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Chinese State Council · 2014
China’s 2014 ‘Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System’ is the real State Council document behind the Western ‘social credit’ conversation — a framework for financial trustworthiness and legal compliance that became the canon’s model for the Grid. The document is public; the caricature and the reality diverge in instructive ways.
The codex is speculative fiction; this source and the record below are real.
A national framework for ‘trustworthiness’ in financial, commercial and legal life: credit records, blacklists for court defaulters, and inter-agency data sharing. It is bureaucratic, sectoral, and real — not the single citizen score of the headlines.
The Western image — one number ruling every citizen’s life — has never existed as described; researchers who read the Chinese-language record found fragmented blacklists, credit reporting and local pilots. The codex notes the gap is the lesson: the Grid’s scariest version needed no invention, only translation loss.
Because it is a state publishing a plan for behavioral data infrastructure — the Grid’s vocabulary in a government gazette. The canon’s question — ‘if they write it there, who writes it here?’ — is the codex’s, asked honestly.
State Council document of June 2014 (the ‘2014–2020 planning outline’), public in Chinese and in translation. The scholarly corrections — on the score that doesn’t exist and the blacklists that do — are themselves part of the record and linked above.
The Grid’s social-credit panels cite the outline by name. The Grounded Edition prints what the document builds — records, blacklists, shared data — beside what the mythology says it builds, and lets the reader measure the distance.
A 2014 State Council framework for financial and legal ‘trustworthiness’ — credit records, defaulter blacklists and data sharing — not a single behavioral score for every citizen.
No such universal score exists in the document or in practice. The record shows fragmented blacklists, credit reporting and local pilots; the single-score image is a Western distillation.
Because it is a state publishing behavioral-data infrastructure in plain language — the Grid’s real-world reference case, cited with its actual content attached.
The outline itself (translated), and the scholarly corrections on what the system actually is — both linked in the source strip above.
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