Cynthia Chung

June 11, 2026

One of the most infamous criticisms of China over the past several years that has formed the basis for viewing the country as an Orwellian surveillance state and its citizens as mere drone-like-automatons is its supposed “social credit system.” But what if I were to tell you that the origin of this Orwellian “social credit system” and the fintech (financial technology) credit loan bubble crises were actually created by the same Anglo-American institutions that also created the United States’ 2008 financial crisis? Or that fintechs such as Alipay, Antpay (both created by Jack Ma) and Wepay (Tencent) are not truly Chinese creations but have in fact been managed and funded by Anglo-American institutions that overlap heavily with Project Stargate? Or that China in fact cracked down on this back in 2020 which was portrayed by western press as a global scandal when the poor Big Tech billionaire Jack Ma was taken down a few pegs?

As this four-part series will go through in great detail, the reality was that these Big Fintech companies were giving out predatory loans on the level of what sparked the 2008 financial crisis. These Big Tech companies, like Alibaba and Tencent didn’t hold skin in the game and were going to come out on top, even if mass defaults of loan payments were to occur and which were already happening. This is something that even by a western viewpoint, should not be left unchecked. Alibaba and Tencent were effectively acting as banks while holding no responsibility of a bank. It was a powder keg ready to explode, and as I will showcase in this series, was engineered to do so.

In addition to this, these Big Tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, had created their own social credit scoring and were creating rewards and punishments based off of a user’s score that would determine what discounts/deals they would receive as a consumer on their platforms (think of Amazon, Apple Pay and Google Pay on steroids), or whether the penalised user would have limited access or temporary banning etc. to these platforms, such as music or films, video games, online shopping, restaurants, loans, rental deals on apartment units etc., thus, penalties meant you didn’t have full access or the best “deals” offered on their platforms.

Basically, think of a “Ready Player One” sort of world as the ideal for Big Tech. If you can get consumers to increasingly live their “reality” in a digital world, then who controls that digital world is like a God are they not? Well, you could say in 2020, Jack Ma was on a god-like high.

Alibaba and Tencent are still global giants in Fintech, however, they are beholden to proper banking regulation now which put at an end to the predatory loaning (they no longer give out P2P loans), as well as their reward and punishment social credit system. Thus, China clamped down on Big Tech’s social credit system and deemed it illegal to create rewards and punishments.

In truth, there is a double standard that is repeatedly applied to China. In this case, criticizing China for having been too lax on these Big Tech giants, which led to the P2P (peer-to-peer fintech loans) crisis that hit a boiling point in China from 2013-2018, and then when China regulates these Big Tech giants’ actions such that predatory actions are not tolerated, the West howls that China is being authoritarian. As we will see in this series, China’s P2P crisis was an Anglo-American construct, the same construct that also triggered the 2008 financial crisis within the United States.

In this series we will go through the history of how China clamped down on Big Tech in great detail, including members of its own government that were found guilty of corruption and went to jail. Yes, you heard right, China, unlike in the United States, responded to this financial crisis sparked by predatory loans by actually sending high-ranking government officials to jail.

Meanwhile, these very institutions continue to go largely unchecked in the West with the most recent BigTech Private Credit Loan bubble ready to burst in the United States. Even the former Goldman Sachs CEO who led the bank through the 2008 financial crash, Lloyd Blankfein, told the Telegraph recently that he “smells [another] crash coming.” The question is – is this just all reckless happenstance, or is it an engineered “reboot” of the financial system where Big Tech comes out on top?

As we will see, Goldman Sachs will play a central role in this story…

One example of Big Tech attempting to enter the banking world is Libra,[1] later called Diem, a stablecoin payment system proposed by U.S. social media company Facebook, that was ultimately rejected by U.S. regulators. The plan included a private currency implemented as a cryptocurrency. The launch was originally planned to be in 2020, the same year that China shutdown Jack Ma’s Ant IPO, what was to be the largest IPO in history.

Facebook’s bold attempt to create its own digital currency, if approved, would have had as its ultimate goal the eventual right to establish its own bank for said digital currency. It would not be long before other Big Techs would follow suit, such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Twitter X, Uber, DoorDash etc. With such a development, Big Tech would be in the position to give away risky loans, equivalent to loan sharking, with penalties if the borrower was late or defaulted on a payment.

In other words, these platforms could penalise a borrower by limiting or blocking their services to said borrower on platforms such as Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Twitter X, Uber, DoorDash etc. etc. The reader should be aware that Apple Pay and Google Pay are already highly integrated into much of American consumer society.

Presently these companies do not have the right to give out loans or own their own bank, however, as we will see in this paper, fintech in the United States and Europe does have this right to give out P2P loans and own their own banks. It is only the merger of these consumer-based platforms mentioned above that are kept separate, however, massive pressure is whittling away at this flimsy barrier that is ready to break at any moment. In fact, Goldman Sachs is leading this charge into a “Ready Player One World” as we will soon see.

This had been something that was allowed to fester in China through Big Tech private credit loans such as Jack Ma’s Alipay and Antpay, along with WeChat pay (Tencent), something that had run amok earlier during their P2P crisis before the Chinese government began to clamp down, which led ultimately to the global scandal in 2020 when Jack Ma was taken down several pegs. The significance of this should be especially viewed in context to the fact that Alipay, Antpay, and Wepay are not truly Chinese companies but are funded and managed by powerful Anglo-American institutions as this paper will lay out.

This four-part series will showcase how not only are the origins of the social credit system not to be found in China, but that China had in fact blocked the attempt from Big Tech to essentially attempt a coup d’etat on its national banking/financial system. This series will go into great detail as to how this came about, as well as where the true origins of the social credit system lie. In Part III, we will discuss accusations of China using an Orwellian social credit system within their legal system, which we will see consists of a lot of hot air. Finally, in Part IV we will discuss what is China’s digital currency and how it differs from what Big Tech is attempting to bring about.

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Via https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/the-true-origins-of-chinas-social