Given that China's social credit system is mostly seen in media reports, there are also many conflicting claims of why it was established, obscuring what the system is and how it works. Precisely because of the lack of clarity regarding the functioning of the system and the purposes for its establishment, I decided that the main question of this master's thesis will be what is the conceptual basis and practical implication of the social credit system? Can we look for the answers to the creation of such a system in the dynamics of modern Chinese society? In the first part of the thesis, I present how the social credit system works in practice, using official documents and some secondary sources on the topic. In the second part, I show what the Chinese public opinion is about the establishment of the system through the use of secondary sources from the results of two surveys. It turns out the majority of Chinese citizens support the system, as they believe that Chinese society is facing a so-called "crisis of trust". In the third part of the thesis, I define the concept of trust in Chinese cultural tradition and present the connection between trust in society and economic well-being with the help of primary sources from Chinese classics and secondary literature on the topic. At the end, a conceptual analysis follows, where I summarize the main idea for establishing the social credit system. I believe that all this will achieve the goal of clarifying how the social credit system operates and will illuminate the role the system has in trying to solve the crisis of trust in modern Chinese society.
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