Morality as performance: Studying the rise of performance measurement in citizen governance through the case of Chinese Social Credit System

In this paper, relying on a qualitative study of the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS), we explore how performance measurement is being mobilized to enact a moral regime to guide citizens’ behavior. Basing our analysis on governmentality studies in general but also studies of governmentality regimes in post-reform China, we conceptualize the techniques of government mobilized in SCS to normalize traditional civic value of trust (Chengxin) amalgamated with market value of creditworthiness. We discuss how under SCS, three visual regimes are at work, the Panoptic, the Synoptic and what we term the Alloptic. The first, the Panoptic gaze involves algorithmic and diffuse surveillance of citizens’ behavior backed by a regime of reward and punishment, the second, the Synoptic gaze (Mathiesen, 2004) is about making the stories and images of model citizens pervasively visible to all, and the third, what we term the ‘Alloptic’ gaze others the “untrustworthy” citizens under the shaming gaze of the mobile, unknown community shadowing them in their physical movements and online. We discuss how use of AI and Big Data enables such a coming together of the three gazes in a dynamic and highly uncertain nexus of visibility wherein the contours of the regime, and the purveyor of the shaming gaze are changing and unknown. We discuss the implications of our study for analysis of governance in other settings – especially considering the rise of authoritarianism in conjunction with new technologies or what has been termed “techno-fascism” particularly in the US, but also throughout the world.