Data-driven assessments of trustworthiness of natural and legal persons have in recent decades become immensely powerful. Credit scores, Uber/Didi ratings, environmental impact assessments, and ESG regimes, to just name a few examples, have become key factors influencing our everyday decision-making. Data-driven trust assessments also increasingly inform discretionary decisions of public regulatory agencies. While in Europe, trust assessment regimes are often created from within single regulatory agencies, China’s State Council has early on summarized trust assessment projects under the policy of “building a social credit system （社会信用体系建设）” and later put forward the concept of credibility-based regulation （以信用为基础的新型监管机制，简称 信用监管）to spur the use of trust assessments in public regulation. In this talk, I will examine cases of data-driven trust assessments in public regulation from Europe and China and unravel how they can strengthen the law, for instance by facilitating better enforcement of laws and regulations by identifying potential violators early on. We then dive into how the same mechanisms pose significant threats to pillars of the rule of law such as the prohibition of improper connection （不当联合禁止）and the proportionality principle （比例原则）.

Marianne von Blomberg (安帆) is a doctoral candidate at Zhejiang University Law School and Cologne University Chair of Chinese Legal Culture, as well as a Research Associate at Bern University of Applied Sciences. Her research explores regulatory evolution, in particular assessment-based public regulation, and governance-related technical standardization and has been published in outlets such as China Information, The China Review, the German Journal of Chinese Law and Modern China. In her dissertation, she addresses the relationship of law and trust assessment regimes through observing the case of China’s social credit system, asking how trust assessments strengthen, weaken and transform traditional legality. She edits the blog of the European Chinese Law Studies Association (https://blog.uni-koeln.de/eclrhub/). Marianne holds an LL.M degree from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, a BA in Communication and Cultural Studies from Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen and conducted a one-year stay as a visiting scholar at City University of Hong Kong School of Law.

本次讲座主持为 Lena Scheen, Director of the Center for Global Asia, Associate Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU.