The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture Series
under the Cornell East Asia Program. The arguments and viewpoints
of this talk belongs solely to the speaker.
We hope you enjoy.
I'm very happy to introduce you to Tom McDonald who is an assistant professor of sociology
at Hong Kong University. He finished his PhD actually in the field of anthropology
at University College London in 2013. And during some of the dissertation
research then, and then in this next couple of years while on postdoc,
accumulated much experience in rural China
working on ethnographic projects there which led him to work on social media
and new technology particularly as it's used, experienced in rural China
or amongst migrants in big cities. He's here to speak to us
tonight about a subset of this topic so please join me in welcoming Tom McDonald.
Thank you very much for the wonderful introduction and a huge thank you to Professor McNeil,
to Professor Friedman for the invitation. Thanks Amala at the back for the
wonderful logistical organization and all the activities and thanks obviously
to the East Asia program and to the Contemporary China Initiative here at
Cornell for the chance to be here and speak and of course thank you to you all
for giving up your time and actually coming. I will try to keep you entertained and interested.
Okay so as was mentioned part of the theme of this series
has been this urban and rural integration
and transformation in China. So some of the topic I'd like to talk
about today through the lens of digital money is rural migrants
and their transformation of theirselves into this urban self
and how that really functions when they still keep hold of, look back on, and have to
reflect upon the rural relationships that they have and how those are
juxtaposed against new different forms of relations.
So hopefully this links the bigger theme of the series and today's talk is called
"Social Money and Working Class Subjectives: Digital Money and Migrant Labor in Shenzhen."
So I wanted to start with a quote to think on.
And that is from Emily Martin the anthropologist and it says "money circulates in Chinese
communities in ways premised on an entirely different logic than that
of capitalism . . . building pure interaction and allowing personal liberty at the same time."
So these reflections made by anthropologist Emily Martin on what she
viewed to be the particularly unusual social nature of money in China
actually stemmed from her ethnographic fieldwork which she conducted amidst the apparent
onset of capitalization in the Taiwanese countryside between 1969 to 1975.
So examining a range of different rural economic institutions such as
labor, marriage, and rotating credit societies, Martin actually argued that the Chinese
cultural understanding of money possessed unique characteristics,
most notably in the way money served to facilitate social integration by acting
as a road opener within relationships. But now the spectacular recent growth of
digital payment platforms in China has once again engendered a sense of intrigue
around Chinese money. This time they're not
driven so much by the idiosyncratic nature of local vernacular practices
of money use but instead by an awe at the apparent sophistication, ubiquity,
and variety of ways that money in its newly digital form is now being put to use.
So for example a recent article from the New York Times proclaims that China is
systematically and rapidly doing away with paper money and coins.
This enthusiasm seems in part to be a reaction to the conspicuousness
of China's digital payment platforms in everyday life which of course are made
tangible almost everywhere in China through prominently displayed signage
in shops and stores that show they take online payments along with the kind of
novel sight you see of customers almost everywhere carrying out transactions
using their smartphone rather than with cash or cards. So the above phenomena
make visible a deeper infrastructural transformation that's going on in China,
which is the convergence of many popular digital payment platforms into existing
social media and communication technologies. So this really distinctive
technosocial formation in China raises two important questions I think
for scholars. The first one is does the apparent enthusiasm amongst Chinese
Internet users for the integration of digital payment platforms into social media
reflect a more general shared cultural recognition of money
as possessing somehow inherently social characteristics? Then second how might
such a convergence potentially extend money's social nature? And in particular
what significance might this have for marginalized and low-income groups,
who often as we knows confront severe challenges of economic inequality,
institutional exclusion, and social immobility.
In other words can these supposedly newly social forms of digital money
in China really have any bearing or impact upon working class life? So this study
will try to answer these questions by drawing on the testimonies and some of
the observed behaviors of migrant factory workers from the Chinese city
of Shenzhen. Because these workers experienced intense constraints on their
financial resources and on their social mobility meaning that they often
run short of cash or they need to borrow from friends or family,
this group of people stand to be amongst the most affected by
the digitization of money. Hence factory workers offer a unique
vantage point from which to assess the potentially social nature of digital money
and its impact on the working class. So Jack Qiu in the Chinese University of Hong Kong
has claimed that the extensive use of low-cost
information communication technologies by migrant factory workers is leading to
what he calls a working class network society and the formation of a digital
working class in China. So building on this proposition I want to draw on
my fieldwork data to argue that the exceptional cultural power of money
means that its digitization has actually become one of the central ways
through which the dynamics of class subjectivity are now playing out in China.
Such processes however neither preordained nor are they bound to proceed in uniform ways.
So this paper is gonna be divided into four sections. In the first section
what I'll do is try to highlight some of the very impressive body
of scholarship that already exists pointing out the distinctive social capacities
of money in China, which leads me to argue that the emergence of digital
money necessitates further scholarly inquiry. Secondly I wanted to describe
the methods that I've employed in order to gain an understanding of migrant
factory workers' attitudes towards digital money. Then in the third section
I'll examine the workers' different strategies for appropriating three major
Chinese digital payment platforms. So that's WeChat Wallet, QQ Wallet, and Alipay.
What I'm gonna do is document how participants see WeChat Wallet as
being best suited for small everyday transactions with their friends and family,
QQ wallet as being generally too risky
for the involvement of money, and then Alipay as ideal for the storage
and transfer of significant sums. So this analysis will reveal how different
platforms in fact tend to engender quite distinctive working class subjectivities,
which actually extend sociality in various and different ways.
So part of my argument is that this variance actually demonstrates that the
circulation of digital money on these platforms involves not only the transfer
of specific kinds of economic capital but also the transaction of different
cultural and political values. And then the fourth section I'll try
and conclude by discussing the broader implications of this finding, and explore
how the manyfold different logics that are central to digital money
actually underline the processual and the shifting nature of working class
subjectivity in China today.
Okay so this section's called social money
and social media money in China. So the prominent position of money
in Chinese society has been very well documented by scholars studying the region,
who've recorded its role in ritualized gift giving during major life events
such as weddings, funerals, celebrations of offspring surviving in infancy,
and annual Chinese New Year festivals. Also of course forms of paper currency or
spirit money are often used by living persons to mediate
exchanges with cosmological entities such as gods, ghosts, and ancestors.
Recent accounts of reform era China also highlight the increasing
intrusion of money into areas where its influence
had previously been constrained under the socialist command economy.
So these include for instance concerns regarding bribery
where money is seen to kind of sully traditional principles of
guanxi exchange based on familiarity and also instances of individualistic young
couples extorting their parents for ever increasing amounts of bride wealth.
Just there's two examples. So what's interesting here is the tension
that Simmel actually describes of money possessing as being both socially integrating
and also having disintegrating aspects is implicit
in these kind of recent narratives as is the idea that money's social qualities
are what can engender kind of immoral actions by those who use them.
So in spite of the differences in the empirical settings between Emily Martin's
Taiwanese field site and my own in contemporary Shenzhen, her assertion that
of the distinctive and the integrative nature of money in Chinese culture
as one that enables dense exchanges that increase personal autonomy,
this also ostensibly I think resonates with the recent growth of digital money in China.
These new platforms actually facilitate monetary exchanges within
existing friendship and kinship networks while also at the same time allowing
users to pay for goods and services in physical shops, restaurants,
online marketplaces, taxis, food delivery companies, travel agencies,
utility companies, the list goes on and on. These seemingly grant increased
convenience and autonomy to users over how money can be put to use.
So while such exchange practices may in some instance play a role
in the maintenance of social relations, the assumption that the increased volume
and the occurrence of monetary exchanges bought by
digitization will invariably produce more or deeper social relations needs to
be avoided and questioned if reliable assessments and judgments of the
potentially socially integrative or disintegrative nature of digital money
are to be reached. Okay so this section is called doing field work on factory work
and the data presented in this paper forms part of a larger 3.5 year
long project that's researching digital money and migration in China.
So field work for this project started in June 2016 and continued
through to November last year. However much of the data that I'll be presenting
today was collected in the summer of 2016 in an industrial factory area on the outskirts
of the city of Shenzhen in China. So this research actually involved
a combination of group, individual interviews, and also ethnographic observation
with migrant factory labor participants along with more casual discussions
and interactions with dozens of other migrant workers
who also resided in the area. All of the migrant participants in this study
were either currently working in local factories or they'd done so
for significant periods in preceding months 'cause a lot of migrants swapped their jobs,
got dissatisfied with their factories and so on.
The majority of the key participants here
were second generation male migrant workers who were
in their early 20s as the largest factory in the neighborhood of this
sprawling Foxconn campus that specialized in laptop computer assembly
primarily recruited from this kind of demographic of people.
So while we couldn't gain access to the factories
where participants spend their working hours
we nonetheless found ourselves hanging out with workers in nearby parks,
in public squares, canteens, malls, and they're rented accommodation.
This provided additional possibilities to observe the broader monetary
ecologies that these workers inhabited, witnessing the kind of consumptive
opportunities and public messages concerning digital money that they
encountered in their day-to-day lives. And this information actually ended up
being instrumental in helping to discern and appreciate the distinct qualities
that migrant workers were actually attaching to different digital money platforms.
Okay so the following section actually takes three main digital money
platforms which are used by migrant workers, WeChat Wallet, QQ Wallet, and Alipay,
and examine these three in order. It's worth pointing out that other digital money
platforms do exist in China but that our participants didn't really talk
about them or mention them during the time when we were there.
So these platforms, these three platforms were launched at different times
and for quite different purposes. However over the years
all of these three platforms, these three payment platforms,
have ended up being increasingly like each other.
And if you can see here they offer kinds of similar functionalities.
They allow workers - users - to enact and receive transfers from other individuals,
to pay for services and goods in online or offline contexts, and also to take
full advantage of these features, all of these platforms encourage users
to link conventional bank cards to their account
so that funds can be transferred to and from the platform.
So while increasing the homogeneity of all of these platforms,
in their service offerings suggest that there's just a like-for-like
choice on the part of the users. Some differences of course do exist
in the corporate strategies of the companies that operate them.
These companies also sometimes create payment ecosystems for buying
certain goods or services. So for instance purchases of
online goods on the shopping marketplace Taobao
must be processed through Alipay for instance.
However emphasizing corporations is the only source
of this diversity amongst the similarity of these competing payment platforms.
I think risks overlooking how users' own engagement with these technologies
actually becomes a really important additional venue, an additional avenue
for the inscription of kinds of differences onto these particular platforms.
So while workers' distinctive understanding of the different platforms
may not be immediately apparent, dismissing these kinds of perspectives
as unimportant perpetuates what Jack Qiu has referred to as the dramatically
lopsided field in Chinese internet studies which disproportionately focuses
on professionals, on commercial enterprises, on non-government activities,
while having very little interest in the working class people who use these
platforms and the issues they face. So Madianou and Miller's concept
of polymedia actually provides a really useful additional theoretical tool for helping
to overcome this problem. They seek to describe how the proliferation
of low-cost communication technologies and virtually free-to-use platforms in many
parts of the world means that decisions around which media to use shift from one
that's based on constraints, like the cost or their efforts to use
a particular platform, that are imposed by each media to pay more attention
to the social and the emotional consequences of their use.
This Madianou Miller claim makes polymedia about a new set of social relations
of technology rather than merely a technological development
of increased convergence.
Polymedia is this particularly well-suited
to understanding digital media use in China because it can reveal the really
distinctive sets of relationships that users actually associate with each of
these platforms despite the apparent similarities that exists between them.
So understanding the structure of these relationships provides an avenue
for making sense of the potential interactions between digital money
and these kinds of nuanced working class subjectivities. So the first platform
I want to concentrate on is WeChat Wallet which workers often said was
based for use between friends. So participants often described
WeChat Wallet as being the most convenient owing to its close integration with WeChat,
which is the social media platform on which it resided.
So WeChat obviously acted as the nucleus of participants frequent daily online
interactions with their close friends and family.
WeChat Wallet used WeChat's contact list to allow money to be easily sent
to individuals and that facilitated monetary exchanges between migrant workers
and other friends or family who also had an account. Now the exchange
of digital red envelopes by WeChat Wallet occupied a really prominent position
in interviews and discussions with workers regarding their
WeChat transactions. While digital red envelopes were yet to replace
the paper versions given and received at major festivals and life stages
they nonetheless spawned several new monetary practices within everyday transactions.
So for example many workers explained that when they settle
the small debt with their friends, such as let's say if they split the bill
for a meal in the restaurant, they typically send money
that they owed using a digital red envelope feature instead of the standard
transfer function on WeChat. Both functions they said achieved
the same goal of moving funds between users. However the former was described as
carrying more 人情, so carrying more human emotion and social emotion.
So while sentiments around the fun and friendly nature of digital
red envelope transactions were widely shared amongst participants,
the use becomes particularly important to migrant factory workers as a means of
coping with their constrained social opportunities that result from the
meager salaries and the often extended working hours that they labor under.
So several participants enthusiastically described how distributing red envelopes
within WeChat messaging groups that were composed of fellow migrant workers
constituted a form of relatively undemanding socialization.
So as opposed to digital red envelopes being sent to selected individuals
distributing digital red envelopes to WeChat groups involved specifying
a fixed amount of funds that was to be shared in random portions
between a number of users giving all group members a chance to compete for the funds
by reacting the fastest to these notifications.
Sending a digital red envelope into groups created
moments of intense copresence against otherwise asynchronous online
interactions that they had with each other. So for instance let me
illustrate this. Xi, who was a male migrant worker in his early 40s,
often recalled how he would lie on his dormitory bed after completing
very lengthy production line shifts, saying he was just too exhausted to contemplate
going outside and socializing with other people. Xi explained that sending red envelopes
to other workers within a WeChat group actually helped to establish
a kind of congregative socially vivacious atmosphere online which avoided
the inconvenience and often the expense of meeting up in person.
This was particularly valued he said given the
isolating nature of production line work where communication with coworkers
during one's shift was often virtually impossible. So he described how around 8:00 p.m.
every night saw a brief flurry of these messages being exchanged
within multiple WeChat groups as different individuals sent small amounts of money
into these groups to be grabbed like 钱 [money] by their friends.
So the comments of
Wu, another male migrant worker, encapsulate how such exchanges could be
particularly effective engendering this kind of group excitement.
So he said if you send a red envelope into the group it may only be 5 RMB.
But let us say you split it between 30 people who compete for it.
You know I reckon this is enlivening the atmosphere. So this effervescent
atmosphere often became, for a short while at least, kind of self-sustaining
as one envelope that was sent into the group often prompted other workers to
also send further envelopes into the group in turn with users playing what
Adam Chao has described as an active participating role as makers of the
social sensorium. So although the monetary amounts of individual red
envelopes that were sent by participants into WeChat groups remained pretty small,
the effective impact of such exchanges was nonetheless dramatic.
Perhaps most revealing in this connection was migrant workers' very strongly held resolve
the exchanges of digital red envelopes within WeChat groups should not be
driven by a desire for personal gain. So when participants were asked whether
their use of red envelopes had bought them a net gain or a loss many responded
that this just did not matter anyway because the point of such exchanges
was actually to foster emotion or 感情 with one's friends.
So the logic of digital red envelope distribution within these WeChat groups
actually can be seen to share certain traits with Emily Martin's description
of rotating credit societies in which she actually stresses that members'
pooling of money is not with the intention to accumulate profit,
but rather it's seen as creating an obligation to engage in another
interaction at a later time. So this logic is arguably even more
applicable in the case of Chinese factory workers where the small amounts
of money involved in individual transactions online actually combined
with their daily frequency and the randomized nature of these payouts
to emphasize a kind of pure interaction of such exchanges and this generalized
sense of reciprocity. So in addition to WeChat Wallet transactions facilitating
monetary exchanges between friends, the WeChat platform was actually also
increasingly tied to participants consumptive practices.
So WeChat Wallet was the most widely accepted payment platform
in the small stores that lined the crowded alleyways
and also in the wider streets in the neighborhood that surrounded the factories.
So just as an example we walked down one street
and went into every shop on this street and asked shop owners
if they accepted WeChat Wallet, if they accepted Alipay,
and WeChat Wallet was the most widely accepted
payment platform in the small stores and
crowded alleyways, and Alipay was generally accepted in large supermarkets,
department stores, and online retailers. By contrast WeChat Wallet could be used
in a far wider array of venues located nearby the factories including in
convenience stores, hole-in-the-wall eateries, and with market traders.
This latter category of consumptive venues primarily sold cheap goods and services
to low-income migrant laborers. Although many venues accepted both
of these payment platforms, enough distinctiveness actually existed
in their distribution for workers to primarily associate WeChat Wallet
with these smaller neighborhood stores. So Chen, a male factory worker,
explained that WeChat supplements Alipay. For places which take Alipay, I'll use Alipay.
But there are some places like stalls where you get breakfast,
they just don't provide this network. So work has also maintained
that the WeChat platform was primarily suited for small transactions.
One male migrant worker
felt that this represented the chief difference between WeChat and Alipay.
He claimed to adhere to the following very simple rule of thumb.
He said if it's a small amount of money use WeChat
but if it's a big amount of money use Alipay.
So in this sense WeChat Wallet really appeared to live up to its name.
It was quite literally akin to a personal wallet
used for storing small amounts of money intended for everyday use.
Furthermore because factory workers associated the small stores,
often operated by fellow migrants, with receiving WeChat wallet payments,
its use in these venues provided opportunities for migrant workers to
actually increase the density of their social interactions through different
payment repertoires that were associated with this platform.
So migrant worker Chen gave one such example.
He said I often go to a particular food stall
and I've added their WeChat. After I've eaten I'll just leave
and on the way back I'll actually transfer the money
to the food stall owner and it's fine. So here by choosing to pay for his regular
early morning meal from a small street-side vendor using WeChat Wallet the role this
platform plays in mediating such recurring transactions actually becomes visible.
Furthermore here digital money actually
interestingly serves to intentionally delay payments, running counter to
popular discourses which, as anthropologist Bill Maurer notes,
generally assume that these kinds of technologies invariably deliver greater
speed and efficiency.
In this instant Chen's temporal reordering and spatial
relocating of the consumption and the payment of a service, the consumption of
a service away from the moment of payment, actually allows both himself
and the vendor to reaffirm their mutual trust with each other on a daily basis.
So here the repertoires of payment that surround the exchange of money
are shown to fulfill different communicative functions
through which migrant workers are able to add density
to their daily social interactions in the urban space.
Okay so to compare this with another platform we'll now move on
to QQ Wallet which workers said generally was problematic 'cause
there were too many people on QQ. So although QQ wallet had also been
developed within an existing social media platform, that's QQ,
participants regarded the convergence of monetary and communicative media
on this platform to be an unappealing one,
leading to it being the least popular payment platform amongst the three.
A key concern here was the perception that those other users
using this platform actually somehow lacked integrity.
Participants generally stored a far larger number of contacts on their QQ account
than they did on their WeChat account and felt that they knew comparatively less
about these contacts. So the fact that the social media platform QQ was launched
over a decade before WeChat, so QQ was launched in 1999, WeChat in 2011,
helps to explain workers' distrust of other QQ users. Participants recorded
that their QQ accounts were predominantly composed
of persons from their hometown or previous classmates from their school,
many of whom they're now fallen out of contact with.
As a result while work has tended to be relatively selective
with regards to who they added as contacts on WeChat,
QQ was instead seen as being somehow littered with persons who they knew
as a result of their prior circumstances, which at the time they often
had comparatively little control over. The composition of people on
QQ meant their interactions occurring on this platform were often quite noncommittal.
They were often unplanned and they were often sporadic.
They were just as likely to be mediated through the platform's
online games or through personal photo albums than they necessarily were
via instant messaging. So while this led to QQ being regarded by workers as being
well-suited for entertaining oneself through having interactions with distant others
and also explains QQ's enduring popularity as a social media platform,
this also gave rise to certain uncertainties over QQ Wallet's
suitability for mediating financial transactions. On the rare occasions when participants
actually did use QQ Wallet, it was often within multiplayer games
online where money held on the platform could be exchanged for Q coins or Q币
or other in-game currencies that were used for buying virtual goods such as
weapons or skills that could aid users' gameplay.
Sometimes these were also gifted to other players.
So in this sense although money that was stored on the QQ Wallet
did sometimes end up being used in social ways it was primarily for the
kinds of short lived and pleasurable activities that were actually felt to
typify the QQ platform as a whole. So closer analysis of money circulation
within QQ Wallet reveals kind of two dimensions of sociality that are quite
distinctive from those experienced through WeChat Wallet.
The first is that rather than transfers chiefly creating a kind of social cohesion,
monetary exchanges on QQ Wallet instead permit the somewhat formal
structure of Tencent to actually draw on workers in material resources
such as their game based interactions, their attention, and their effort
by constructing value around these multiple game based currencies
that are operated by the company.
This facilitates the extraction of material resources and
real money from the workers.
Secondly the fact that many workers opted to eschew
QQ Wallet entirely in favor of both WeChat Wallet and Alipay suggests
that familiar connections based on static notions of shared hometown
or schooling are actually giving away to much more dynamic processes
of relational formation where workers are acutely aware of their positioning
within shifting social networks. And they also seek to avail themselves
of the opportunities that are presented by this.
A further shaping force around workers' attitudes
towards QQ Wallet came from participants having also previously
friended strangers through QQ, meaning that their contact list on these
platforms also often frequently contained multiple persons who they had
never actually ever met in face-to-face encounters. So while these kinds of
strangership provided additional sources of amusement and often
opportunities for participants to reflect on their self through
interactions with others, the presence of unknown others on QQ also gave rise
to numerous concerns around the safety of money stored within.
So male migrant worker Wong actually explained
if you're talking about QQ in my own opinion
I don't think QQ's that safe. WeChat is comparatively safer.
For QQ I only have to know your account number
then it is possible to hack your QQ.
So there was this big concern that there were lots of people on my QQ
that I don't know and some of them would somehow be able to hack
into my account.
So to summarize, in contrast to WeChat, QQ's abundance of users, many of whom
might have been strangers or from the rural place where they came from who
they're no longer in contact with, this actually appeared both chaotic
and unknowable, leading to this platform to be judged as largely incommensurate and
incompatible with digital money. While QQ Wallet exchanges did
occasionally facilitate social interactions between individuals,
this was typically framed within shared leisure experiences rather than being
guided by notions of kinship or community or just simple economic exchange.
The intention was to use money to keep distant relations amicable
and noncommittal rather than deepening any obligation.
Okay so to move to the final platform, Alipay.
Unlike WeChat Wallet and QQ Wallet Alipay had not been
integrated into an existing social media platform from the outset.
Instead its emergence was tied to the growth
of online shopping marketplaces Alibaba and Taobao,
both of which were also owned by the Alibaba Group. In its earliest incarnation
Alipay acted chiefly as an escrow service mediating payments
between merchants and their customers. Features were then subsequently added
for transferring funds between individuals and for fulfilling a range
of other everyday transactions. Over the years Alipay's attempted
to actually compensate for the absence of integrations
with existing social media platforms
by introducing additional new kinds of social features which I don't
have time to describe in detail now. But however what's really interesting
is these efforts have not always been positively received by users.
Rather than Alipay's lack of connections with existing online social networks
detracting from its appeal, work has actually suggested that
the platform's isolation in fact made it more suitable for larger transactions
or even for the storage of significant sums of money.
So participants often cited Alipay's
distinctive handling of users' contacts as evidence of the platform's somewhat
limited social nature. So in common with WeChat and QQ, Alipay also featured
a contacts list. However none of the participants interviewed during the time
of the research actually reported linking Alipay to their phone contacts.
Instead many said that they preferred to only manually add contacts to this list for
the explicit purpose of transferring funds. By contrast both WeChat Wallet and
QQ Wallet actually offered the ability to send money to anyone who was a friend
on the social network even if there had been no communication beyond simply
accepting a friend request. So male migrant factory worker Li
summed up the distinction in terms of Alipay actually offering
improved control over which persons should be included in this payment platform.
So he said in reality Alipay's contacts are somewhat choice based.
Normally you'll manually add people but generally speaking if you don't have any
financial exchange with that person then you won't add them.
Another migrant worker Zhao similarly suggested that Alipay was reserved
for purely monetary exchange and was ostensibly devoid of social interactions.
They said that normally there is no communication with contacts in Alipay.
It's normally only an economic connection.
Alipay contacts, they're mainly based on money. Apart from this
there is not really any other use for Alipay. Migrant laborer Deng said that
because people understood Alipay to be a venue
that was reserved for financial transactions only,
any action oriented towards social exchanges that occurred on it would in fact
be treated with suspicion by others. He said if you send out friend requests
on Alipay a lot of people just won't accept the invitation. They think you're
actually trying to borrow money from them or something like that.
So the perceived limited sociality of interactions on Alipay actually gave rise
to factory workers regarding it as being the most somewhat most
professional or 专业, most specialized platform for managing money that was
that was ideal for sizeable transactions often involving hundreds or even
thousdands of renminbi. Or for online purchases from large impersonal institutions,
such as supermarkets, travel agents, or utility companies, or unknown entities,
such as Taobao merchants. As one male participant explained
it's for that kind of purchase like travel tickets, plane tickets, hotels,
then I'll use Alipay. This comment I think is really really telling, as although
WeChat Wallet and QQ Wallet offer virtually identical functions for
facilitating such purchases, this worker nevertheless remained adamant
that Alipay was best suited for such sizable transactions. And so the notion
of polymedia here is again really useful in helping to make sense of how in the
process of weighing up choices between roughly equivalent platforms,
users actually base their decisions on the specific sets of social relations that
they associate with each of these platforms rather than on the constraints
of one platform over another. The relative detachment of Alipay from
workers' existing social networks and from everyday interactions gave
Alipay transactions a kind of sociality that while not entirely absent,
nonetheless seems somehow depersonalized when compared to the sending of money
between friends or to the small face-to-face purchases
that WeChat was understood to be ideal for.
So workers' growing relationship with the Alipay platform itself
became particularly apparent through considering Yuebao
which was a feature within Alipay that provided users
with a kind of savings account style functionality.
So this was first introduced in 2013. When it was first introduced in 2013
what was important is Yuebao differed from the third party payment services
that I've just described in that although it was built into Alipay's payment platform,
it's actually more of a money market fund which pays users interest on
funds that are deposited on the platform. So the minimum deposit for Yuebao
is just 1 RMB.
However funds can be withdrawn without notice
and Yuebao offers interest rates that were slightly more
generous than that of accounts held with conventional banks.
Yuebao interest was also paid on a daily basis.
As you can see here it's like yesterday's profits, 2 RMB.
Whereas banks normally only paid interest monthly or annually.
So while many workers struggled to meet the high cost of living in Shenzhen
those who were able to save small amounts would often deposit these monies in
their Yuebao account. One worker described to me the satisfaction that
was derived from seeing his money grow every day even if it was just by a few 毛 [cents].
So the importance of Yuebao amongst low-income individuals such as
migrant factory workers was also particularly apparent. Participants have
very limited investment options and they were generally extremely wary of any
investment channel which carried a risk of losing one's initial outlay.
In light of these limited options factory laborers instead often prioritized
an assured return and the safety of their funds
which they saw Yuebao as offering. Furthermore money stored in Yuebao
was perceived to be somehow favorably detached from their familiar
social networks as at the time of conducting this fieldwork funds first
needed to be transferred out of Yuebao into a users main Alipay
account before they could then be sent to other individuals or used for purchases.
So Wang Jing has also noted how money market funds like Yuebao
have made financial investment available to anyone who can access the Internet.
She's argued that this not only widens
participation in financial activities in China but it also results in a close
working partnership between technology companies and also financial enterprises.
So while Wang's chief focus is on the structural transition occurring at this
institutional level my own study I think seems to demonstrate how workers'
enthusiastic adoption of Yuebao and of Alipay more generally represents more than
just an outcome of these kind of macro-level structural shifts.
Worker's agency in affecting such a repositioning away from banks and to work
and towards technology firms must also be acknowledged as should the class
equality dimensions that permeate such decisions.
As one of our female factory worker participants really wonderfully described,
she said banks treats VIPs and us differently.
VIPs have gold cards, diamond cards. When they go to use bank cashiers
the people meet each other and then there is this separation between
rich and poor, high and low status. But when you use Alipay it's all
operated on your phone so it's not the same.
So workers' participation in these forms of online investment
raised really important questions around how
the new capacities for engaging in financializing activities actually have
implications for working class subjectivity. With digital money services
allowing workers to increasingly pursue their own individual and private investments,
workers can no longer simply be assumed to be
passive subjects of global monopoly capital, but are themselves increasingly
active adopters of various logics of financialization.
While the chief beneficiary of workers' decisions to store funds on Alipay
is undoubtedly the Alibaba Group itself
this instance nonetheless speaks to the growing
contradictions that are inherent in the novel working class subjectivities that
are being made possible through digital money in China.
So to conclude.
This paper opened by questioning whether the increasing convergence
between digital money platforms and social media actually represented
a reflection of what Emily Martin had posited to be the unusually
social nature of money in China.
Through the above comparison of migrant factory workers' varying
attitudes towards three different digital money platforms,
it can be seen that while WeChat Wallet's integration with
existing offline social networks and monetary behaviors seemingly corresponds
with this idea of sociality this just isn't representative of all platforms.
QQ Wallet by contrast was felt by workers to be comprised of somewhat
disorderly social connections and was therefore unsuitable for digital money,
whereas the detachment of Alipay, and its savings feature Yuebao,
from laborers' everyday networks of connections was conversely the very
factor that gave it its appeal. So this variation then would seem to
problematize Martin's assertion of the existence of a Chinese cultural logic
that sees money as being somehow inherently socially integrative.
Rather than asking whether digital money might be more or might be less
social than its predecessors, this study has instead demonstrated
how distinct forms of sociality actually become associated
with competing digital money platforms.
This I feel is particularly significant for migrant factory workers
who are appropriating digital money who are often acutely aware of these varying
forms of sociality and also seek to be able to move between them in ways that
are conducive to their own social lives and aspirations. This insight I feel can
begin to form a basis from which to address the second question that is
raised by the convergence of money into China's communicative media,
which was whether or not such a confluence might actually extend
the social possibilities of money and might potentially rework rigid social divides
and so in so doing ameliorate some of the challenges and difficulties
encountered in the course of working class life.
This question has particular significance when one
considers the widespread claims by different voices that champion the
digitization of money in China as both expanding financial inclusion and
economic opportunity for the country's low-income populations. Analysis of this
fieldwork data has helped to reveal how these heterogeneous forms of
sociality which are produced by the circulation of money through these
platforms can at times actually allow factory workers to confront the various
resource institutional and social constraints that they face in various ways.
At other times though these specific forms of sociality may actually
entrench such obstacles. The social ways that money moves between workers through
WeChat forms for instance an antithesis to the logics of capital that they
encounter on the factory floor, fostering relations between workers
that can help to combat the social isolation they often otherwise face.
By contrast QQ's strong association with old school friends and strangers,
whom migrants increasingly wish to limit their exchanges with,
combines with the tendency for money on QQ Wallet to be used in game based interactions,
facilitating Tencent's attempts to extract wealth from its users.
The depersonalized nature of transfer and storage of money on Alipay centers
around a form of sociality that's premised chiefly on interactions
with institutions, including Alipay itself, while also fostering more individualistic
forms of accumulation often driven by emerging logics of
financialization amongst workers. The breadth of socialities that are produced
through migrant workers appropriation of digital money carries two important
theoretical implications. First they underline the need to repudiate these
techno-deterministic accounts of the digitization of money in China
as somehow being destined to facilitate economic and social inclusion by
challenging the assumption that novel monetary technologies will inevitably
generate more wealth for their users. What matters to workers is not simply
whether using particular digital money platforms will ultimately make them
more money but rather whether the kinds of sociality that's actually being
produced through their use can address the forms of exclusion that are present
and that they face in their everyday lives. Secondly though this paper
also contributes to a deeper understanding of the emergence of the
digital working class in China by highlighting how money's communicative
and it's symbolic capacities are actually being extended
through money's increasing role within communicative media
such that digital money is becoming a key means through which
working class subjectivities are being produced, shared, and actually explored.
This affirms recent understandings of class as shifting, contextual,
and also processual. While factory workers' sentiments
towards digital money platforms may sometimes be shared with other social
groups in China, being able to contextualize workers attitudes against
the very distinctive economic, institutional, and social barriers that
they face actually affords these viewpoints with a unique specificity.
At a moment then when money and media technologies in China are increasingly
undergoing an increased convergence, and as non-Chinese technology companies
seek to also emulate this supposed success, acknowledging the handworkers
actually having transforming the social possibilities of money can give
rise to really important discussions about what we ourselves may actually
want money to mean. Thank you very much.