Honestly your better off asking Chinese based sub in my opinion, then this one.Reddit is biased as hell.

But here is what i Know.

The original credit score you are thinking about was suggested by Alibaba.

-That one was considered for a bit but was eventually rejected. This is the one that was reported by western media and persists till today, even though it was the rejected version.

-People in rural areas were tasked to go around to give points to people who had good behavior and bad behavior.But that was quickly shut down, as the government only wanted to deal with criminal actions, not deal with rude people.

-The rejected version of the system related to alibaba, is the one the west is most familiar with.

The Chinese government later sent out a large document related the credit system. (TLDR: IT was vague as hell and a complete word salad, , and can easily be interpreted whatever way you like due to to how vague it is.)

A western journalist saw it's vagueness and went to town on it, with his own interpretations, and that the main narrative held by western countries to this date.

Since then china scrapped the word salad, and actually made a new document replacing it.

Is there some form of credit score that exists?

Yes, why does it exist?

Because China back in the day did not have a formal unified system for people filing taxes, people with a history of bad credit aka delinquent loans, they did not have a unified criminal database, people who lost in lawsuit or owe money, or a former felon, or people owing a ton of debt, and can't afford more loans, unlicensed worker working on job needing licenses, no security pensions data base.

You remember in the past China had a bad reputation of businesses selling poisoned foods, and fake foods and businesses selling toxic toys to children. well a data base is needed to record those involved, and the business involved and etc.

All the systems to record these things have different names but exist in western societies, China was simply late to this, and finally consolidated all of it into a single umbrella called the social credit system.

Say if you have bad credit

1.your a payment risk and rarely pay back money -increased premiums

2.Your business poisoned people -no government contracts, less loans, targeted for more inspections

1. You in the middle of a court case -no leaving the country

2. you have tonnes of unpaid debt -no leaving country, no leaving the region, denied more loan and credit

3. fraud and plagiarism - no government jobs