This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Spectator Podcast.

This podcast is sponsored by Merriam Global Investors, bringing together the art and science of investing.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Katie Gors.

We're bringing you this podcast from the midst of the Brexit Omni Shambles,

and we'll be delivering a special Brexit edition shortly.

But before that, something just as monumental, and perhaps more, is happening on the other side of the world.

China is developing a social credit system to rate its own citizens and their social behaviour.

So, just how dangerous is this idea?

Dear passengers, people who travel without tickets or behave disordered

as small being public areas will be punished according to regulations

and the behaviour will be recorded in the individual

credit information system. To avoid an in an additive record of personal credit, please follow

the relevant regulations and help with the orders on the train and at the station.

That was the announcement that technology journalist James O'Malley heard when he's travelled on a high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai earlier this year.

It is just a tip of a social credit iceberg. James writes in this week's cover piece.

The Chinese government is working to create a system of scoring its citizens on their behaviours.

James joins me now together with Cindy Yu,

the spectator's broadcast editor and China commentator. So James, first, you can you just

explain what the social credit system is? So social credit at the moment is more of an idea. It's

basically the idea that China has all of these different government departments and local authorities,

and they've all got a problem that we have in the West, which is they need to share data

and they need to join up their various systems.

...