Two decades on, China’s social credit system is more dysfunctional than dystopian.
Illustration by Valeria Petrone
In 1999, a frustrated young entrepreneur wrote a letter to then-Premier Zhu Rongji. Huang Wenyun had made a small fortune for herself by capitalizing on Shenzhen’s manufacturing boom and selling educational toys, but her business had hit a wall: Her products were so successful that the market was being flooded with cheap knock-offs, eating up a chunk of her profits and delivering a major blow to her business.
Not one to sit around, Huang had gone on a hunt for solutions to what
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