was critical. When the new republic disintegrated soon after its establishment, most intellectuals blamed the top-down approach to political change. Political legitimacy, similarly, was now derived from the people rather than from the imperial lineage and divine sources. Underlying this line of reasoning was a fundamental shift in the political logics of the state from that of the Manchu-led dynastic empire to the Chinese nation. Sun Yatsen, the revolutionary leader and “father of the republic”, also famously castigated the disorganized and disunited state of the Chinese nation (Lam, 2011, p. Those who led the top-down revolution that ultimately toppled the dynasty also shared this view. According to him, the prerequisite to forming such a society was to create national citizens who were motivated and enlightened. The prominent intellectual Liang Qichao (1873–1929), for example, argued that the Chinese nation emerging out of the crumbling empire was in dire need of an organic society. When the multi-ethnic Qing empire led by the Manchu ethnic group (1644–1912) repeatedly suffered major military defeats and setbacks in political and institutional reforms in its final decades, many Han Chinese intellectuals came to believe that the failure of the empire was due to its inability to create a unified body politic to counter the encroachment of foreign powers. The desire to reform the thought of the individual is at least partially rooted in China’s looming existential crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead, it edges towards a posthuman world where citizens are fast becoming calculable and mouldable data subjects. In doing so, it has also given up on the dream of creating enlightened and critical citizens once cherished by Chinese intellectuals and revolutionary vanguards a century ago. By subjugating the everyday to neoliberal logics and normalizing its citizens through self-regulation, postsocialist China is moving away from the older socialist system of surveillance. Under such practices of state-led neoliberalism, the government uses social engineering interventions-the idea of the social credit in this case-to promote the ideas of marketization, social harmony, innovation, entrepreneurship, the rule of law, and other state-defined “core socialist values”. Significantly, this government-mandated big data and surveillance project involves more than just the mining and processing of data by the state and corporations it also seeks to compel individuals and groups to regulate themselves tirelessly based on the social and ethical order sanctioned by the state. As a new technology of governance, the social credit system is intended to track and calculate the social credit scores of every Chinese citizen and organization based on their activities and performance. This essay equally questions the adequacy of this view of human capacity, especially in the contemporary digital landscape, by examining the recent introduction of the social credit ( shehui xinyong) rating system in China.
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