Automated Law Enforcement: An Assessment of China's Social Credit System (SCS) Using Interview Evidence from Shanghai

This paper provides a fieldwork-based research account of China’s Social Credit Systems (SCS), focusing on automated law enforcement. It draws evidence from interviews with Shanghai-based government officials, judges, and corporate employees in April 2021. The paper examines the use of blacklists and joint sanctions within the SCS framework, revealing their detailed workings and perceived impacts. Automation is observed to have achieved efficient scaling but also have negative consequences, including the rigidity of code and counter-productive incentives, resulting in ‘institutional overload’. Proposing an original institutional theory of computational law which identifies the role of governance in ‘scaling and layering’, the paper argues that automated enforcement can only achieve scale effects if human judgement is combined with automation. In this process, governance operates in a layered manner, scaling up from social norms to laws, to numbers/data, and to code, sustained by human work and societal feedback.

Dr. Zhenbin Zuo is Lecturer in Law at Essex Law School, and Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, Centre for Business Research. He also started a Jones Day Fellowship at Peking University since August 2024. His research focuses on the theory and practice of automating legal processes, and the governance of data and algorithms/AI (China, Europe and the US). His key fields of interests include computational law, AI governance and regulation, law and economics, and Chinese law and society. His recent publications include Automated Law Enforcement (2024), and China’s Data Strategies (2023). He held visiting fellowships at Harvard Law School and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg). He has previously worked with the European Court of Human Rights (Strasbourg), and the antitrust team of Clifford Chance (Beijing).

Moderator: Taorui Guan, Assistant Professor & Deputy Director of Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law