Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax are awful entities that I never consented to share my personal financial data with. But one wrong doesn’t justify another. Personally I think a score by private data brokers to judge creditworthiness is less harm than a score by your government to judge social worthiness but both are harm.

The idea of a social worthiness score doesn’t exist in China, though. They have a system largely for penalizing corporations and businesses that are caught skirting regulations, and a limited system for catching those who commit tax fraud and other crimes.

They have a system largely for penalizing corporations and businesses that are caught skirting regulations The core mechanism is the court “judgment defaulter” blacklist (失信被执行人) and related high-consumption restrictions (限制高消费), which are imposed when someone refuses to comply with a legally effective court judgment, such as paying a debt or damages ordered by the court. The penalty mainly restricts luxury or non-essential spending (flights, first-class train seats, luxury hotels, tourism, etc.) until the judgment is fulfilled. In law it applies to any individual or company, and if a company is the debtor the restrictions can extend to its legal representative or responsible managers on top of any accounts registered to the company. In practice 99.99% of cases involve businesses because most court enforcement actions arise from commercial disputes (contracts, loans, wages, suppliers, etc.), so the mechanism ends up being an enforcement mechanism against business owners and managers to push them to settle judgments properly, but legally it’s just a court enforcement tool against anyone who refuses to comply with a court ruling.