Writing in Foreign Policy, journalist Amy Hawkins explains that China's pandemic of social distrust is the problem to which the social credit system is addressed as the cure: "To be Chinese today is to live in a society of distrust, where every opportunity is a potential con and every act of generosity a risk of exploitation." A fascinating empirical study of social trust in contemporary China actually finds high levels of "in-group" trust but discovers that these are correlated with negative health outcomes. The conclusion is that many Chinese trust only the people who are well-known to them. All other relationships are regarded with suspicion and anxiety, with obvious consequences for social trust as well as well-being. This rampant distrust, typically assigned to the traumas of rapid modernization and the shift to a quasi-capitalist economy, is also the legacy of Chinese totalitarianism. The Chinese Communist Party dismantled traditional domains of affiliation, identity, and social meaning—family, religion, civil society, intellectual discourse, political freedom—recalling Arendt's description of the "atomization" that destroys bonds of trust. As Hawkins writes, "But rather than promoting the organic return of traditional morality to reduce the gulf of distrust, the Chinese government has preferred to invest its energy in technological fixes… and it's being welcomed by a public fed up of not knowing who to trust… in part because there's no alternative."

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1240