Who needs democracy when you have data?

China has had average 10% growth rates for 3 decades, it's economy has grown by a factor of 40 since 1988. It's hard to explain just how powerful this positive economic shock has been. The Chinese people have seen, during their recent lifetimes, the country transitioning from abject poverty into a world superpower in the medium income range. Their quality of life and paychecks have grown every year and the political leadership is addicted to this growth, it's how they stay in power and easily quench all discontent.

As soon as this incredible growth cycle is exhausted we will start to see the first chinks in the armor of the Party State, we will see the public demand democracy and official accountability. Look for example to Hong Kong, where the growth has been much slower (they already had a high level of development) and the dissenting voices are multiplying. And that's exactly what will happen in the rest of China in the next 10-20 years; growth becomes much harder once you have picked the low hanging fruits and you get closer to the advanced countries.

The system would decide what would be the best position for somebody in the government if they desired to go there. It'd also monitor people and evaluate in real time their psyche. People who were predisposed to psychopathic and/or sociopathic behaviour were flagged and monitored. The police would use guns that tranquilized flagged people and disintegrated people deemed public danger.

This article painted China as a predecessor of the country presented in the anime.

As for the ranking / credit system. I don't believe that such an idea is feasible, as it resembles elo. We know from online games such as League of Legends that elo is not an appropriate metric as it's often governed by multiple variables out of the individual player's control. While in the 'long run' it evens out, it often creates the illusion that a player stuck because of their environment and not themselves, which while may be true in a few cases, in most cases is false.

There won't be a war, by the way. I honestly think we're past the point as a species where superpowers duke it out in such a literal fashion. It's just bad for business. (Military might today is usually directed from superpowers to third-world countries, but that's a topic for another day).

China's influence and dominance will happen through the private sector, ironically. They have their own versions of Google and Facebook: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. These are the tech giants through which the Chinese government gets most of its data on citizens. They are even more ubiquitous than ours - people do everything from getting loans to scheduling medical appointments through them - and they've begun trying to break into the western markets. Tencent in particular has been investing billions in everything from Blizzard to Tesla. At the same time, Google, Facebook, and Apple are also trying to break into the Chinese market. Those companies have already compromised their values for the sake of that opportunity by blocking VPN apps on app stores, censoring content, etc. For now those policy adjustments only apply in China itself, but once it becomes an established (and massive) market - they have four times the population of the U.S. - do you really think the companies would stand up against pressure from the Chinese government to apply those policies elsewhere?

Between the spread of the companies it effectively owns, and the deals being made with the rest of the world's most powerful tech companies, China will soon wield more influence than the U.S. I don't think it'll be long before surveillance-states are the norm.

Yes but this was a huge source of instability for the Qing regime. Arguably, the Qing's failure to adapt to the modern world came in part from a cabal of bureaucrats that opposed reforms.

It's bad for business until it's not. Isolationist economic policies will over time make war more likely.

> Between the spread of the companies it effectively owns, and the deals being made with the rest of the world's most powerful tech companies, China will soon wield more influence than the U.S. I don't think it'll be long before surveillance-states are the norm.

I'm not sure about China wielding more influence than the U.S. That sort of thing is really hard to predict accurately, especially from the perspective of someone who isn't a world leader privy to all available information.

I do agree that surveillance states will be the norm, though, at least everywhere that doesn't currently have a democracy functioning well enough to prevent it.