English transcript

A good score brings benefits, but people with low scores lose rights.

The cinema names and shames people considered untrustworthy,

plastering their details, even their addresses, across big screens.

It's a matter of principle. Those people have to be condemned.

Those people aren't honest, so they have to pay the price.

It's only right to pay your debts. You have to blacklist those that don't.

The Supreme Court has created a blacklist for so-called bad citizens,

those whose ratings have dropped to zero.

On it are companies, but also 23 million people to date.

Among them is this journalist Liu Hu.

He got a little too close to uncovering corruption among high-profile party members.

After being sued for defamation by the subject of a story he'd written,

he was blacklisted.

Liu only realised when he'd tried to buy a train ticket

and was told he was banned from travelling.

That tells me I'm still on the blacklist.

Punished because he's been branded untrustworthy by the state.

Once you're blacklisted, you can no longer get a bank loan,

start a business, buy an apartment,

or even send your children to a private school.

Liu Hu is among a tiny minority of people who have dared to criticise the system,

which some are calling a digital dictatorship.

I worry, because I think many people like me will be deprived of individual freedoms.