Welcome to this course "Law, Governance and Human
Rights in Today’s China".
The
course is taught by Dr. QIAO Cong-rui and Prof. Tom ZWART from the Cross
Cultural Human Rights Centre at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, through the 2021
Honours Programme for VU, UvA and AUC students.
Enjoy!
In Lecture 8, we start with the general context where digitalisation
offers opportunities for State governance to be efficient and smart, and at the
same time, poses challenges to the protection of personal privacy. The theme of
protecting personal date in the context of smart governance is particularly
topical in China during its implementation of the Social Credit System
(hereafter, the “SCS”) in China. A variety of implementation measures have been
high-profile in the news and academic debates.
In
specific, we will first discuss “what
is credit?” and “what is the SCS about?” We seek to make sense of the essence
and scope of the recently promoted data-driven governance combined with a
careful reading of the SCS Outline policy and its exemplary implementations.
Second,
how did the deterrence and sanction mechanism of publicising personal data come
to being? What are the common procedures for Chinese citizens to seek a remedy
for the allegedly undue processing of their personal data?
Third,
what could go wrong with the SCS and what kind of lessons can be learned from the
regulatory regimes in Europe and beyond?