Scoring the Citizen: Aesthetic Regimes of Digital Governance in China and Post-Yugoslav States in the Context of Globalization

Abstract

This article offers a comparative analysis of China’s Social Credit experiments and emerging educational data infrastructures in post-Yugoslav states as interconnected aesthetic regimes of digital scoring. Rather than treating these systems only as legal or technical arrangements, the article examines how they organize perception and experience: which behaviors become visible as data, how they are ranked, and which emotions—shame, pride, anxiety, aspiration—are attached to their visual forms. Methodologically, the article employs a comparative interpretative approach situated within media and cultural studies, combining discourse analysis, interface analysis, and critical policy analysis. The comparison does not aim to establish direct equivalence between political systems, but rather to examine how distinct digital environments produce comparable regimes of behavioral visibility, classification, and normalization. On the Chinese side, the analysis focuses on policy documents and critical scholarship on the Social Credit System (SCS), and shows how blacklists, redlists, and scoring interfaces construct state-sanctioned images of the “trustworthy” citizen. On the post-Yugoslav side, it discusses Serbia’s Unified Information System of Education (JISP) and the eDnevnik platform as instances of “soft” social scoring that continuously evaluate pupils and schools. The theoretical framework combines Jacques Rancière’s notion of aesthetic regimes, Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism, critical media theory (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Lev Manovich), and Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology. Together, these perspectives illuminate how software interfaces, scoring metrics, and systems of continuous evaluation shape subjectivity, emotional orientation, and social behavior. The article argues that, despite substantial differences in political context and institutional coercion, both cases reveal broader global transformations in which digital governance increasingly operates through continuous visibility, behavioral evaluation, and affective modulation. At the same time, these systems also open space for contestation and for imagining more humane and autonomy-supporting digital infrastructures.