IN 2014, THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY unveiled a plan to create the world’s first nationwide social credit system. It is, to put it mildly, one of the most comprehensive social control projects ever devised. The overarching goal is to track and monitor each and every Chinese citizen, business, and government agency in real time by amalgamating big data from public and private sources. That data is used to build a “high-trust society” in which individuals, companies, and organizations are strongly incentivized to follow the law and act ethically.
To that end, each individual, business, and government agency is allocated a social credit score based on their behavior. The State Council calls it a “credit system that covers the whole of society.” When you follow the rules, obey Communist Party edicts, and behave like a “good citizen,” you are awarded points. If you break the rules or otherwise act like a “bad citizen,” you have points deducted. As Foreign Policy magazine reported in 2018, the ultimate goal for the Chinese government is to create a system that “allow[s] the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”1
The intent could not be clearer: Those ranked below a certain social credit score will form a literal underclass, forced to eke out a meager existence on the fringes of society. Sound familiar? Switch the word “trustworthy” for “vaccinated” and “discredited” for “unvaccinated,” and the similarities are striking.
While the intent behind China’s social credit system may be clear, the system’s evolution on the ground is a lot less so. China is so big and the reach of its government so sprawling that keeping track of developments is extremely difficult. And of course, criticizing government policy in China can land a person in serious trouble. What’s more, Western depictions of the system tend to be simplistic and overblown, as noted by The Diplomat, an international online news magazine covering geopolitical trends and developments in the Indo-Pacific region, in 2019:
Criticism of the system, particularly from Western observers, has largely come along two, seemingly contradictory lines: that the project is either too ambitious to succeed or, given the country’s successful clampdowns on dissent, too Orwellian to fail.2
A case in point is a France 24 report from May 2019 claiming that “Chinese citizens’ behavior is monitored and scrutinized—they are given scores and ranked according to rules set by the government.” The reality is that this level of social control was—and still is—only happening in select parts of the country, in particular the cities where pilot social credit schemes are taking place.3 And for the moment businesses are the main focus of attention. A MERICS study revealed that between 2003 and 2020, almost three quarters of mentions in official documents identified “companies” as the targets of social credit, compared to just 10 percent for individuals.4
The Chinese government wanted to have its social credit system up and running by the end of 2020, but that deadline has come and gone and the system is still far from complete. For the moment, it is still being piloted in approximately 30 cities around the country and the rollout across regions is extremely uneven. It is also still voluntary. The plan, set out in the “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014–2020),” is for it to eventually become mandatory and unified across the nation.5
The system is also heavily fragmented. Local governments chosen for the pilot schemes have developed their own social credit registers that coexist alongside private financial institutions’ unofficial private social credit systems that award or deduct people points based on their online behavior. The most important of these systems are Tencent Credit, operated by WeChat, tech giant Tencent’s messaging, social media, and mobile payment app, and Alipay’s Sesame, or Zhima, Credit. Alipay is owned by Ant Group, which itself is an affiliate of the Chinese technology behemoth Ali Baba. Both Ali Baba and WeChat have hundreds of millions of monthly users.
According to a report by Chinese internet search company Sohu, users of Tencent Credit must input their real names and Chinese ID numbers to reveal their scores, which range from 300 to 850. WeChat split the score into five subcategories: consumption behavior, social connections, security, wealth, and compliance.6
Alipay’s Sesame Credit system was first conceived by company executives in 2013 and launched two years later. As Mara Hvistendahl reported in her 2017 article for Wired magazine, “Inside China’s Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking,” the company’s scope of influence is almost unfathomable:
If you live in the United States, you are by now accustomed to relinquishing your data to corporations. Credit card companies know when you run up bar tabs or buy sex toys. Facebook knows if you like Tasty cooking videos or Breitbart News. Uber knows where you go and how you behave en route. But Alipay knows all of these things about its users and more. Owned by Ant Financial, an affiliate of the massive Alibaba corporation, Alipay is sometimes called a super app. Its main competitor, WeChat, belongs to the social and gaming giant Tencent. Alipay and WeChat are less like individual apps than entire ecosystems.7
Both Alipay and WeChat’s social credit systems track shopping habits as well as other data to inform credit-style scores. These private systems operate on an opt-in basis, and though they tend to get conflated with the government plans, they aren’t part of the official system. That said, the data collected by private companies is expected to be shared with the government in the future, and some of the data is already used in government trials. Sesame Credit says this occurs only with user consent.
We want people to be aware that their online behavior has an influence on their online credit score “so they know to behave themselves better,” the WSJ quoted Joe Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice chairman, as saying.8
What’s troubling is when these private systems are fused with the government rankings—which is already happening with some pilots. Mareike Ohlberg, research associate at the MERICS, told Wired magazine. “You’ll have a sort of memorandum of understanding like arrangements between the city and, say, Alibaba and Tencent about data exchanges and including that in assessments of citizens.”9
The Chinese government’s social credit system has been marketed as a modified version of an individual’s credit score. As Hvistendahl notes, over recent decades China grew at a breakneck speed to become the world’s second largest economy, yet it never developed much of a functioning credit system:
The People’s Bank of China, the country’s central banking regulator, maintains records on millions of consumers, but they often contain little or no information. Until recently, it was difficult to get a credit card with any bank other than your own. Consumers mainly used cash. As housing prices spiked, this became increasingly untenable. “Now you need two suitcases to buy a house, not just one,” says Zennon Kapron, who heads the financial tech consultancy Kapronasia. Still, efforts to establish a reliable credit system foundered because China lacked a third-party credit scoring entity.10
That was what the government’s social credit system was originally intended to be. In 2002, it was mentioned at the 16th Chinese Communist Party Congress as part of the Party’s effort to create a “unified, open, competitive and orderly modern market system.” The aim was to streamline the country’s business environment, cut bureaucratic red tape, and create a means of keeping tabs on the creditworthiness and ethical standards of the millions of companies, domestic and foreign, operating in the country. In 2007, credit, tax, and contract performance records were suggested as potential elements of one’s social credit status.
But as tends to happen with these sorts of projects, mission creep quickly set it. In 2014, Beijing published its so-called Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System. The plan set out how the system would function as a nationwide incentive mechanism, by gathering social credit information from every individual, organization, and enterprise to reward good behavior and punish bad.
“A social credit system is an important component part of the Socialist market economy system and the social governance system,” stated the document. “It is based on a complete network covering the credit records of members of society and credit infrastructure. It is supported by the lawful application of credit information and a credit services system.”11
The ultimate goal is to “[raise] the honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society.” To that end, all Chinese citizens would be rated in four main areas—administrative affairs, commercial activities, social behavior, and the law enforcement system. The core idea is that everyone gets a credit score and then earns or loses points depending on good or bad behavior. It’s similar to a financial credit score but China’s social credit system would broaden the concept to almost every facet of life.
“Good credit is turning into an asset,” says Gang Zeng, the deputy director of the National Institute for Finance and Development, one of China’s most influential think tanks. “For people with a good credit history, that asset will bring advantages, especially financially. If everybody cares about their good credit history it leads to an honest society.”12
In some of the cities where the system is being piloted, such as Rongcheng in Shandong Province, each resident is given 1,000 points. Based on credit records and credit scores, evaluations are split into four categories: A, B, C, and D. If you accumulate 1,050 points, you are considered a triple-A model citizen (AAA). This confers benefits, such as access to lower interest on loans or discounts on travel. Between 1,030 and 1,049 points makes you a double-A citizen. If your score falls below 900, you’re classed as a B.
A bad rating can make life a lot more difficult. Those qualified as a “C” (below 850) or a “D” (below 650) may struggle to book a business class seat on a plane, take out a loan, or send their child to a private school. Actions that can hurt one’s credit rating include jaywalking, littering, speeding, falling behind on your debts, or cheating in exams or online games. Actions that can boost your credit rating include eating healthy food, athletic achievements, reporting other people for bad behavior, or donating bone marrow.13
So far, the localized social credit systems already in place have drawn little criticism from within China itself. One reason for this is that the system is still far from complete, meaning that many people are still not directly affected by it. Even in cities where the pilot schemes have taken place, participation is still voluntary. Many residents refuse to sign up because there are no meaningful benefits for doing so, says Dai Xin, an associate professor of legal theory at Peking University Law School.14
Many Chinese citizens also feel that the social credit system’s ostensible end—encouraging more trustworthy social behavior by individuals and businesses—justifies the means. There is, after all, a significant trust deficit in many areas of Chinese business and society. In 2018, a 32-year-old entrepreneur, who gave his name only as Chen, told Foreign Policy magazine he felt that “people’s behaviour ha[d] gotten better and better” since the launch of the pilot scheme. “For example, when we drive now, we always stop in front of crosswalks. If you don’t stop, you will lose your points. At first, we just worried about losing points, but now we are accustomed to it.”15
A 2019 study by Genia Kostka, a professor of Chinese politics at the Freie Universität Berlin, published by SAGE Journals suggests that the extent to which Chinese citizens’ approve of the social credit systems may depend on their social position and status:
Based on a cross-regional survey, the study finds a surprisingly high degree of approval of SCSs across respondent groups. Interestingly, more socially advantaged citizens (wealthier, better-educated, and urban residents) show the strongest approval of SCSs, along with older people. While one might expect such knowledgeable citizens to be most concerned about the privacy implications of SCS, they instead appear to embrace SCSs because they interpret it through frames of benefit-generation and promoting honest dealings in society and the economy instead of privacy-violation.16
The seeming broad public acceptance of social credit schemes in China might also reflect the severity of punishment that can follow speaking out against the government. There is also a cultural dimension at work. The Chinese have a very different notion of privacy from their Western counterparts. In traditional Confucian philosophy, morality trumps respect for individual rights as the guiding principle for interpersonal relationships and the government of a society, notes Eunsun Cho in her paper, “The Social Credit System: Not Just Another Chinese Idiosyncrasy,” published in Princeton’s Journal for International and Public Affairs. It also helps that Chinese people are already accustomed to surveillance:
Since the Mao era, the Chinese government has kept dang’an, a secret dossier, on millions of its urban residents that maintains influence in the public sector to this day (Jacobs 2015; Yang 2011). The information included in the dossier ranges from one’s educational and work performance, family background, and records of self-criticism to mental health conditions, but individuals do not have access to their dang’an (Ibid.). When a completely opaque system like dang’an has been in place for decades, an intrusive program like the SCS may feel less objectionable to the Chinese public.
Big data surveillance is already in place across the country. In Xinjiang, an autonomous region in western China home to Uighur Muslim minority, the government is collecting a vast array of citizens’ information—including but not limited to DNA samples, iris scans, voice samples, applications installed on phones, and records of power consumption—in order to search for “suspected criminals.”17
The term “social credit system” is a misnomer, says the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a South Korean nonprofit think tank: “This has nothing to do with credit; it has everything to do with control. Marrying algorithms to big data, the Chinese government seeks to inculcate a higher standard of morality and tighten its control over the people.”18
But the system is “incredibly messy,” according to Vincent Brussee, an associate analyst at MERICS. There are literally thousands of government documents that mention credit or social credit. Instead of functioning as one giant centralized system, as Western media often portray it, China’s social credit system is “more of a loose-hanging policy framework for social credit systems,” says Brusee. For example, different cities, ministries, and departments all have their own interpretation of what it means to be trustworthy or untrustworthy.19
But the system is only one part of China’s huge surveillance and enforcement apparatus. There are also the blacklists that predate the social credit system, which the government uses to block financial transgressors from accessing basic services, such as public transport. The lists are publicly searchable on a government website called Credit China.
In April 2018, the government-affiliated news website Global Times reported that more than 11 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed train trips had been blocked for so-called “discredited people.”20 A year later, Forbes reported that as many as 23 million people had been banned from travel. Grounds for inclusion on Beijing’s no-fly or no-train lists include failure to pay fines on time or taxes when told to as well as engaging in financial fraud or false advertising.21
Talking about the wrong sorts of things can also land you in trouble. Liu Hu, a journalist in China who covers censorship and government corruption, found himself on a List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People’s Court. As a result, he was disqualified from buying a plane ticket and banned from traveling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan.
“There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to,” Liu Hu told The Globe and Mail. “What’s really scary is there’s nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere.”22
Local governments also use public shaming to punish transgressors. In its trial of the social credit system the local government of Suzhou, Anhui province, went so far as to publish on its WeChat account photos of local residents walking around the city in their pajamas. The officials said the people were made an example of as part of a drive to “expose uncivilized behaviors and improve citizens’ quality.” The images posted on WeChat were caught by surveillance cameras and included private data, such as the person’s name and ID card number.23
This points to another key instrument of social control in China: the government’s vast, AI-powered surveillance system. China has more surveillance cameras per person than any other country on the planet—no small feat for a country of 1.44 billion people. Of the 770 million surveillance cameras in use globally in 2018, 54 percent of them were in China, according to IHS Markit’s 2019 report on the sector. China is also home to 16 of the top 20 most surveilled cities on the planet (based on the number of cameras per 1,000 people), says consumer website Comparitech. London, by the way, is the third most surveilled city on the planet.24
China also boasts the world’s biggest manufacturer of surveillance cameras, Hikvision, whose facilities can crank out 260,000 cameras per day. According to a 2021 article in The Atlantic called “China Is Watching You,” that’s the equivalent of “two for every three people born each day.” In 2019, the company manufactured almost a quarter of the world’s surveillance cameras.25
China may be leading the way when it comes to keeping digital tabs on its citizens as well as manufacturing the tools to do so, but it is by no means an outlier. By the end of 2021, it is estimated that over one billion surveillance cameras will have been installed in the world.26 With the exception of Taiyuan and Wuxi, both in China, London is home to more surveillance cameras per capita than any other city on the planet.27 According to IHS, the United States had almost as many surveillance and security cameras as China in 2018, with one for roughly every 4.6 people (compared to China’s 1 for every 4.1). The UK was not far behind with one for every 6.5.
“During the past few years, coverage of the surveillance market has focused heavily on China’s massive deployments of cameras and artificial intelligence (AI) technology,” said IHS Markit analyst Oliver Philippou. “What’s received far less attention is the high level of penetration of surveillance cameras in the United States. With the United States nearly on par with China in terms of camera penetration, future debate over mass surveillance is likely to concern America as much as China.”28
The United Kingdom and the United States are also investing heavily in facial recognition technologies. Both countries have been trialing live facial recognition (LFR) surveillance in public places for a number of years. Police and security forces in the two countries are also making use of retrospective facial recognition (RFR), which is even more controversial than LFR. While LFR compares live images with those on a specific watch list, RFR enables police to check against a far broader collection of sources, including CCTV feeds and social media.
“Those deploying it can in effect turn back the clock to see who you are, where you’ve been, what you have done and with whom, over many months or even years,” Ella Jakubowska, policy advisor at European Digital Rights, an advocacy group, told Wired magazine, adding that the technology can “suppress people’s free expression, assembly and ability to live without fear.”29
In the European Union a tug of war has broken out between privacy advocates and security forces over proposed legislation for the use of remote biometric identification, such as facial recognition, in public. Proponents of the technology, including law enforcement agencies, argue that it is needed to catch criminals. But privacy activists and some European lawmakers have called for an outright ban. They include Wojciech Wiewiórowski, who leads the EU’s in-house data protection authority, EDPS, which is supposed to ensure the EU’s own agencies are complying with the Continent’s strict privacy rules.
Wiewiórowski warns that use of the technology would “turn society, turn our citizens, turn the places we live, into places where we are permanently recognizable. I’m not sure if we are really as a society ready for that.”30
In early December, the civil liberties group Statewatch reported that the Council of the EU, where the senior ministers of the 27 Member States sit, not only intends to extend the purposes for which biometric systems can be used under the EU’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act but is also seeking to allow private actors to operate mass biometric surveillance systems on behalf of police forces.31
Moves like this, which accelerate the drift of ostensibly democratic societies and nations toward technocratic authoritarianism, are often presented by the political, business, and financial elite as unavoidable. The technology already exists and is broadly beneficial, at least to those in power, while also opening up yet another rich vein of opportunities for tech giants, so why not use it?
A perfect example of this way of thinking is the book The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, written by Henry Kissinger, for whom no introduction is needed; Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google who has forged close ties to the United States’ military and security industrial complexes; and Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing, an AI-focused mega-lab that is partly funded by foreclosure profiteer Stephen Schwarzman, the cofounder of the investment group Blackstone. As Meredith Whittaker and Lucy Suchman note in their article, “The Myth of Artificial Intelligence,” published in The American Prospect, the book serves “Big Tech’s agenda through three rhetorical strategies”:
First, they position Big Tech’s AI and computing power as critical national infrastructure, across research and development environments, and military and government operations. Second, they propose “solutions” that serve to vastly enrich tech companies, helping them to meet their profit and growth projections, while also funding AI-focused research programs at top-tier universities. This serves to bring Big Tech and academia closer together, further merging their interests and deterring meaningful dissent by a new wave of researchers critical of Silicon Valley. Third, and most importantly, by providing arguments against curbing the power of Big Tech companies, the book frames these companies as too important to the American national interest to regulate or to break up.32
Western governments are also beginning to embrace social credit systems, albeit on a small scale—for now—and by instituting reward schemes rather than punitive measures. In October, the UK government announced it was launching a pilot scheme called HeadUp to encourage people to wear wrist-worn devices that can generate personalized health recommendations, such as increasing their step count, eating more fruits and vegetables, and decreasing portion size. The government says that “healthy behaviours … will unlock rewards, which could include gym passes, clothes or food vouchers and discounts for shops, cinema or theme park tickets”:
Evidence suggests that financial incentives can improve rates of physical activity and inspire healthier eating so HeadUp will work with a range of organisations to provide rewards such as vouchers, merchandise, discounts and gift cards.
The government is committed to helping people lead healthier, happier lives by making it easier for people to make healthy choices.33
A similar app was launched in Canada back in 2016, called Carrot Rewards, which awarded users points in return for completing questionnaires and following steps for healthy living. The app was rolled out in in three Canadian provinces (British Colombia, Newfoundland, and Labrador) and one territory (Northwest Territories) before the app designer ran out of funds in 2019. But that was not the end of the Carrot Rewards system. In January 2020, the London-based health app-developer Optimity bought Carrot Rewards and relaunched the health app under a new model.34
The Carrot Rewards system reveals an interesting feature of the social credit systems being developed and rolled out in both the West and China: Most of them are run by private businesses, not government. While these sorts of systems are pretty harmless on their own, at least in their current form, it is ironic that governments such as the UK are considering making healthy eating part of a social credit–based scheme while public health officials in the country—as well as many others—have systematically ignored the role healthy eating, exercising, taking supplements, and other preventive measures could play in reducing the risk of COVID-19.
In 2019, the business magazine Fast Company ran an article titled “Uh Oh: Silicon Valley Is Building a Chinese-style Social Credit System.” In it, journalist Mike Elgan explained how a change in US law had allowed life insurance companies to use the sort of behavior displayed in their customers’ social media posts to inform the premiums they charge them. “The insurance companies have to demonstrate that social media evidence points to risk, and not be based on discrimination of any kind—they can’t use social posts to alter premiums based on race or disability, for example.”
In this context, it is interesting that Airbnb can ban customers for life for any reason it chooses, and without the right of appeal. A message on the company’s website notes it is not obligated to divulge why action is taken against an account. Airbnb has awarded itself broad latitude to ban users indefinitely if they have convictions the company deems “serious” without explaining what it means by “serious.” In September 2020 a coalition of activist groups including ACLU sent a letter to the San Francisco–based company complaining that its use of arrest and conviction records to screen prospective users perpetuates the racism prevalent in the criminal legal system and demanding that the company reverse course.
“As many as 100 million adults in the United States—or nearly a third of the total population—have a conviction record of some sort,” said Marlon Peterson, Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity. “I know from personal experience that while many of these convictions occurred years ago, Airbnb has decided to perpetually punish those with a conviction record long after they have paid their debt to society.”35
Uber has a similar policy allowing it to ban drivers from using the service if their rating falls significantly below average. Messaging apps like Whatsapp are also banning or terminating users if they send spam or threatening messages or if they have been blocked by other users. In October 2021 the company, owned by Facebook (now called Meta), banned two million users in India alone.36
As Elgan warns, the most disturbing attribute of any social credit system, whether run by a government or a private-sector company, is not its invasiveness but the fact that it’s extralegal:
Crimes are punished outside the legal system, which means no presumption of innocence, no legal representation, no judge, no jury, and often no appeal. In other words, it’s an alternative legal system where the accused have fewer rights.
Social credit systems are an end-run around the pesky complications of the legal system. Unlike China’s government policy, the social credit system emerging in the US is enforced by private companies. If the public objects to how these laws are enforced, it can’t elect new rule-makers.
An increasing number of societal “privileges” related to transportation, accommodations, communications, and the rates we pay for services (like insurance) are either controlled by technology companies or affected by how we use technology services. And Silicon Valley’s rules for being allowed to use their services are getting stricter.
If current trends hold, it’s possible that in the future a majority of misdemeanors and even some felonies will be punished not by Washington, D.C., but by Silicon Valley. It’s a slippery slope away from democracy and toward corporatocracy.
In other words, in the future, law enforcement may be determined less by the Constitution and legal code, and more by end-user license agreements.37
Wall Street banks could soon be getting in on the act as well. In 2020, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) featured research on its website suggesting that lenders are considering using data from borrowers’ internet browsing, search, and shopping history to create a more accurate credit score:
The use of non-financial data will have large effects on the provision of financial services. Traditionally, banks rely on the analysis of customer financial information from payment flows and accounting records. The rise of the internet permits the use of new types of non-financial customer data, such as browsing histories and online shopping behavior of individuals, or customer ratings for online vendors.
The literature suggests that such non-financial data are valuable for financial decision making. Berg et al. (2019) show that easy-to-collect information such as the so-called “digital footprint” (email provider, mobile carrier, operating system, etc.) performs as well as traditional credit scores in assessing borrower risk. Moreover, there are complementarities between financial and non-financial data: combining credit scores and digital footprint further improves loan default predictions. Accordingly, the incorporation of non-financial data can lead to significant efficiency gains in financial intermediation.38
In other words, our internet habits could soon have a bearing on whether or not banks will lend to us, how much they will be willing to lend and at what interest rate.
We have also seen how Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Twitter have become the arbitrators of truth in recent years, largely at the insistence of government. This has led to a bizarre situation in which fact-checkers, programmers, and AI algorithms remove content provided by scientific experts in fields such as virology, epidemiology, medicine, or pharmacology if the content in question does not chime with the prevailing official narrative.
In December 2021, the disinformation war took an even darker turn when Twitter quietly updated its “COVID-19 misleading information policy” to impose new sanctions on tweets claiming, among other things, that people who are fully vaccinated can “spread or shed the virus” to others. This means Twitter users could now be sanctioned for sharing or discussing a scientific fact that has been proven by countless studies and is even admitted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The change in policy produced a fierce backlash from users and on December 14, Twitter announced its use of the word “virus” had been no more than a typo. What it had apparently intended to say was that it would sanction claims that the fully vaccinated can (emphasis my own) “spread or shed the vaccine” to others.39
We have already seen social media companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, ban users for creating or sharing the “wrong” sort of content. If this practice begins to proliferate as much as it has in India and users’ social media activity becomes tied to a digital ID or social credit score, posting or sharing contentious information on a controversial topic, such as, say, vaccines, might not only lead to censorship and banning, but could also have a negative impact on a person’s social status and their ability to access certain services. In other words, we can bid farewell to free speech.
Since Elgan’s article was published in August 2019, the situation has deteriorated beyond all recognition. COVID-19 arrived in early 2020 and has not departed, despite the rollout of the vaccines. Many of the world’s so-called liberal democracies have taken advantage of the crisis it has triggered to bulldoze into law batteries of repressive measures, many of them enabled by digital technologies. Those technologies, including vaccine passports and other forms of digital identity, have provided states with unprecedented mass surveillance and control powers.
Few countries have traveled quite so far down this road as Australia, which has imposed one of the longest lockdowns on the planet. It is also forcibly confining individuals—many of them perfectly healthy—to “quarantine camps.” In December 2021, the state of Victoria, home to Australia’s second largest city, Melbourne, passed new pandemic laws that grant the state’s premier, Daniel Andrews, the power to declare a pandemic for an unlimited period of time. The new bill, designed to replace sweeping state of emergency powers, also gives the health minister the authority to issue “any order” he deems necessary, including lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
Victorian Bar President Christopher Blanden QC described the proposed laws as “extreme,” adding for emphasis that the Stasi, the secret police in communist East Germany, would be more than happy with such a “breathtaking” range of powers. Blanden also said the bill did not contain sufficient checks and balances, gave the premier too much power with scant parliamentary scrutiny, and allowed for indefinite detention of people who breach the restrictions.40
In England and Wales, a new police bill is awaiting passage (as of this writing) that will effectively enshrine lockdown-like restrictions on the right to protest. The new bill contains myriad restrictions on demonstrations as well as new surveillance and stop-and-search powers, notes Jun Pang, policy and campaigns officer at Liberty, a UK-based human rights advocacy group:
The right through which we won many of the things we take for granted today—from voting rights to marriage equality—which allows all of us to stand up against injustice. Now we know the government is taking a sledgehammer to this right, smashing everyone’s ability to stand up to power …
[The new bill will also create] new Serious Disruption Prevention Orders, or protest-banning orders, which can be imposed on people if they have previously been convicted of what the amendment calls a ‘protest-related offence’—or even if they have just been to two protests in the past five years in which they carried out activities that could have caused serious disruption. The government just this week proposed an expansive, catch-all definition of serious disruption, which can also be redefined in the future by the home secretary of the day.
Protest-banning orders can require people to keep police up to date on their current residence and can include restrictions on who people can meet, where they go and when, and their use of the internet. Breach of these conditions could lead to a 51-week jail sentence, an unlimited fine or both.41
In the United States multiple cities, from New York to Los Angeles, have rolled out vaccine passports. In November, the House of Representatives passed a bill, with the support of 80 Republicans, to set up a federal vaccination database. If the Senate also passes the bill, the federal government will spend $400 million on an “immunization system data modernization and expansion,” a system it describes as “a confidential, population-based, computerized database that records immunization doses administered by any health care provider to persons within the geographic area covered by that database.”42 This could end up being the tracking system to which a digital vaccine passport is tied.
But it is Europe that is truly leading the way, where almost all nations have embraced unprecedented tech-enabled control and segregation of society.
Even the Chinese Communist Party must be impressed. Since the early days of the pandemic, Beijing has been calling for a global COVID-19 tracking system using QR codes, to help reopen international travel and business. Speaking at the virtual G20 last year President Xi said that countries needed to coordinate a uniform set of policies and standards to ensure the “smooth functioning” of the world economy during and post pandemic:
China has proposed a global mechanism on the mutual recognition of health certificates based on nucleic acid test results in the form of internationally accepted QR codes. We hope more countries will join this mechanism.43
Like the Chinese with the social credit system, most Europeans have so far accepted the imposition of vaccine passports. According to a survey by the British polling company YouGov (which, it is worth noting, was cofounded and is still partly owned by the UK’s former vaccine minister, Nadhim Zahawi), a majority of people in the UK (64 percent), Spain (64 percent), Italy (62 percent), Sweden (62 percent), Germany (59 percent), and France (57 percent) support the use of vaccine passports for large public events. Fifty-eight percent of Italians, 54 percent of Germans, 51 percent of Spaniards and 50 percent of French people support using them to control access to restaurants.44
None of this should come as much of a surprise. When people are sufficiently frightened and confused, they can be easily controlled. As British writer Paul Kingsnorth notes in “How Fear Fuels the Vaccine Wars,” of all the stories we are watching play out right now, this is the biggest one: “the manipulation of public fear to impose unprecedented levels of control on populations”:
The ongoing nature of the COVID threat—the endless boosters, the endless variants—means there is no end in sight to this “new normal.” Like the War on Terror before it, the control and monitoring of citizens in the name of “public health,” the segregation of the virtuous vaxxed (or, any day now, boosted) from the antisocial unvaxxed, the internet-wide censorship of whatever Silicon Valley labels “disinformation,” and the widespread obedience of the once-mainstream press to an agreed story towards which they clumsily try to nudge their readers—none of this has any sell-by date.45
That the vaccine passports are issued for vaccines that do not confer immunity or prevent transmission does not seem to matter. By late November 2021—five months after Brussels’s introduction of the Green Pass—Europe was once again the epicenter of global COVID-19 infections. By the end of the year many of the countries in Europe with the highest caseloads on a per capita basis, such as Ireland, Gibraltar, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Iceland, also had the highest vaccination rates. Indeed, since Rome banned unvaccinated Italians from working, cases have done nothing but rise. In France, one of the first countries to ban people without vaccine passports from accessing hospitality venues, case numbers began rising exponentially in mid-October and by January 2022 were almost four times higher than at the previous peak, in November 2020.
All of these trends represent a damning indictment of a deeply flawed policy. Indeed, it could even be argued that the launch of the Green Pass, and all the national iterations it has spawned, has led to more coronavirus infections, not fewer. According to Belgian microbiologist Emmanuel André, when Belgium’s COVID Safe Ticket (CST) was introduced, not only did it lead to a negligible increase in vaccine uptake, but public events that required a CST were allowed to drop the face mask and social distancing measures:
Therefore, the CST led to the opposite of what was expected, also because other measures were phased out when it was introduced … Masks, alongside the vaccine and good ventilation, remain one of the most important ways of protecting against the virus.46
In any sane, rational world, the failure of Europe’s Green Pass system to contain the virus would have been enough to force a dramatic policy rethink. But instead, the continent’s policymakers have doubled down on their failed strategy. When Austria began registering more daily COVID cases than at any time since the pandemic, the government responded by imposing the world’s first ever “lockdown of the unvaccinated.” It lasted for five days before the government extended the lockdown to everybody. But the precedent had been set. Two weeks later, Germany followed suit, banning unvaccinated people from all but the most essential businesses.
Austria has even unveiled plans to mandate vaccines for every resident in the country over the age of 14, becoming the first so-called democratic nation to take such a step. Under the proposed bill, anyone above that age (including teenagers) who refuses to get the COVID-19 jab after February 2022, when vaccination becomes mandatory, will face a fine of up to €3,600.47 Germany is considering a similar measure.48 In Greece, which already has some of the highest poverty rates in Europe, authorities will start fining people over the age of 60 who are not vaccinated €100 for every month they remain unvaccinated after January 15.
Most ominous of all, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called for a debate on EU-wide mandatory vaccination. The proposal is plagued with problems, not least of which is the fact that the vaccine does not prevent transmission or infection, or that vaccine manufacturers are exempt from liability.49 But there’s an even more contentious issue: the lack of transparency around the agreements between the European Commission and vaccine manufacturers. Five Members of the European Parliment (MEPs) from the Greens/EFA Group have even submitted a case application to the European Court of Justice alleging “implicit refusal” from the Commission to provide access to information regarding the vaccine contracts.
“For nine months the Commission has refused to disclose them, but after being heavily criticised for the opacity of its vaccine policy, they have published heavily redacted contracts,” which is “clearly insufficient,” said Kim van Sparrentak, a Dutch MEP.50
In April, the New York Times reported that von der Leyen had exchanged calls and texts with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. (It is also worth noting that as of December 2020 von der Leyen’s husband, Heiko von der Leyen, has been working as Medical Director of the US biotech company Orgenesis, which specializes in cell and gene therapies, including vaccines.51) Yet when MEPs requested to access the content of von der Leyen’s messages with Bourla, the Commission said it had no record of them. Text messages, the Commission contends, are generally “short-lived” and in principle excluded from its record-keeping.
The Commission refuses to confirm whether the correspondence has been deleted, whether they still exist, or whether the Commission just doesn’t know. This is not the first time that von der Leyen has found herself in trouble over deleted text messages, reports Der Spiegel:
In late 2019, it emerged that text messages had been deleted from two of the official mobile phones she used during her time as Germany’s defense minister, leading to a criminal complaint against von der Leyen and trouble with an investigative committee in the German parliament that had requested the text messages as evidence.52
So, to recap, the European Commission president has called for a debate on making COVID-19 vaccination mandatory across Europe despite the fact the vaccines do little to prevent transmission or infection of COVID-19. Additionally, most European lawmakers have no access to the contracts the Commission signed with vaccine makers in March 2021. The Commission president herself, who may have conflicts of interest, appears to have destroyed communications she has had with the CEO of the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer. All while the EU leads the way in forcing digital IDs onto its almost 450 million citizens.
Romanian MEP Cristian Terheş describes it like this:
Clearly what we are witnessing right now is the Chinafication of Europe. What is happening in China with social credit scores … we are seeing the same … being implemented right now … in the European Union. The Green Certificate was just the first step. There are more proposals under debate in the parliament. The European Wallet ID, the European Social Security Card—all these things that are creating a system that will monitor, control, supervise, and condition the rights of all European citizens.53
But even in Europe, not everyone is on board, despite the increasingly authoritarian measures being implemented by both the European Commission and national governments. As von der Leyen herself admitted, roughly one third of all Europeans, including most children under the age of eleven, were still unvaccinated as of late November. This is despite the huge pressure governments are exerting on citizens to toe the line.
And as I will show in chapter 8, despite monumental efforts to parlay the COVID-19 pandemic to cement power and control over the world’s citizens, resistance is rising around the world.