China’s social credit system and the family: Punishment and collective resistance

China’s social credit system (SCS) is a recently launched, nationwide, all-encompassing, digitally integrated programme, merging modern technology with legal individualism and elements of China’s socialist heritage. The SCS compiles vast amounts of personal data into large platforms that occasionally exhibit internal conflicts. It identifies individuals who breach trust, locally derided as ‘laolai’, and automates the process of blacklisting them and determining their punishments. From the theoretical perspective of liminality, which views the liminal individual as ‘interstructural’–existing ‘betwixt and between’ colliding social systems–this paper explores how the modern SCS juxtaposes with traditional, deeply respected Chinese familial systems and customs. This qualitative exploratory research reveals that SCS punishments may trigger unanticipated micro-circumstances for those blacklisted and their families. Instead of the individual trust-breakers receiving the punishment, certain family members–such as innocent wives, sons and daughters–are placed on the SCS blacklists as a result of collective decisions within the family structure. Further, the family as an economic unit develops a mesh of mutual strategies to circumvent the digital SCS restrictions.