City improving social credit system for businesses

Shenzhen is expanding its social credit system for business entities to include information on more businesses registered outside the city and developing a joint mechanism for acts of good or bad faith to reward trustworthy enterprises or punish seriously dishonest ones.

The system has so far gathered 1.35 million pieces of information on blacklisted businesses, 2.31 million pieces on trustworthy enterprises and 1,200 reward and punishment measures, according to Huang Shengwen, deputy director of the Shenzhen Municipal Market Supervision Bureau, on Monday.

This move will help nurture a sound business and social environment, and regulate enterprises' behavior based on credit records, according to Huang. Under the system, trustworthy enterprises will be rewarded, while infringers will be discredited.

The databank will be shared among different government departments and discredited companies will face restrictions in administrative approvals, bidding for government projects and applying for government funds.

Shenzhen was China's first city to establish a business social credit data bank and has one of the country's largest such data banks, having collected 890 million pieces of information, Huang said.

It allows the public to make credit inquiries about 100 million business entities nationwide and 80 million commodities via up to 10 platforms, including portal, WeChat account, WeChat mini program and app, for free.

Shenzhen has taken the lead in China in terms of business density, boasting 3.2 million business entities, according to the bureau.

So far, the bureau has blacklisted 56,210 businesses and issued credit warnings to another 19,377 businesses.

Recent years have seen China make visible progress in developing a national social credit system. A unified social credit code has been introduced nationwide: 33.99 million credit codes have been issued to newly registered businesses, and 71 central government departments and provincial governments have been connected to the national credit information sharing platform.

The cross-sector, inter-agency mechanism of incentives and disincentives for acts of good and bad faith have already made initial impacts. Big data has been applied in credit investigation and helped businesses meet real needs. For example, companies with good credit records had received 632,000 loans from financial institutions in the banking sector by the end of 2017.