Lecture: Who defines trustworthiness? The role of technical norms in the infrastructure of China’s Social Credit System

One of the more promising projects that sprung from China’s Social Credit System strategy is the so-called “new type of regulation based on trustworthiness (信用監管)”, a mode of discretionary decision-making informed by quantified assessments of regulatory subjects’ credibility. Credibility assessments are to be conducted by regulatory agencies well as non-state actors such as industry associations and companies – for instance, e-commerce platforms for the merchants that use them. The criteria and methods for these consequential trustworthiness assessments are laid down not in policy or law but in technical standards. Technical standardization is, traditionally, a realm of industrial self-regulation rooted in the private sector, with standards not usually having a legally binding effect. Yet, China’s SCS architects build on technical standardization processes, created a designated technical committee, and actively promote the use of their standards among private actors. In practice, the series of national social credit standards provides the technical link between central-level rhetoric on credibility-based regulation and its implementation. European regulatory strategies, too, increasingly invoke technical standardization processes, as evident from the GDPR and the AI Act. Using the case of social credit standards-for-governance in China, I discuss issues that emerge from the use of technical standards in public regulation from a comparative perspective: Why are standardization processes popular among legislators, and how do the presumably value-neutral processes change through the overt entanglement with politics?  Where do standardization organizations derive their legitimacy from to make moral-laden political decisions, for instance about the threshold of discrimination? Is this trend a step towards technocracy?