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When did China pivot from seeing the internet as a US-generated threat (mối nguy) to something it could use to discipline (kỷ luật, kỷ cương) and punish  (trừng phạt) its own population (người dân)?

It’s not just the internet, it’s technology in general. If you go back to even the late 1970s and early 80s, the way the Chinese Communist party (CCP) talks about technology is as a tool of social management. It’s a way of not only coercive (ép buộc, cưỡng bức) control, but also sort of cooperative control where you participate in your own management. It’s this idea of shaping the environment, shaping how people think, how they’re willing to act before they even know they’re making a choice. That’s the party’s idea.

When did that develop into what is called the social credit system?

Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin spoke about this in 2000. He said we need a social credit system to merge rule by law and rule by virtue. I don’t see it as different from the way Hannah Arendt describes how regimes attempt to make the law inseparable from ethics in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

...The most egregious example of this surveillance technology would be in Xinjiang for controlling the Uighur [Muslim] population?

The most visibly coercive forms of what the party is doing are unfolding in Xinjiang. It’s a virtual police state. There are QR codes on people’s doors for when the party goes in to check on who is in (có mã qr ở cửa để người của đảng vào kiểm tra ai ở trong nhà). Some researchers have found that if someone leaves through the back door instead of the front door, that can be considered suspicious behaviour (đi cửa sau thay vì cửa trước cũng bị coi là hành vi đáng ngờ).

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