The Chinese are building a totalitarian police state with socioeconomic controls the likes of which the world has never seen.

Hebei Province in northern China is the test base for a brand-new WeChat program, named officially the “map of deadbeat debtors.” A name can’t be much more clear than that – but this hand-held app also draws a picture. So helpful.

On January 14, 2019, the Higher People’s Court in Hebei launched a new mini-app on WeChat, the country’s the national internet and web services network.

WeChat is a controversial “super app” and “app for anything” due to its vast capabilities, reach, and functionality. WeChat is the Communists’ way “of censoring politically important topics in China, including human rights abuses.”

The Hebei Map of Deadbeat Debtors (“MODD”) shows a street map with icons for all persons who have been digitally identified as owing someone money located within a 500-meter (about 550 yards) radius of the user.

That’s right, this mobile app IDs and maps people from the national credit/criminal database, then alerts all networked portable wireless devices that someone who is late with one or more payments has come within shaming distance. Time to blow that whistle, loyal citizens of China!

What better way to inform concerned and honorable, debt-free, law-abiding, good people that despicable, debt-ridden, lawless bad people are near at hand?

The new MODD is a “point-the-finger” app, make no mistake about it. No one is hiding this fact.

Now, a proud and debt-free person can approach the nearest deadbeat and loudly proclaim, for all to hear, “For shame, Debtor! Why do you bring dishonor on yourself, your family, and your country by not paying your credit card bill? Get a good job!”

Although speculation is rampant about the MODD, people outside China have been given very few details about the debt-shaming app. It’s not clear if the shameful one’s name or photo will display along with the sum money owed and to whom.

The China Daily reported only that the app lets users “whistle-blow on debtors capable of paying their debts.”

It’s not hard to imagine that an unhappy neighbor could just wait until the app signals that their target has fallen behind in some payment before alerting the authorities.

Top leadership in the Chinese government is deadly serious about finishing their national computerized internet-linked surveillance state where every citizen’s actions are subject to constant public CTV camera recording, high-tech facial recognition sunglasses and realistic flying robotic birds that spy down from above.

By early 2020, the Chinese government expects to be able to track, monitor, and quantify just about every activity each citizen undertakes, from pumping gas to paying the rent to enrolling for community college classes.

The idea that income, debt, and obedience to community standards are perfectly fine targets of public identification and shaming is very foreign to the American way of thinking.

This writer already covered the public shaming of jaywalkers in Shenzhen, China, by a high-tech facial recognition camera network that projects the face and name of any and all who cross against the traffic lights onto a huge, towering Times-Square-esque screen on the corner.

The Chinese culture considers honor to be a principal virtue and its opposite (shame) to be its utter debasement.

The Chinese effectively used public shaming coupled with socio-economic rewards and punishments to enforce their 1980 one-child law which limited most Chinese families to one child each. The government supplied contraceptives, and forced both sterilizations and abortions on noncompliant couples.

In addition to the threat of heavy fines and possibility that the family’s children could be denied public education and healthcare, the heavy-hitting Communists made these draconian rules:
“City dwellers who broke the law risked losing their jobs and rural families had their homes torn down for having ‘illegal’ children.”

Grandmotherly women were employed as official government representatives sent to rural villages to convince women pregnant with a second child that breaking the national law was selfish, inconsiderate, and dishonorable.

It is important to understand how the Communist Chinese leadership thinks and how these philosophies are translating into real life in the largest Asian country. This is information you won’t get on the nightly news.