I know it's hard for Westerners to understand but most middle class Chinese are likely to see it as a good thing. The whole time I've been here I've read a constant stream of stories about fake food, fake medicine, fake milk-powder (which killed many babies), fake products, all types of fraud, etc. Add that to the general anti-social behaviors (such as spitting in the street) and you can see why many people recognize the need to "improve peoples' behavior" as Orwellian as that might sound to Western ears.
Middle-class urban Chinese also distinguish themselves from rural Chinese which they see as kind-of backwards. That's why there's little appetite for democracy ... nobody thinks those people should be voting.
"The" social credit system looks very different from the monolithic apparatus of totalitarian control that people imagine it to be, so many different views can be simultaneously true.
> '...one of the ways that people can improve their own social credit score is to report on the supposed misdeeds of others.'
It's not the cameras, the government agents in the shadows or the spying technology... It's the end result of everyone spying on each other that made the world of 1984 so inescapable to Winston.
Some Chinese are still old enough to remember the Cultural revolution.
During this time people were interrogated for days by their peers in so called 'struggle meetings' in an attempt to change their supposed incorrect behaviour.
Reporting someone as a bourgeois person could cause them to disappear.
That said, the real life 1984 that we see slowly emerging in a piecemeal manner worldwide (faster in some places than in others) seems to mostly effect the lower and middle classes.
The idea of people being spied on by their neighbours in 1984 comes from real-world examples that Orwell was drawing on at the time (the Hitler Youth and the purges under Stalin). While it is very dystopian, I would classify it as being extreme totalitarianism and not Orwellian. Almost all recent totalitarian regimes I can think of had people informing on their neighbours.
This is why I routinely go off on people when they suggest calling the cops (or some other external authority) over petty differences. I don't want to see that kind of behavior left unchallenged let alone normalized.
My point is that the spying in 1984 is most of the time seen as being done by Big Brother and its agents against the people but it was quite clear to me when reading it that it was more about everyone keeping an eye on everyone to report to BB, people were doing the watching and there was no escape (I seem to remember there's a line about how they don't know if the camera work but that doesn't matter because you can't prove it and people could be spied on by anyone anyway).
Maybe it's time I pick it up again.
As long as they are convinced or can be convinced that only bad people will be prosecuted (they are good people after all, right?) many people will welcome this.
Reminder: Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?
Everyone is the hero of their own story.
Based on my observation, people acting better usually because now they can and willing to, rather than been forced to.
In our city for example, we used to have many jaywalkers. But that number dropped since the administration constructed better pedestrian crossings (underground tunnels, foot bridge etc). People still jaywalking when those infrastructure is unavailable.
I've heard that some people like it (Chinese co-workers), as they feel everyone acting better, but they don't live in China at the moment.