Emily Dickinson Archive (http://www.edickinson.org/) makes high-resolution images of manuscripts of Dickinson’s poetry available in open access, along with transcriptions and annotations from historical and scholarly editions. A collaboration between Amherst College, Boston Public Library, Brigham Young University, Harvard University Press, Houghton Library at Harvard, and other institutions holding Dickinson manuscripts, Emily Dickinson Archive is designed to inspire new scholarship and discourse on this literary icon.
In 2014, the Chinese government issued a document aimed at increasing the amount of ‘trust’ in society. Today this emerging system is known as China’s social credit system – like a credit score but tracking more than financial transactions. China’s central government wants to have the system in place across China by 2020, using a range of information — including shopping habits, driving fines and even what’s written on social media — to rate and rank individuals. People with poor scores could find themselves unable to get bank loans or buy plane tickets. Advocates claim that a system is necessary in a country where few people have credit ratings. But detractors see it as a kind of dystopic super-surveillance. Celia Hatton and a panel of expert guests weighs up the costs and benefits of social credit.
(Photo: A Chinese woman walks along the street holding a broom and dustpan. Credit: Getty Images)
Contributors
Rana Mitter – Professor of Chinese History, Oxford University
Samantha Hoffman – Visiting Fellow at Mercator Institute for China Studies
Cindy Yu – Writer at the British magazine, The Spectator
Duncan Clark – Chairman of BDA China, a technology consultancy in Beijing
By 2020, China plans to give all its 1.4. billion citizens a personal score based on how they behave. Some with low scores are already being punished if they want to travel. Next week, the program will start expanding nationwide. Ben Tracy reports.
China is testing a new plan to urge its citizens to do more good and be more trustworthy – the Social Credit System. It’s kind of like the American credit score, except it tracks far more than financial transactions. It tracks good — and bad — deeds.
Part of the system is a neighbor watch program that’s being piloted across the country where designated watchers are paid to record people’s behaviors that factor into their social credit score. A high score could bring you lower interest loans and discounted rent and utility bills, but if your score is low, you can be subjected to public shaming or even banned from certain kinds of travel, life gets hard.
China’s economy has exploded over the past decades, economic reforms required banks to be able to evaluate individuals looking to borrow money to buy houses or start new businesses. Fraud and excess borrowing were rampant because most people didn’t really have much of a credit history. To measure its citizens’ trustworthiness, in 2014, The State Council laid out a plan that aims to build a centralized database to evaluate individuals and organizations based on their financial and social behaviors.
The program is scheduled to be nationwide by 2020, which means every Chinese citizen will be tracked, scored, and receive perks and restrictions accordingly.
VICE News went to a village in one of the first pilot cities to see how the local office funnels the behaviors of 3,000 residents in this neighborhood into social credit scores.
Premiered Mar 15, 2019
In this episode of Head to Head, Mehdi Hasan challenges Charles Liu, Senior Fellow at Peking University, seasoned Chinese entrepreneur and informal adviser to the Chinese government, on Xi Jinping’s record in power so far, the government’s crackdown on the Uighur Muslim minority, and what role for China if it becomes the 21st century’s military and economic superpower.
With the presidential term limit abolished in 2018, critics say that Chinese President Xi Jinping appears to be paving the way to being able to stay in power for life, but Charles Liu, founder of Hao Capital, disputes this. Separately, despite lower-than-predicted growth, China is still growing substantially and is set to become the world’s biggest economy.
But the economic boom has been paired with an increase in state surveillance and crackdowns on dissent, as well as the repression of the Muslim Uighur minority. So at what cost has China’s economic miracle come? And what’s the future for civil liberties of the Chinese people?
In recent years China has also increased its military spending while some Chinese officials have been ratcheting up their militaristic rhetoric, raising fears of direct military confrontation with the United States.
On this Head to Head episode filmed at the Oxford Union, we challenge Charles Liu on all these topics, ask him whether the Chinese economy has hit a wall, and whether China’s neighbours should dismiss their fears as his country builds up its military and extends its global reach.
We are joined by a panel of three experts:
Andreas Fulda – China Specialist at Asia Research Institute and Assistant Professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham.
Victor Gao – Vice President of the Beijing based Center for China and Globalization and former interpreter for the late President Deng Xiaoping.
Steve Tsang – Professor and Director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London.
It was once a bipartisan issue, but now one of America’s major parties acts like climate science doesn’t exist. This is an updated version of a video we published in 2016.
We think we know what’s at stake when it comes to climate change, and we often treat it as if it’s tomorrow’s problem. The real story is much, much more urgent. We have released more carbon into the atmosphere over the last thirty years than in the rest of human history, bringing the planet to the brink of climate catastrophe in less than a generation. And yet we still think of climate action as a peripheral concern; a ‘nice to have’ once our more pressing priorities are taken care of. New York magazine deputy editor and viral sensation David Wallace-Wells paints a disturbing picture of what we’re up against, warning of the real human costs and irrevocable planetary damage that climate change will bring – and sooner than we think. No longer can we live in ignorance or denial. He issues an urgent call to arms, imploring us to change the way we think and talk about our planet’s future.
Published on Mar 20, 2019
• Saving the world from the apocalyptic impact of climate change should be a dream for many Silicon Valley titans concerned about legacy, says David Wallace-Wells, and yet few are dedicating themselves to addressing the catastrophe.
• Negative emissions technology funded by Bill Gates exists. It would cost $3 trillion per year to operate globally and would mean human industry could continue at current levels without global warming.
• That figure sounds astronomical, however global subsidies to fossil fuel industries cost $5 trillion per year.
David Wallace-Wells is the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” (https://amzn.to/2Of5N3y). He is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.
Susan Thornton, Senior Fellow, Yale University Paul Tsai China Center & Fmr. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairsrnton, Senior Fellow, Yale University Paul Tsai China Center & Fmr. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
Welcome to Transition Studies. To prosper for very much longer on the changing Earth humankind will need to move beyond its current fossil-fueled civilization toward one that is sustained on recycled materials and renewable energy. This is not a trivial shift. It will require a major transition in all aspects of our lives.
This weblog explores the transition to a sustainable future on our finite planet. It provides links to current news, key documents from government sources and non-governmental organizations, as well as video documentaries about climate change, environmental ethics and environmental justice concerns.
The links are listed here to be used in whatever manner they may be helpful in public information campaigns, course preparation, teaching, letter-writing, lectures, class presentations, policy discussions, article writing, civic or Congressional hearings and citizen action campaigns, etc. For further information on this blog see: About this weblog. and How to use this weblog.
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