Chinese Dictatorship.. Is India Far Behind ?

I am actually quite a dodo at keeping up with news.. I bury my head in the sand, emerging when something bothers me, to read in depth on the matter. I was surprised when Dad told me recently that Xi Ping had gotten the Chinese party congress to declare him president for life ! I thought that was dangerous not only to china but to the rest of the world as well – what if we had a mad man in charge and unable to shake him off ? China today domiantes world affairs, much as the US does. We already have out of control Trump in the US, but alteast can look forward to him being deposed either before, or at the time of the next US election.

Concurrently, Hongkong is fearing being completely assimilated in the mainland China political system whereas it is said it was promised autonomy at the time of reverting back to china.

A documentary by Australian TV says China is experimenting with a social credit monitoring system much like the financial credit monitoring system to assess every individual in society on how much they comply with laws. Those with bad social credit will be denied use of long distance travel and so on. Its scary.

The system has been used to already block nine million people with "low scores" from purchasing domestic flights. While still in the preliminary stages, the system has been used to ban people and their children from certain schools, prevent low scorers from renting hotels, using credit cards, and blacklist individuals from being able to procure employment.^[Criticism of this program has been widespread with the proposed system being described by Human Rights Watch as "chilling" and filled with arbitrary abuses.

However, survey results in China show that wealthier, higher educated, urban respondents perceive social credit systems as an instrument to close institutional and regulatory gaps, leading to more honest and law-abiding behavior in society, and less as an instrument of surveillance. 

But a Queensland University of Technology researcher has said that while the social credit system can be used to punish political dissenters, it may have positive benefits for Chinese citizens because government officials can be blacklisted for corrupt behaviour. Over 1,100 officials were on restricted lists at December 2017, according to the state media organisation People’s Daily.

But India is following in China's wake ofcourse.. 'Advanced Application for Social Media Analytics' or AASMA – was developed by the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, with funding from the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology around 2013-2014. Since then, its use by government agencies has grown manifold without much public scrutiny. More than 40 state and Central government departments had deployed the tool by April 2017 and another 75 had requested its installation at the time.

The tool can “24X7” collect and analyse “live data” on users from “multiple social networks” including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Google+. It can track social media profiles, their posts and networks of connections to identify “top users”, and conduct “sentiment analysis” of their posts to categorise them as either “positive” or “negative”.

“The biggest concern around use of this tool is there is no transparency,” said Amber Sinha of the Centre for Internet and Society, a non-profit research organisation. Sinha added, “We don’t know who is using it for what purpose. We don’t know whether the government agencies are just using it to aggregate data of social media chatter or tracking profiles of past criminals or profiling each individual. If they are tracking social media activities of each individual, it would have a chilling effect on free speech.”