China’s ancient Nine-Rank system was the basis, with further tinkering, for all future imperial Chinese ranking systems, as well as those in Japan and Korea. Even in modern, nominally Communist China, similar systems are applied in the administration.

The thing is the modern Chinese system to rank officials is not so different from those in other countries and even private corporations; I myself was part of a ranking system when I worked in Europe’s largest bank. Yes, China was pretty uniquely obsessed with ranking people in the past, but the obsession seems to have spread.

Witness the inflation in the granting of bullshit British aristocratic titles (“Lord”, “Sir”, “Dame”) to football coaches, actresses, interior decorators and divorced wives of Jeffrey Epstein-adjacent royals, or the craze for financial markets’ rank-and-filers to become “Chartered Financial Analysts.”

China’s Social Credit Score certainly has deep roots in the history of ranking systems. The drive to control, regulate and count — China has some extraordinarily detailed censuses made two millennia ago — is an enduring characteristic of the Chinese state, for better or worse.

Despite some over-excited reporting in the West, China’s SCS have never gone past the experimental phase, and the systems have been scaled down in recent years, particularly after the Covid lockdowns made a lot of people lose a lot of patience with bureaucratic tinkering and experimentation. In Beijing, where I visit regularly, there’s no real SCS: nightmares about losing social standing points because you jumped a red light remain in the realm of fantasy, and people jump red lights all the freaking time.

Then again, if and when China tries something like SCS again, be sure that the promoters of the new system will cite Shang Yang, and the Nine-Rank System, and the Twenty-Rank System, and the affection of the Chinese state across generations for numbering and ranking.