Right, it's all the delusions of the Western media as to how this could go wrong, because we never had any things go wrong with blacklists in the West? In the 1950s we had anti-communist blacklists that didn't work out too well. Today we have the terrorist watch list. It's our experience with government creating blacklists and the inherent injustice from false positives that make us very wary of it. People have accidentally gotten onto the terrorist watch list and had their lives ruined.

In China, you have this combined with a President who seems bent on keeping power forever (removing term limits), a party which aggressively blocks and filters anything critical of the government, the installation of key-loggers, face recognition cams, firewalls, and a huge system of monitoring social media, that should raise alarms when there is talk about a universal social ranking, as it's pretty obvious how easy you could end up with a low ranking from off hand joke about the government on Weibo. (https://international.thenewslens.com/article/65955)

I assume you've been living abroad for a while, so you must know we that aggressively criticize our own governments because we don't trust them to do the right thing, and there is ample lessons from history that proves that out. While the Chinese government wants to credit a social credit system to keep the population "honest", there is no "good governance credit system" to keep the government "honest". In the West, we have independent court systems to try and achieve that, as well as democratic elections. It doesn't always work, and corruption still flourishes, (good lord, the fucking Trump administration) but at least there's some attempted check on government power and corruption.

All I'd say is, a glass heart when China is criticized is probably not the best way to react, but I guess it may be the only way to react, since criticism of the government isn't really permitted publicly internally, the only Chinese widespread public criticism is from the external diaspora. My own feeling is that Xi is taking the country in the wrong direction and there appears to be no internal forces to stop him.

Anyway, here's an example of the hell of disputing these kinds of lists.

https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/world/social-credit-s...

"Lawyer Li Xiaolin was also not given advanced notice that he was blacklisted.

In 2014, Li was sued for defamation and lost. A judge ordered Li to make an apology, which he submitted in writing in April 2015. Ten months later, when he was away on a work trip, he was blocked from buying a return flight home to Beijing. That’s when he found out he was blacklisted.

It took him another three weeks before an official told him why.

“The court said my apology was not sincere. I asked officials how they determined what is sincere.” Li said.

Eventually Li wrote a second apology and the court removed him from the blacklist in 2016. Then last year, he tried to get a credit card.

“The bank denied my application. I figured out that the bank might still have my name blacklisted and I was right,” Li said.

The bank updated its records the next day, but by that point, he had spent almost a year to fully clear his name."