China is using a new blockchain-based propaganda application to monitor loyalty to the Communist Party.
Less than a week after President Xi Jinping highlighted the value of blockchain and the potential “breakthrough” it afforded for Chinese enterprise, reports have surfaced tying the technology to Community Party loyalty.
According to a report by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), China’s Communist Party has released an application allowing members to pledge their loyalty to the party while tracking the results on a distributed ledger.
SCMP’s report explains how the application, called Lian Shang Chuxin, works to track user input,
[The app] allows members of the Communist Party to pledge their loyalty to the party by writing down the reasons they joined, and answers will be stored on a permanent distributed ledger using blockchain technology. This way a person’s party loyalty will stay recorded in cyberspace forever.
The application was officially launched last week by The People’s Daily, which serves as the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, and is being build as a tool for Party building “in cyberspace.”
The platform was reportedly inspired by the teaching of President Xi, and follows in the vein of state-sponsored online platforms which urge Party members to “stay true to their mission.”
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