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Based on fieldwork inside one of China's most celebrated social credit systems, this talk shows what actually happens when a state tries to score the moral lives of its citizens. Far from the all-seeing surveillance machine, the system runs on data that are selectively collected and routinely fabricated—and even then, the state struggles to make the score mean anything, facing constant contestation and reinterpretation. This notorious system, Dr. Liu will suggest, is less an authoritarian anomaly than a sharp lens on the contradictions of governing by numbers anywhere.

Chuncheng Liu is a sociologist of knowledge and technology who studies the politics of data and classification. An assistant professor of communication and sociology at Northeastern University, he earned his Ph.D. in sociology and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England. His current research examines the politics of sociotechnical systems that surveil and classify citizens. His work has appeared in journals including Big Data & Society; Information, Communication & Society; Social Science & Medicine; and Science, Technology & Human Values, and has been featured in outlets such as The Guardian, Bloomberg, and Rest of World.