On November 14, the National Health Commission and 10 other government bodies jointly released a policy encouraging local governments to incentivize blood donation via the social credit system. The policy encourages all localities to:
establish an incentive mechanism for uncompensated blood donation…, provide preferential treatment for blood donors to use public facilities, visit government parks, etc., and regularly carry out blood donation commendation activities.
City governments across China have been implementing the use of blood donation as a positive behavioral metric in citizen social credit files for the last several years. Many local programs have encouraged citizens with poor credit to donate blood as part of the credit rectification process. But this national-level policy comes at time when public awareness of social credit is slowly rising, and the topic is increasingly filtering into the public conversation.
The announcement has sparked debate domestically, particularly surrounding whether or not the inclusion of blood donation in social credit records extends the boundaries of the system beyond what is reasonable.
A November 24 opinion piece in China Youth Daily thinks so:
“… it must be pointed out that this is a misunderstanding and abuse of the credit reporting system, which will damage the credibility of the credit reporting system itself.”
Other key questions under public discussion:
- If donors are rewarded via social credit for giving blood, then is it really an ‘uncompensated donation’?
- Is this fair to those who would like to give blood, but are medically or otherwise unable?
- If the credit system is continually expanded, and the bottom line keeps shifting, does this impact the system’s validity?
The takeaway: While support for the social credit system in general is widespread, there are public concerns over potential misuse.