China’s authoritarian party-state regime will mount a greater global challenge to Western democracies through its embrace of big data, a force that many governments in the West have underrated, according to a prominent Berlin-based political scientist.
Sebastian Heilmann, who coined the term “digital Leninism” based on developments in China, said the discipline and obedience of Leninism were a tight fit with the digital surveillance and big data technologies that the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping had pushed over the past few years.
One such data-driven system that has been ringing alarm bells is the government’s “social credit” platform, which generates ratings for each Chinese citizen, business and authority and affects everything from loan approvals to permission to board flights. The system was introduced in 2014 and is expected to be in place nationwide by 2020.