Your score dropped while you were reading this. China's social credit system has barred "untrustworthy" citizens from traveling with industrial efficiency: Chinese courts blocked flight ticket purchases 17.5 million times and train ticket purchases 5.5 million times. That's not a typo. Seventeen and a half million times, someone walked up to a counter and learned their citizenship had been downgraded.
The offenses read like a terms-of-service agreement written by a disappointed parent: unpaid fines, unpaid taxes, and — the crowd favorite — spreading "false information." The quotation marks are doing all the heavy lifting, because somebody has to decide what counts as false, and that somebody is the same government grading the test.
The official slogan, and we are not making this up, is: "once untrustworthy, always restricted." It has the cadence of a fortune cookie and the mercy of a collections agency. Somewhere there is a committee that approved that line, and that committee presumably has excellent social credit.
Here's the part that stops being funny for a second: in America, your credit score can ruin your mortgage. In China, your citizen score can ruin your Tuesday. The system doesn't just punish — it administrates, quietly, at the point of sale, with no hearing and no appeal. The punishment isn't a knock on the door. It's a declined transaction.
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That's the engine of the joke. The post isn't really about airplanes. It's about a bureaucracy so thorough it turned morality into paperwork — 5.5 million train tickets' worth of paperwork. The satire barely has to invent anything. The receipts did the heavy lifting; we just added the red stamp.
Send this to someone with a perfect credit score. Tell them it doesn't count. In at least one country, it really doesn't.
See the original post on Instagram. More from this story is filed in the Evidence Locker.
