A total of 533 people were banned from taking trains and 692 were banned from air travel in March due to their social credit scores, including some who were punished for manipulating the stock market, according to a newly released social credit report by China's National Public Credit Information Center.
In March, China's social credit authority added 254,803 information items related to 53,128 organizations and 171,823 people, according to the report.
The country launched a national social credit system project in 2014 and has sped up the process of regulating the behavior of citizens with the tagline, "Once discredited, limited everywhere" to show the Chinese authority's determination.
People with poor scores were blocked from buying train tickets more than 5.61 million times and flights more than 19.41 million times between June 2018 and February 2019, according to the center.
Social credit offenses include not only criminal incidents, but also annoying public behavior, such as forcibly occupying other passengers' seats, smoking on public transportation or damaging public property, and more items will be brought into the system, said the report
The newly released report also included eight stock investors, six of whom were senior executives of listed firms. They were blocked from buying plane tickets or high-class seats on trains. One of them was Zheng Lingbin, who committed crimes of manipulating stock trading and was fined nearly 100 million yuan ($14.88 million), according to China Securities Regulatory Commission.
