How China’s Social Credit Score is playing out in Fuzhou and Xiamen. So far, all carrots no sticks.

In 2018 Xiamen and Fuzhou, two cities in Fujian province, a region on the coast in the southeast most famous for its historic trader links and global diaspora population, became one of just a handful of cities in China with their own city-level personal credit scores (个人信用评分). These are algorithmically created scores, using data gathered by the local government to assess citizens’ level of “promise keeping” (守信), that can be used at places like hospitals and tourist sites, or when paying school tuition fees and borrowing books. However, a look under the hood reveals a reality far from any utopian or dystopian picture.

A Case Study on Social Credit Scores in Xiamen and Fuzhou


Goals

After coming from asking my young downstairs neighbour to not play her boom boom music so loud in her bedroom after 10pm*, I just procrastinated for 30 minutes trying to write a sentence in Chinese.

I’m looking for a new Chinese tutor and a good teacher always asks what your goals are. In the past I would reply by saying I would like to speak like a native speaker or sound just like you. I liked impossible goals. Now I simply state that I hope it will slow down or reverse cognitive decline. Perhaps, also an impossible goal.

Cognitive decline could be either 認知能力的衰退過程 or 認知力下降. I’m not sure which is best and my learn Chinese network is all asleep.

* I think I need to take Kirstin Lunds Conflict Resolution course because my well established methods don’t work here.


At the outset, your primary goal for reading is to improve your speaking

Why is it so important that you begin to read more extensively? Adult learners of a foreign language don’t have the luxury of learning to speak the way babies do. To a great extent, we must absorb a foreign language via written texts. The linguist Ferdinand Saussure tells us that written language is merely the external representation of speech; the spoken language is the basis of the written language. Thus, for a student of a foreign language, who usually doesn’t have as much verbal linguistic input as a baby has, reading is a way of getting familiar with the nuts and bolts of the language, a shortcut to developing an intuitive “feeling for the language” (Sprachgefühl in German, or, in Chinese, yǔgǎn 语感). And this path is what has, up to now, been very difficult for Chinese learners.

David Moser making the case for reading as a means to improve your spoken language. In the past, beginning to read Chinese was an arduous process but with the abundance of digital tools now available it’s far less time consuming for the adult learner. From The new paperless revolution in Chinese reading.

Steve Kaufmann also shares similar views in a couple of videos: How I went about learning Mandarin & 学语言的7个原则


We often tend to see children as the best and fastest language learners, and attribute their success to a brain plasticity and flexibility that we adults no longer possess. One might quibble with the definition of “brain plasticity”, but a key factor in the learning process is often omitted: the way they acquire a foreign language is different from ours.

Children hear whole sentences. They don’t start with syllables. They simply hear chunks of a language and then identify the single components by themselves. As adults, we tend to think that we can figure out the structure of a language by analysing every single aspect of it, and we lose sight of the general, broader picture. As adults, we still have the capacity to hear, but we have partially lost our capacity to listen. A Polyglot Dream