How to Make the Perfect Citizen? The Instrumentalisation of Civic Virtue in China’s Social Credit System

COVID-19 has triggered a new wave of digitalisation of people’s lives, motivating experiments with systems that surveil citizens as an integral part of society. One development is the increasing use of emerging technologies to assign “social credit” to individuals to classify them as healthy or unhealthy, safe or dangerous, trustworthy or treacherous. The lecture shows how social credit systems are mushrooming in China and the West and accelerate the development of cybernetic citizenship. Will the rise of social credit systems lead to a digital utopia or dystopia?

Please note that this event takes place in English only with no translation.

The event is part of the WZB Talks series.

Liav Orgad is head of the project group “International Citizenship Law” at WZB Berlin as well as director and part-time professor, “Global Citizenship Governance”, at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute (EUI).

Wessel Reijers is visiting researcher at the the “International Citizenship Law” research group at the WZB Berlin.