China's chilling dictatorship is moving quickly to introduce social scorecards by which all citizens will be monitored 24/7 and ranked on their behaviour.

The Communist Party's plan is for every one of its 1.4 billion citizens to be at the whim of a dystopian social credit system, and it's on track to be fully operational by the year 2020.

An active pilot program has already seen millions of people each assigned a score out of 800 and either reap its benefits or suffer its consequences — depending on which end of the scale they sit.

Under the social credit scheme, points are lost and gained based on readings from a sophisticated network of 200 million surveillance cameras — a figure set to triple in 18 months.

The program has been enabled by rapid advances in facial recognition, body scanning and geo-tracking.