By Editor Morten B. Reitoft 

Today my oldest son asked me about China. He has been looking into the widely discussed Social Credit system (wikipedia) developed (of course) in China back in 2009. The Social Credit system score behavior among individuals, businesses, and institutions. The implications of not having good scores influence everything from bank engagements to job opportunities - and the government uses it to enforce certain behaviors. If you know about a crime and inform the authorities about the crime, the people involved, etc., your score increases, and if not, decreases! The system has, of course, extreme implications on people since a low score can damage opportunities in severe manners. The Chinese system doesn't leave much behind if the Internet was available during the Stasi-times.

The Social Credit System (video) is just one of many things suppressing the Chinese population. You can, of course, discuss why this is important to anybody outside China, but we go to wars fighting for democratic values and democratic bodies. Most of us stand up to protect freedom of speech and believe that democratic values secure our populations and are a foundation for further prosperity and growth. So can we do anything about China?

When huge sports events occur, governments talk about boycotting these events to pressure China. Still, it can sound a bit hollow, boycotting events, when at the same accepting production of everything from cars to smartphones and practically everything you can think of. China is also notoriously known for violating human rights, exploiting its population, and having a reluctant perspective on its impact on the global environment.

When companies continue to move production to China, they do it for several reasons. One, access to cheap labor. Two, more accessible access to sell the company's product in China. And three, more reluctant legislation on the environment - and we as buyers are happy if the carbon footprint can easily be offset so the CO2-neutral label can be stuck to the printing machine! But we can't be sure that this is true since fully offsetting CO2 requires traceability to the energy sources, etc. Who should be the resource for that in China?

Even China's reluctance to IP rights doesn't seem to bother the companies investing in China, and even worse, companies often see technology be stolen and used by Chinas own companies.China is, by all means, working towards becoming a global superpower both financially, technologically, militarily, in space, and despite everything mentioned above, the western democracies and companies don't care!