1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,120 The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture Series 2 00:00:04,120 --> 00:00:07,880 under the Cornell East Asia Program. The arguments and viewpoints 3 00:00:07,880 --> 00:00:10,120 of this talk belongs solely to the speaker. 4 00:00:10,120 --> 00:00:11,460 We hope you enjoy. 5 00:00:12,640 --> 00:00:20,380 I'm very happy to introduce you to Tom McDonald who is an assistant professor of sociology 6 00:00:20,380 --> 00:00:26,180 at Hong Kong University. He finished his PhD actually in the field of anthropology 7 00:00:26,180 --> 00:00:33,440 at University College London in 2013. And during some of the dissertation 8 00:00:33,440 --> 00:00:37,960 research then, and then in this next couple of years while on postdoc, 9 00:00:37,960 --> 00:00:42,520 accumulated much experience in rural China 10 00:00:42,520 --> 00:00:51,220 working on ethnographic projects there which led him to work on social media 11 00:00:51,220 --> 00:00:59,580 and new technology particularly as it's used, experienced in rural China 12 00:00:59,580 --> 00:01:04,340 or amongst migrants in big cities. He's here to speak to us 13 00:01:04,340 --> 00:01:13,080 tonight about a subset of this topic so please join me in welcoming Tom McDonald. 14 00:01:16,420 --> 00:01:25,799 Thank you very much for the wonderful introduction and a huge thank you to Professor McNeil, 15 00:01:25,799 --> 00:01:32,430 to Professor Friedman for the invitation. Thanks Amala at the back for the 16 00:01:32,430 --> 00:01:38,040 wonderful logistical organization and all the activities and thanks obviously 17 00:01:38,040 --> 00:01:43,649 to the East Asia program and to the Contemporary China Initiative here at 18 00:01:43,649 --> 00:01:49,950 Cornell for the chance to be here and speak and of course thank you to you all 19 00:01:49,950 --> 00:01:57,460 for giving up your time and actually coming. I will try to keep you entertained and interested. 20 00:01:57,460 --> 00:02:04,780 Okay so as was mentioned part of the theme of this series 21 00:02:04,780 --> 00:02:08,120 has been this urban and rural integration 22 00:02:08,120 --> 00:02:12,120 and transformation in China. So some of the topic I'd like to talk 23 00:02:12,120 --> 00:02:18,660 about today through the lens of digital money is rural migrants 24 00:02:18,660 --> 00:02:25,000 and their transformation of theirselves into this urban self 25 00:02:25,000 --> 00:02:32,080 and how that really functions when they still keep hold of, look back on, and have to 26 00:02:32,080 --> 00:02:38,019 reflect upon the rural relationships that they have and how those are 27 00:02:38,019 --> 00:02:41,920 juxtaposed against new different forms of relations. 28 00:02:41,920 --> 00:02:47,769 So hopefully this links the bigger theme of the series and today's talk is called 29 00:02:47,769 --> 00:02:54,260 "Social Money and Working Class Subjectives: Digital Money and Migrant Labor in Shenzhen." 30 00:02:54,260 --> 00:02:58,760 So I wanted to start with a quote to think on. 31 00:02:58,760 --> 00:03:06,060 And that is from Emily Martin the anthropologist and it says "money circulates in Chinese 32 00:03:06,060 --> 00:03:11,060 communities in ways premised on an entirely different logic than that 33 00:03:11,060 --> 00:03:18,340 of capitalism . . . building pure interaction and allowing personal liberty at the same time." 34 00:03:18,340 --> 00:03:24,310 So these reflections made by anthropologist Emily Martin on what she 35 00:03:24,310 --> 00:03:29,540 viewed to be the particularly unusual social nature of money in China 36 00:03:29,540 --> 00:03:35,160 actually stemmed from her ethnographic fieldwork which she conducted amidst the apparent 37 00:03:35,160 --> 00:03:43,460 onset of capitalization in the Taiwanese countryside between 1969 to 1975. 38 00:03:43,460 --> 00:03:49,700 So examining a range of different rural economic institutions such as 39 00:03:49,700 --> 00:03:56,160 labor, marriage, and rotating credit societies, Martin actually argued that the Chinese 40 00:03:56,160 --> 00:04:00,900 cultural understanding of money possessed unique characteristics, 41 00:04:00,900 --> 00:04:06,819 most notably in the way money served to facilitate social integration by acting 42 00:04:06,819 --> 00:04:13,269 as a road opener within relationships. But now the spectacular recent growth of 43 00:04:13,269 --> 00:04:19,240 digital payment platforms in China has once again engendered a sense of intrigue 44 00:04:19,240 --> 00:04:22,600 around Chinese money. This time they're not 45 00:04:22,600 --> 00:04:28,140 driven so much by the idiosyncratic nature of local vernacular practices 46 00:04:28,140 --> 00:04:34,500 of money use but instead by an awe at the apparent sophistication, ubiquity, 47 00:04:34,500 --> 00:04:41,780 and variety of ways that money in its newly digital form is now being put to use. 48 00:04:41,780 --> 00:04:48,200 So for example a recent article from the New York Times proclaims that China is 49 00:04:48,200 --> 00:04:53,760 systematically and rapidly doing away with paper money and coins. 50 00:04:53,760 --> 00:04:59,320 This enthusiasm seems in part to be a reaction to the conspicuousness 51 00:04:59,320 --> 00:05:05,160 of China's digital payment platforms in everyday life which of course are made 52 00:05:05,160 --> 00:05:10,040 tangible almost everywhere in China through prominently displayed signage 53 00:05:10,040 --> 00:05:14,980 in shops and stores that show they take online payments along with the kind of 54 00:05:14,980 --> 00:05:19,210 novel sight you see of customers almost everywhere carrying out transactions 55 00:05:19,210 --> 00:05:25,540 using their smartphone rather than with cash or cards. So the above phenomena 56 00:05:25,540 --> 00:05:30,190 make visible a deeper infrastructural transformation that's going on in China, 57 00:05:30,190 --> 00:05:36,490 which is the convergence of many popular digital payment platforms into existing 58 00:05:36,490 --> 00:05:42,190 social media and communication technologies. So this really distinctive 59 00:05:42,190 --> 00:05:47,240 technosocial formation in China raises two important questions I think 60 00:05:47,240 --> 00:05:53,560 for scholars. The first one is does the apparent enthusiasm amongst Chinese 61 00:05:53,560 --> 00:05:58,920 Internet users for the integration of digital payment platforms into social media 62 00:05:58,920 --> 00:06:03,640 reflect a more general shared cultural recognition of money 63 00:06:03,640 --> 00:06:10,300 as possessing somehow inherently social characteristics? Then second how might 64 00:06:10,300 --> 00:06:16,760 such a convergence potentially extend money's social nature? And in particular 65 00:06:16,760 --> 00:06:22,100 what significance might this have for marginalized and low-income groups, 66 00:06:22,100 --> 00:06:27,960 who often as we knows confront severe challenges of economic inequality, 67 00:06:27,960 --> 00:06:32,030 institutional exclusion, and social immobility. 68 00:06:32,030 --> 00:06:37,540 In other words can these supposedly newly social forms of digital money 69 00:06:37,540 --> 00:06:44,300 in China really have any bearing or impact upon working class life? So this study 70 00:06:44,300 --> 00:06:49,340 will try to answer these questions by drawing on the testimonies and some of 71 00:06:49,340 --> 00:06:54,300 the observed behaviors of migrant factory workers from the Chinese city 72 00:06:54,300 --> 00:07:00,440 of Shenzhen. Because these workers experienced intense constraints on their 73 00:07:00,440 --> 00:07:05,520 financial resources and on their social mobility meaning that they often 74 00:07:05,520 --> 00:07:09,600 run short of cash or they need to borrow from friends or family, 75 00:07:09,600 --> 00:07:14,120 this group of people stand to be amongst the most affected by 76 00:07:14,120 --> 00:07:18,770 the digitization of money. Hence factory workers offer a unique 77 00:07:18,770 --> 00:07:24,620 vantage point from which to assess the potentially social nature of digital money 78 00:07:24,620 --> 00:07:32,740 and its impact on the working class. So Jack Qiu in the Chinese University of Hong Kong 79 00:07:32,740 --> 00:07:36,220 has claimed that the extensive use of low-cost 80 00:07:36,229 --> 00:07:42,080 information communication technologies by migrant factory workers is leading to 81 00:07:42,080 --> 00:07:47,000 what he calls a working class network society and the formation of a digital 82 00:07:47,000 --> 00:07:52,500 working class in China. So building on this proposition I want to draw on 83 00:07:52,500 --> 00:07:58,320 my fieldwork data to argue that the exceptional cultural power of money 84 00:07:58,320 --> 00:08:03,340 means that its digitization has actually become one of the central ways 85 00:08:03,340 --> 00:08:09,160 through which the dynamics of class subjectivity are now playing out in China. 86 00:08:09,160 --> 00:08:17,440 Such processes however neither preordained nor are they bound to proceed in uniform ways. 87 00:08:17,440 --> 00:08:23,860 So this paper is gonna be divided into four sections. In the first section 88 00:08:23,860 --> 00:08:28,060 what I'll do is try to highlight some of the very impressive body 89 00:08:28,060 --> 00:08:33,020 of scholarship that already exists pointing out the distinctive social capacities 90 00:08:33,020 --> 00:08:38,419 of money in China, which leads me to argue that the emergence of digital 91 00:08:38,419 --> 00:08:44,870 money necessitates further scholarly inquiry. Secondly I wanted to describe 92 00:08:44,870 --> 00:08:49,490 the methods that I've employed in order to gain an understanding of migrant 93 00:08:49,490 --> 00:08:54,530 factory workers' attitudes towards digital money. Then in the third section 94 00:08:54,530 --> 00:09:00,700 I'll examine the workers' different strategies for appropriating three major 95 00:09:00,700 --> 00:09:07,260 Chinese digital payment platforms. So that's WeChat Wallet, QQ Wallet, and Alipay. 96 00:09:07,260 --> 00:09:12,080 What I'm gonna do is document how participants see WeChat Wallet as 97 00:09:12,080 --> 00:09:17,180 being best suited for small everyday transactions with their friends and family, 98 00:09:17,180 --> 00:09:20,630 QQ wallet as being generally too risky 99 00:09:20,630 --> 00:09:25,320 for the involvement of money, and then Alipay as ideal for the storage 100 00:09:25,320 --> 00:09:30,940 and transfer of significant sums. So this analysis will reveal how different 101 00:09:30,940 --> 00:09:36,840 platforms in fact tend to engender quite distinctive working class subjectivities, 102 00:09:36,840 --> 00:09:41,270 which actually extend sociality in various and different ways. 103 00:09:41,270 --> 00:09:45,470 So part of my argument is that this variance actually demonstrates that the 104 00:09:45,470 --> 00:09:50,570 circulation of digital money on these platforms involves not only the transfer 105 00:09:50,570 --> 00:09:55,820 of specific kinds of economic capital but also the transaction of different 106 00:09:55,820 --> 00:10:00,780 cultural and political values. And then the fourth section I'll try 107 00:10:00,780 --> 00:10:06,420 and conclude by discussing the broader implications of this finding, and explore 108 00:10:06,420 --> 00:10:10,440 how the manyfold different logics that are central to digital money 109 00:10:10,440 --> 00:10:15,160 actually underline the processual and the shifting nature of working class 110 00:10:15,160 --> 00:10:18,160 subjectivity in China today. 111 00:10:18,940 --> 00:10:23,120 Okay so this section's called social money 112 00:10:23,120 --> 00:10:28,320 and social media money in China. So the prominent position of money 113 00:10:28,320 --> 00:10:34,120 in Chinese society has been very well documented by scholars studying the region, 114 00:10:34,120 --> 00:10:40,280 who've recorded its role in ritualized gift giving during major life events 115 00:10:40,280 --> 00:10:45,620 such as weddings, funerals, celebrations of offspring surviving in infancy, 116 00:10:45,620 --> 00:10:51,800 and annual Chinese New Year festivals. Also of course forms of paper currency or 117 00:10:51,800 --> 00:10:55,820 spirit money are often used by living persons to mediate 118 00:10:55,820 --> 00:11:02,460 exchanges with cosmological entities such as gods, ghosts, and ancestors. 119 00:11:02,460 --> 00:11:08,160 Recent accounts of reform era China also highlight the increasing 120 00:11:08,160 --> 00:11:11,460 intrusion of money into areas where its influence 121 00:11:11,460 --> 00:11:16,020 had previously been constrained under the socialist command economy. 122 00:11:16,020 --> 00:11:20,360 So these include for instance concerns regarding bribery 123 00:11:20,360 --> 00:11:24,440 where money is seen to kind of sully traditional principles of 124 00:11:24,440 --> 00:11:30,380 guanxi exchange based on familiarity and also instances of individualistic young 125 00:11:30,380 --> 00:11:35,560 couples extorting their parents for ever increasing amounts of bride wealth. 126 00:11:35,560 --> 00:11:40,000 Just there's two examples. So what's interesting here is the tension 127 00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:46,340 that Simmel actually describes of money possessing as being both socially integrating 128 00:11:46,340 --> 00:11:50,080 and also having disintegrating aspects is implicit 129 00:11:50,080 --> 00:11:55,400 in these kind of recent narratives as is the idea that money's social qualities 130 00:11:55,400 --> 00:12:00,380 are what can engender kind of immoral actions by those who use them. 131 00:12:00,380 --> 00:12:06,400 So in spite of the differences in the empirical settings between Emily Martin's 132 00:12:06,410 --> 00:12:12,500 Taiwanese field site and my own in contemporary Shenzhen, her assertion that 133 00:12:12,500 --> 00:12:18,380 of the distinctive and the integrative nature of money in Chinese culture 134 00:12:18,380 --> 00:12:23,240 as one that enables dense exchanges that increase personal autonomy, 135 00:12:23,240 --> 00:12:30,000 this also ostensibly I think resonates with the recent growth of digital money in China. 136 00:12:30,000 --> 00:12:35,560 These new platforms actually facilitate monetary exchanges within 137 00:12:35,560 --> 00:12:41,450 existing friendship and kinship networks while also at the same time allowing 138 00:12:41,450 --> 00:12:46,400 users to pay for goods and services in physical shops, restaurants, 139 00:12:46,400 --> 00:12:51,060 online marketplaces, taxis, food delivery companies, travel agencies, 140 00:12:51,060 --> 00:12:57,740 utility companies, the list goes on and on. These seemingly grant increased 141 00:12:57,740 --> 00:13:01,960 convenience and autonomy to users over how money can be put to use. 142 00:13:01,960 --> 00:13:07,260 So while such exchange practices may in some instance play a role 143 00:13:07,260 --> 00:13:12,220 in the maintenance of social relations, the assumption that the increased volume 144 00:13:12,220 --> 00:13:15,440 and the occurrence of monetary exchanges bought by 145 00:13:15,440 --> 00:13:22,490 digitization will invariably produce more or deeper social relations needs to 146 00:13:22,490 --> 00:13:27,470 be avoided and questioned if reliable assessments and judgments of the 147 00:13:27,470 --> 00:13:33,200 potentially socially integrative or disintegrative nature of digital money 148 00:13:33,200 --> 00:13:40,200 are to be reached. Okay so this section is called doing field work on factory work 149 00:13:40,200 --> 00:13:46,340 and the data presented in this paper forms part of a larger 3.5 year 150 00:13:46,340 --> 00:13:52,000 long project that's researching digital money and migration in China. 151 00:13:52,000 --> 00:13:57,830 So field work for this project started in June 2016 and continued 152 00:13:57,830 --> 00:14:02,740 through to November last year. However much of the data that I'll be presenting 153 00:14:02,740 --> 00:14:11,340 today was collected in the summer of 2016 in an industrial factory area on the outskirts 154 00:14:11,340 --> 00:14:16,720 of the city of Shenzhen in China. So this research actually involved 155 00:14:16,720 --> 00:14:22,420 a combination of group, individual interviews, and also ethnographic observation 156 00:14:22,420 --> 00:14:28,760 with migrant factory labor participants along with more casual discussions 157 00:14:28,760 --> 00:14:32,020 and interactions with dozens of other migrant workers 158 00:14:32,020 --> 00:14:37,100 who also resided in the area. All of the migrant participants in this study 159 00:14:37,100 --> 00:14:41,560 were either currently working in local factories or they'd done so 160 00:14:41,560 --> 00:14:47,200 for significant periods in preceding months 'cause a lot of migrants swapped their jobs, 161 00:14:47,200 --> 00:14:49,820 got dissatisfied with their factories and so on. 162 00:14:49,820 --> 00:14:52,980 The majority of the key participants here 163 00:14:52,980 --> 00:14:56,450 were second generation male migrant workers who were 164 00:14:56,450 --> 00:15:00,560 in their early 20s as the largest factory in the neighborhood of this 165 00:15:00,560 --> 00:15:06,230 sprawling Foxconn campus that specialized in laptop computer assembly 166 00:15:06,230 --> 00:15:10,340 primarily recruited from this kind of demographic of people. 167 00:15:10,340 --> 00:15:14,900 So while we couldn't gain access to the factories 168 00:15:14,900 --> 00:15:17,340 where participants spend their working hours 169 00:15:17,340 --> 00:15:23,020 we nonetheless found ourselves hanging out with workers in nearby parks, 170 00:15:23,020 --> 00:15:28,120 in public squares, canteens, malls, and they're rented accommodation. 171 00:15:28,120 --> 00:15:35,420 This provided additional possibilities to observe the broader monetary 172 00:15:35,420 --> 00:15:40,760 ecologies that these workers inhabited, witnessing the kind of consumptive 173 00:15:40,760 --> 00:15:45,950 opportunities and public messages concerning digital money that they 174 00:15:45,950 --> 00:15:50,660 encountered in their day-to-day lives. And this information actually ended up 175 00:15:50,660 --> 00:15:56,660 being instrumental in helping to discern and appreciate the distinct qualities 176 00:15:56,660 --> 00:16:02,700 that migrant workers were actually attaching to different digital money platforms. 177 00:16:03,420 --> 00:16:08,720 Okay so the following section actually takes three main digital money 178 00:16:08,720 --> 00:16:15,280 platforms which are used by migrant workers, WeChat Wallet, QQ Wallet, and Alipay, 179 00:16:15,280 --> 00:16:21,440 and examine these three in order. It's worth pointing out that other digital money 180 00:16:21,440 --> 00:16:27,050 platforms do exist in China but that our participants didn't really talk 181 00:16:27,050 --> 00:16:31,220 about them or mention them during the time when we were there. 182 00:16:31,220 --> 00:16:36,600 So these platforms, these three platforms were launched at different times 183 00:16:36,600 --> 00:16:42,100 and for quite different purposes. However over the years 184 00:16:42,100 --> 00:16:46,000 all of these three platforms, these three payment platforms, 185 00:16:46,000 --> 00:16:49,220 have ended up being increasingly like each other. 186 00:16:49,220 --> 00:16:54,060 And if you can see here they offer kinds of similar functionalities. 187 00:16:54,060 --> 00:17:00,260 They allow workers - users - to enact and receive transfers from other individuals, 188 00:17:00,260 --> 00:17:08,140 to pay for services and goods in online or offline contexts, and also to take 189 00:17:08,140 --> 00:17:13,060 full advantage of these features, all of these platforms encourage users 190 00:17:13,060 --> 00:17:16,340 to link conventional bank cards to their account 191 00:17:16,340 --> 00:17:19,860 so that funds can be transferred to and from the platform. 192 00:17:19,860 --> 00:17:24,620 So while increasing the homogeneity of all of these platforms, 193 00:17:24,620 --> 00:17:29,420 in their service offerings suggest that there's just a like-for-like 194 00:17:29,420 --> 00:17:34,300 choice on the part of the users. Some differences of course do exist 195 00:17:34,300 --> 00:17:38,140 in the corporate strategies of the companies that operate them. 196 00:17:38,140 --> 00:17:44,900 These companies also sometimes create payment ecosystems for buying 197 00:17:44,900 --> 00:17:49,520 certain goods or services. So for instance purchases of 198 00:17:49,520 --> 00:17:52,280 online goods on the shopping marketplace Taobao 199 00:17:52,280 --> 00:17:56,920 must be processed through Alipay for instance. 200 00:17:56,920 --> 00:18:02,200 However emphasizing corporations is the only source 201 00:18:02,200 --> 00:18:09,120 of this diversity amongst the similarity of these competing payment platforms. 202 00:18:09,120 --> 00:18:15,580 I think risks overlooking how users' own engagement with these technologies 203 00:18:15,580 --> 00:18:21,560 actually becomes a really important additional venue, an additional avenue 204 00:18:21,560 --> 00:18:27,700 for the inscription of kinds of differences onto these particular platforms. 205 00:18:27,700 --> 00:18:32,560 So while workers' distinctive understanding of the different platforms 206 00:18:32,560 --> 00:18:37,820 may not be immediately apparent, dismissing these kinds of perspectives 207 00:18:37,820 --> 00:18:43,720 as unimportant perpetuates what Jack Qiu has referred to as the dramatically 208 00:18:43,730 --> 00:18:49,940 lopsided field in Chinese internet studies which disproportionately focuses 209 00:18:49,940 --> 00:18:54,260 on professionals, on commercial enterprises, on non-government activities, 210 00:18:54,260 --> 00:18:58,760 while having very little interest in the working class people who use these 211 00:18:58,760 --> 00:19:04,940 platforms and the issues they face. So Madianou and Miller's concept 212 00:19:04,940 --> 00:19:11,140 of polymedia actually provides a really useful additional theoretical tool for helping 213 00:19:11,140 --> 00:19:16,140 to overcome this problem. They seek to describe how the proliferation 214 00:19:16,140 --> 00:19:22,580 of low-cost communication technologies and virtually free-to-use platforms in many 215 00:19:22,580 --> 00:19:29,390 parts of the world means that decisions around which media to use shift from one 216 00:19:29,390 --> 00:19:33,940 that's based on constraints, like the cost or their efforts to use 217 00:19:33,940 --> 00:19:39,960 a particular platform, that are imposed by each media to pay more attention 218 00:19:39,960 --> 00:19:44,840 to the social and the emotional consequences of their use. 219 00:19:44,840 --> 00:19:51,240 This Madianou Miller claim makes polymedia about a new set of social relations 220 00:19:51,240 --> 00:19:55,362 of technology rather than merely a technological development 221 00:19:55,362 --> 00:19:57,080 of increased convergence. 222 00:19:57,080 --> 00:20:00,780 Polymedia is this particularly well-suited 223 00:20:00,780 --> 00:20:05,880 to understanding digital media use in China because it can reveal the really 224 00:20:05,890 --> 00:20:11,019 distinctive sets of relationships that users actually associate with each of 225 00:20:11,020 --> 00:20:17,300 these platforms despite the apparent similarities that exists between them. 226 00:20:17,300 --> 00:20:21,580 So understanding the structure of these relationships provides an avenue 227 00:20:21,580 --> 00:20:26,100 for making sense of the potential interactions between digital money 228 00:20:26,100 --> 00:20:32,000 and these kinds of nuanced working class subjectivities. So the first platform 229 00:20:32,000 --> 00:20:37,200 I want to concentrate on is WeChat Wallet which workers often said was 230 00:20:37,200 --> 00:20:41,700 based for use between friends. So participants often described 231 00:20:41,700 --> 00:20:48,560 WeChat Wallet as being the most convenient owing to its close integration with WeChat, 232 00:20:48,560 --> 00:20:52,840 which is the social media platform on which it resided. 233 00:20:52,840 --> 00:20:59,380 So WeChat obviously acted as the nucleus of participants frequent daily online 234 00:20:59,380 --> 00:21:03,010 interactions with their close friends and family. 235 00:21:03,010 --> 00:21:08,040 WeChat Wallet used WeChat's contact list to allow money to be easily sent 236 00:21:08,040 --> 00:21:14,480 to individuals and that facilitated monetary exchanges between migrant workers 237 00:21:14,480 --> 00:21:20,880 and other friends or family who also had an account. Now the exchange 238 00:21:20,880 --> 00:21:25,440 of digital red envelopes by WeChat Wallet occupied a really prominent position 239 00:21:25,440 --> 00:21:31,240 in interviews and discussions with workers regarding their 240 00:21:31,240 --> 00:21:35,880 WeChat transactions. While digital red envelopes were yet to replace 241 00:21:35,880 --> 00:21:41,320 the paper versions given and received at major festivals and life stages 242 00:21:41,320 --> 00:21:48,300 they nonetheless spawned several new monetary practices within everyday transactions. 243 00:21:48,300 --> 00:21:52,440 So for example many workers explained that when they settle 244 00:21:52,440 --> 00:21:56,320 the small debt with their friends, such as let's say if they split the bill 245 00:21:56,320 --> 00:22:00,620 for a meal in the restaurant, they typically send money 246 00:22:00,620 --> 00:22:05,780 that they owed using a digital red envelope feature instead of the standard 247 00:22:05,780 --> 00:22:09,660 transfer function on WeChat. Both functions they said achieved 248 00:22:09,660 --> 00:22:15,920 the same goal of moving funds between users. However the former was described as 249 00:22:15,920 --> 00:22:21,890 carrying more 人情, so carrying more human emotion and social emotion. 250 00:22:21,890 --> 00:22:27,800 So while sentiments around the fun and friendly nature of digital 251 00:22:27,800 --> 00:22:32,840 red envelope transactions were widely shared amongst participants, 252 00:22:32,840 --> 00:22:37,580 the use becomes particularly important to migrant factory workers as a means of 253 00:22:37,580 --> 00:22:43,040 coping with their constrained social opportunities that result from the 254 00:22:43,040 --> 00:22:47,660 meager salaries and the often extended working hours that they labor under. 255 00:22:47,660 --> 00:22:53,140 So several participants enthusiastically described how distributing red envelopes 256 00:22:53,140 --> 00:22:58,480 within WeChat messaging groups that were composed of fellow migrant workers 257 00:22:58,480 --> 00:23:03,820 constituted a form of relatively undemanding socialization. 258 00:23:03,820 --> 00:23:09,440 So as opposed to digital red envelopes being sent to selected individuals 259 00:23:09,440 --> 00:23:14,140 distributing digital red envelopes to WeChat groups involved specifying 260 00:23:14,140 --> 00:23:18,640 a fixed amount of funds that was to be shared in random portions 261 00:23:18,640 --> 00:23:24,400 between a number of users giving all group members a chance to compete for the funds 262 00:23:24,400 --> 00:23:27,940 by reacting the fastest to these notifications. 263 00:23:27,940 --> 00:23:31,560 Sending a digital red envelope into groups created 264 00:23:31,570 --> 00:23:37,820 moments of intense copresence against otherwise asynchronous online 265 00:23:37,820 --> 00:23:42,080 interactions that they had with each other. So for instance let me 266 00:23:42,080 --> 00:23:48,260 illustrate this. Xi, who was a male migrant worker in his early 40s, 267 00:23:48,260 --> 00:23:53,340 often recalled how he would lie on his dormitory bed after completing 268 00:23:53,340 --> 00:23:59,260 very lengthy production line shifts, saying he was just too exhausted to contemplate 269 00:23:59,260 --> 00:24:05,860 going outside and socializing with other people. Xi explained that sending red envelopes 270 00:24:05,860 --> 00:24:10,260 to other workers within a WeChat group actually helped to establish 271 00:24:10,260 --> 00:24:17,040 a kind of congregative socially vivacious atmosphere online which avoided 272 00:24:17,040 --> 00:24:21,260 the inconvenience and often the expense of meeting up in person. 273 00:24:21,260 --> 00:24:24,500 This was particularly valued he said given the 274 00:24:24,500 --> 00:24:29,720 isolating nature of production line work where communication with coworkers 275 00:24:29,720 --> 00:24:36,320 during one's shift was often virtually impossible. So he described how around 8:00 p.m. 276 00:24:36,320 --> 00:24:41,040 every night saw a brief flurry of these messages being exchanged 277 00:24:41,040 --> 00:24:47,180 within multiple WeChat groups as different individuals sent small amounts of money 278 00:24:47,180 --> 00:24:51,793 into these groups to be grabbed like 钱 [money] by their friends. 279 00:24:51,793 --> 00:24:53,090 So the comments of 280 00:24:53,090 --> 00:24:58,190 Wu, another male migrant worker, encapsulate how such exchanges could be 281 00:24:58,190 --> 00:25:03,080 particularly effective engendering this kind of group excitement. 282 00:25:03,080 --> 00:25:08,020 So he said if you send a red envelope into the group it may only be 5 RMB. 283 00:25:08,020 --> 00:25:12,320 But let us say you split it between 30 people who compete for it. 284 00:25:12,320 --> 00:25:17,720 You know I reckon this is enlivening the atmosphere. So this effervescent 285 00:25:17,720 --> 00:25:23,180 atmosphere often became, for a short while at least, kind of self-sustaining 286 00:25:23,180 --> 00:25:28,280 as one envelope that was sent into the group often prompted other workers to 287 00:25:28,280 --> 00:25:33,290 also send further envelopes into the group in turn with users playing what 288 00:25:33,290 --> 00:25:39,410 Adam Chao has described as an active participating role as makers of the 289 00:25:39,410 --> 00:25:46,400 social sensorium. So although the monetary amounts of individual red 290 00:25:46,400 --> 00:25:51,800 envelopes that were sent by participants into WeChat groups remained pretty small, 291 00:25:51,800 --> 00:25:57,700 the effective impact of such exchanges was nonetheless dramatic. 292 00:25:57,700 --> 00:26:03,680 Perhaps most revealing in this connection was migrant workers' very strongly held resolve 293 00:26:03,680 --> 00:26:08,570 the exchanges of digital red envelopes within WeChat groups should not be 294 00:26:08,570 --> 00:26:13,610 driven by a desire for personal gain. So when participants were asked whether 295 00:26:13,610 --> 00:26:20,540 their use of red envelopes had bought them a net gain or a loss many responded 296 00:26:20,540 --> 00:26:25,910 that this just did not matter anyway because the point of such exchanges 297 00:26:25,910 --> 00:26:31,080 was actually to foster emotion or 感情 with one's friends. 298 00:26:31,080 --> 00:26:36,120 So the logic of digital red envelope distribution within these WeChat groups 299 00:26:36,120 --> 00:26:41,200 actually can be seen to share certain traits with Emily Martin's description 300 00:26:41,210 --> 00:26:46,130 of rotating credit societies in which she actually stresses that members' 301 00:26:46,130 --> 00:26:51,200 pooling of money is not with the intention to accumulate profit, 302 00:26:51,200 --> 00:26:56,080 but rather it's seen as creating an obligation to engage in another 303 00:26:56,080 --> 00:27:01,600 interaction at a later time. So this logic is arguably even more 304 00:27:01,600 --> 00:27:06,580 applicable in the case of Chinese factory workers where the small amounts 305 00:27:06,590 --> 00:27:11,090 of money involved in individual transactions online actually combined 306 00:27:11,090 --> 00:27:15,540 with their daily frequency and the randomized nature of these payouts 307 00:27:15,540 --> 00:27:21,060 to emphasize a kind of pure interaction of such exchanges and this generalized 308 00:27:21,060 --> 00:27:27,140 sense of reciprocity. So in addition to WeChat Wallet transactions facilitating 309 00:27:27,140 --> 00:27:32,230 monetary exchanges between friends, the WeChat platform was actually also 310 00:27:32,230 --> 00:27:37,260 increasingly tied to participants consumptive practices. 311 00:27:37,260 --> 00:27:42,520 So WeChat Wallet was the most widely accepted payment platform 312 00:27:42,520 --> 00:27:45,560 in the small stores that lined the crowded alleyways 313 00:27:45,560 --> 00:27:49,980 and also in the wider streets in the neighborhood that surrounded the factories. 314 00:27:49,980 --> 00:27:53,760 So just as an example we walked down one street 315 00:27:53,760 --> 00:27:59,920 and went into every shop on this street and asked shop owners 316 00:27:59,920 --> 00:28:05,760 if they accepted WeChat Wallet, if they accepted Alipay, 317 00:28:05,760 --> 00:28:09,700 and WeChat Wallet was the most widely accepted 318 00:28:09,700 --> 00:28:13,300 payment platform in the small stores and 319 00:28:13,310 --> 00:28:17,990 crowded alleyways, and Alipay was generally accepted in large supermarkets, 320 00:28:17,990 --> 00:28:24,200 department stores, and online retailers. By contrast WeChat Wallet could be used 321 00:28:24,200 --> 00:28:29,690 in a far wider array of venues located nearby the factories including in 322 00:28:29,690 --> 00:28:34,820 convenience stores, hole-in-the-wall eateries, and with market traders. 323 00:28:34,820 --> 00:28:41,000 This latter category of consumptive venues primarily sold cheap goods and services 324 00:28:41,000 --> 00:28:45,700 to low-income migrant laborers. Although many venues accepted both 325 00:28:45,700 --> 00:28:49,800 of these payment platforms, enough distinctiveness actually existed 326 00:28:49,800 --> 00:28:54,500 in their distribution for workers to primarily associate WeChat Wallet 327 00:28:54,500 --> 00:29:00,620 with these smaller neighborhood stores. So Chen, a male factory worker, 328 00:29:00,620 --> 00:29:06,920 explained that WeChat supplements Alipay. For places which take Alipay, I'll use Alipay. 329 00:29:06,920 --> 00:29:10,780 But there are some places like stalls where you get breakfast, 330 00:29:10,780 --> 00:29:15,100 they just don't provide this network. So work has also maintained 331 00:29:15,100 --> 00:29:20,260 that the WeChat platform was primarily suited for small transactions. 332 00:29:20,260 --> 00:29:22,300 One male migrant worker 333 00:29:22,300 --> 00:29:27,120 felt that this represented the chief difference between WeChat and Alipay. 334 00:29:27,120 --> 00:29:31,225 He claimed to adhere to the following very simple rule of thumb. 335 00:29:31,225 --> 00:29:34,640 He said if it's a small amount of money use WeChat 336 00:29:34,640 --> 00:29:37,580 but if it's a big amount of money use Alipay. 337 00:29:37,580 --> 00:29:42,480 So in this sense WeChat Wallet really appeared to live up to its name. 338 00:29:42,480 --> 00:29:46,180 It was quite literally akin to a personal wallet 339 00:29:46,180 --> 00:29:51,940 used for storing small amounts of money intended for everyday use. 340 00:29:51,940 --> 00:29:56,880 Furthermore because factory workers associated the small stores, 341 00:29:56,880 --> 00:30:02,120 often operated by fellow migrants, with receiving WeChat wallet payments, 342 00:30:02,120 --> 00:30:06,820 its use in these venues provided opportunities for migrant workers to 343 00:30:06,820 --> 00:30:12,740 actually increase the density of their social interactions through different 344 00:30:12,740 --> 00:30:16,280 payment repertoires that were associated with this platform. 345 00:30:16,280 --> 00:30:20,160 So migrant worker Chen gave one such example. 346 00:30:20,160 --> 00:30:22,760 He said I often go to a particular food stall 347 00:30:22,760 --> 00:30:27,360 and I've added their WeChat. After I've eaten I'll just leave 348 00:30:27,360 --> 00:30:30,980 and on the way back I'll actually transfer the money 349 00:30:30,980 --> 00:30:36,800 to the food stall owner and it's fine. So here by choosing to pay for his regular 350 00:30:36,800 --> 00:30:43,600 early morning meal from a small street-side vendor using WeChat Wallet the role this 351 00:30:43,600 --> 00:30:49,760 platform plays in mediating such recurring transactions actually becomes visible. 352 00:30:49,760 --> 00:30:52,610 Furthermore here digital money actually 353 00:30:52,610 --> 00:30:58,340 interestingly serves to intentionally delay payments, running counter to 354 00:30:58,340 --> 00:31:02,690 popular discourses which, as anthropologist Bill Maurer notes, 355 00:31:02,690 --> 00:31:07,070 generally assume that these kinds of technologies invariably deliver greater 356 00:31:07,070 --> 00:31:09,140 speed and efficiency. 357 00:31:09,140 --> 00:31:14,000 In this instant Chen's temporal reordering and spatial 358 00:31:14,000 --> 00:31:19,159 relocating of the consumption and the payment of a service, the consumption of 359 00:31:19,160 --> 00:31:25,100 a service away from the moment of payment, actually allows both himself 360 00:31:25,100 --> 00:31:30,180 and the vendor to reaffirm their mutual trust with each other on a daily basis. 361 00:31:30,180 --> 00:31:35,440 So here the repertoires of payment that surround the exchange of money 362 00:31:35,440 --> 00:31:39,520 are shown to fulfill different communicative functions 363 00:31:39,520 --> 00:31:43,460 through which migrant workers are able to add density 364 00:31:43,460 --> 00:31:49,220 to their daily social interactions in the urban space. 365 00:31:49,220 --> 00:31:53,400 Okay so to compare this with another platform we'll now move on 366 00:31:53,419 --> 00:31:58,370 to QQ Wallet which workers said generally was problematic 'cause 367 00:31:58,370 --> 00:32:04,370 there were too many people on QQ. So although QQ wallet had also been 368 00:32:04,370 --> 00:32:08,520 developed within an existing social media platform, that's QQ, 369 00:32:08,520 --> 00:32:13,520 participants regarded the convergence of monetary and communicative media 370 00:32:13,520 --> 00:32:17,000 on this platform to be an unappealing one, 371 00:32:17,000 --> 00:32:22,740 leading to it being the least popular payment platform amongst the three. 372 00:32:22,740 --> 00:32:27,080 A key concern here was the perception that those other users 373 00:32:27,080 --> 00:32:31,260 using this platform actually somehow lacked integrity. 374 00:32:31,260 --> 00:32:37,300 Participants generally stored a far larger number of contacts on their QQ account 375 00:32:37,300 --> 00:32:42,180 than they did on their WeChat account and felt that they knew comparatively less 376 00:32:42,180 --> 00:32:48,280 about these contacts. So the fact that the social media platform QQ was launched 377 00:32:48,280 --> 00:32:55,940 over a decade before WeChat, so QQ was launched in 1999, WeChat in 2011, 378 00:32:55,940 --> 00:33:02,800 helps to explain workers' distrust of other QQ users. Participants recorded 379 00:33:02,800 --> 00:33:07,080 that their QQ accounts were predominantly composed 380 00:33:07,080 --> 00:33:11,760 of persons from their hometown or previous classmates from their school, 381 00:33:11,779 --> 00:33:15,920 many of whom they're now fallen out of contact with. 382 00:33:15,920 --> 00:33:20,600 As a result while work has tended to be relatively selective 383 00:33:20,600 --> 00:33:24,560 with regards to who they added as contacts on WeChat, 384 00:33:24,560 --> 00:33:30,500 QQ was instead seen as being somehow littered with persons who they knew 385 00:33:30,500 --> 00:33:34,840 as a result of their prior circumstances, which at the time they often 386 00:33:34,840 --> 00:33:40,780 had comparatively little control over. The composition of people on 387 00:33:40,780 --> 00:33:46,780 QQ meant their interactions occurring on this platform were often quite noncommittal. 388 00:33:46,780 --> 00:33:50,240 They were often unplanned and they were often sporadic. 389 00:33:50,240 --> 00:33:54,169 They were just as likely to be mediated through the platform's 390 00:33:54,169 --> 00:33:59,800 online games or through personal photo albums than they necessarily were 391 00:33:59,800 --> 00:34:05,620 via instant messaging. So while this led to QQ being regarded by workers as being 392 00:34:05,620 --> 00:34:11,940 well-suited for entertaining oneself through having interactions with distant others 393 00:34:11,940 --> 00:34:17,560 and also explains QQ's enduring popularity as a social media platform, 394 00:34:17,560 --> 00:34:22,730 this also gave rise to certain uncertainties over QQ Wallet's 395 00:34:22,730 --> 00:34:29,600 suitability for mediating financial transactions. On the rare occasions when participants 396 00:34:29,600 --> 00:34:34,520 actually did use QQ Wallet, it was often within multiplayer games 397 00:34:34,520 --> 00:34:41,120 online where money held on the platform could be exchanged for Q coins or Q币 398 00:34:41,120 --> 00:34:46,580 or other in-game currencies that were used for buying virtual goods such as 399 00:34:46,580 --> 00:34:50,160 weapons or skills that could aid users' gameplay. 400 00:34:50,160 --> 00:34:53,900 Sometimes these were also gifted to other players. 401 00:34:53,900 --> 00:34:58,180 So in this sense although money that was stored on the QQ Wallet 402 00:34:58,180 --> 00:35:02,740 did sometimes end up being used in social ways it was primarily for the 403 00:35:02,750 --> 00:35:07,280 kinds of short lived and pleasurable activities that were actually felt to 404 00:35:07,280 --> 00:35:13,920 typify the QQ platform as a whole. So closer analysis of money circulation 405 00:35:13,920 --> 00:35:19,070 within QQ Wallet reveals kind of two dimensions of sociality that are quite 406 00:35:19,070 --> 00:35:22,800 distinctive from those experienced through WeChat Wallet. 407 00:35:22,800 --> 00:35:29,160 The first is that rather than transfers chiefly creating a kind of social cohesion, 408 00:35:29,160 --> 00:35:34,300 monetary exchanges on QQ Wallet instead permit the somewhat formal 409 00:35:34,300 --> 00:35:39,280 structure of Tencent to actually draw on workers in material resources 410 00:35:39,280 --> 00:35:44,000 such as their game based interactions, their attention, and their effort 411 00:35:44,000 --> 00:35:50,160 by constructing value around these multiple game based currencies 412 00:35:50,160 --> 00:35:52,360 that are operated by the company. 413 00:35:52,360 --> 00:35:57,520 This facilitates the extraction of material resources and 414 00:35:57,529 --> 00:35:59,440 real money from the workers. 415 00:35:59,440 --> 00:36:05,360 Secondly the fact that many workers opted to eschew 416 00:36:05,360 --> 00:36:11,239 QQ Wallet entirely in favor of both WeChat Wallet and Alipay suggests 417 00:36:11,240 --> 00:36:15,700 that familiar connections based on static notions of shared hometown 418 00:36:15,700 --> 00:36:20,520 or schooling are actually giving away to much more dynamic processes 419 00:36:20,520 --> 00:36:26,440 of relational formation where workers are acutely aware of their positioning 420 00:36:26,440 --> 00:36:31,160 within shifting social networks. And they also seek to avail themselves 421 00:36:31,160 --> 00:36:34,300 of the opportunities that are presented by this. 422 00:36:34,300 --> 00:36:38,520 A further shaping force around workers' attitudes 423 00:36:38,520 --> 00:36:42,920 towards QQ Wallet came from participants having also previously 424 00:36:42,920 --> 00:36:47,720 friended strangers through QQ, meaning that their contact list on these 425 00:36:47,720 --> 00:36:52,960 platforms also often frequently contained multiple persons who they had 426 00:36:52,970 --> 00:36:58,549 never actually ever met in face-to-face encounters. So while these kinds of 427 00:36:58,549 --> 00:37:03,410 strangership provided additional sources of amusement and often 428 00:37:03,410 --> 00:37:07,220 opportunities for participants to reflect on their self through 429 00:37:07,220 --> 00:37:14,029 interactions with others, the presence of unknown others on QQ also gave rise 430 00:37:14,029 --> 00:37:18,320 to numerous concerns around the safety of money stored within. 431 00:37:18,320 --> 00:37:21,780 So male migrant worker Wong actually explained 432 00:37:21,780 --> 00:37:24,380 if you're talking about QQ in my own opinion 433 00:37:24,380 --> 00:37:29,100 I don't think QQ's that safe. WeChat is comparatively safer. 434 00:37:29,100 --> 00:37:32,400 For QQ I only have to know your account number 435 00:37:32,400 --> 00:37:35,420 then it is possible to hack your QQ. 436 00:37:35,420 --> 00:37:39,580 So there was this big concern that there were lots of people on my QQ 437 00:37:39,580 --> 00:37:44,440 that I don't know and some of them would somehow be able to hack 438 00:37:44,440 --> 00:37:45,860 into my account. 439 00:37:45,860 --> 00:37:53,020 So to summarize, in contrast to WeChat, QQ's abundance of users, many of whom 440 00:37:53,020 --> 00:37:57,700 might have been strangers or from the rural place where they came from who 441 00:37:57,710 --> 00:38:02,210 they're no longer in contact with, this actually appeared both chaotic 442 00:38:02,210 --> 00:38:08,870 and unknowable, leading to this platform to be judged as largely incommensurate and 443 00:38:08,870 --> 00:38:14,420 incompatible with digital money. While QQ Wallet exchanges did 444 00:38:14,420 --> 00:38:18,500 occasionally facilitate social interactions between individuals, 445 00:38:18,500 --> 00:38:24,440 this was typically framed within shared leisure experiences rather than being 446 00:38:24,440 --> 00:38:30,060 guided by notions of kinship or community or just simple economic exchange. 447 00:38:30,060 --> 00:38:35,820 The intention was to use money to keep distant relations amicable 448 00:38:35,820 --> 00:38:40,500 and noncommittal rather than deepening any obligation. 449 00:38:41,500 --> 00:38:44,720 Okay so to move to the final platform, Alipay. 450 00:38:44,720 --> 00:38:49,880 Unlike WeChat Wallet and QQ Wallet Alipay had not been 451 00:38:49,880 --> 00:38:54,480 integrated into an existing social media platform from the outset. 452 00:38:54,480 --> 00:38:57,940 Instead its emergence was tied to the growth 453 00:38:57,940 --> 00:39:01,960 of online shopping marketplaces Alibaba and Taobao, 454 00:39:01,960 --> 00:39:08,840 both of which were also owned by the Alibaba Group. In its earliest incarnation 455 00:39:08,840 --> 00:39:14,840 Alipay acted chiefly as an escrow service mediating payments 456 00:39:14,840 --> 00:39:20,210 between merchants and their customers. Features were then subsequently added 457 00:39:20,210 --> 00:39:24,710 for transferring funds between individuals and for fulfilling a range 458 00:39:24,710 --> 00:39:29,540 of other everyday transactions. Over the years Alipay's attempted 459 00:39:29,540 --> 00:39:33,120 to actually compensate for the absence of integrations 460 00:39:33,120 --> 00:39:35,840 with existing social media platforms 461 00:39:35,840 --> 00:39:41,540 by introducing additional new kinds of social features which I don't 462 00:39:41,540 --> 00:39:46,240 have time to describe in detail now. But however what's really interesting 463 00:39:46,240 --> 00:39:51,180 is these efforts have not always been positively received by users. 464 00:39:51,180 --> 00:39:56,920 Rather than Alipay's lack of connections with existing online social networks 465 00:39:56,920 --> 00:40:00,620 detracting from its appeal, work has actually suggested that 466 00:40:00,620 --> 00:40:06,960 the platform's isolation in fact made it more suitable for larger transactions 467 00:40:06,960 --> 00:40:10,480 or even for the storage of significant sums of money. 468 00:40:10,480 --> 00:40:13,720 So participants often cited Alipay's 469 00:40:13,720 --> 00:40:19,550 distinctive handling of users' contacts as evidence of the platform's somewhat 470 00:40:19,550 --> 00:40:26,340 limited social nature. So in common with WeChat and QQ, Alipay also featured 471 00:40:26,340 --> 00:40:32,060 a contacts list. However none of the participants interviewed during the time 472 00:40:32,060 --> 00:40:35,870 of the research actually reported linking Alipay to their phone contacts. 473 00:40:35,870 --> 00:40:41,160 Instead many said that they preferred to only manually add contacts to this list for 474 00:40:41,160 --> 00:40:47,900 the explicit purpose of transferring funds. By contrast both WeChat Wallet and 475 00:40:47,900 --> 00:40:53,390 QQ Wallet actually offered the ability to send money to anyone who was a friend 476 00:40:53,390 --> 00:40:58,310 on the social network even if there had been no communication beyond simply 477 00:40:58,310 --> 00:41:04,180 accepting a friend request. So male migrant factory worker Li 478 00:41:04,180 --> 00:41:08,660 summed up the distinction in terms of Alipay actually offering 479 00:41:08,660 --> 00:41:14,180 improved control over which persons should be included in this payment platform. 480 00:41:14,180 --> 00:41:18,880 So he said in reality Alipay's contacts are somewhat choice based. 481 00:41:18,880 --> 00:41:24,280 Normally you'll manually add people but generally speaking if you don't have any 482 00:41:24,290 --> 00:41:27,740 financial exchange with that person then you won't add them. 483 00:41:27,740 --> 00:41:33,560 Another migrant worker Zhao similarly suggested that Alipay was reserved 484 00:41:33,560 --> 00:41:39,980 for purely monetary exchange and was ostensibly devoid of social interactions. 485 00:41:39,980 --> 00:41:46,860 They said that normally there is no communication with contacts in Alipay. 486 00:41:46,860 --> 00:41:49,960 It's normally only an economic connection. 487 00:41:49,960 --> 00:41:53,880 Alipay contacts, they're mainly based on money. Apart from this 488 00:41:53,880 --> 00:41:59,580 there is not really any other use for Alipay. Migrant laborer Deng said that 489 00:41:59,580 --> 00:42:02,380 because people understood Alipay to be a venue 490 00:42:02,380 --> 00:42:05,760 that was reserved for financial transactions only, 491 00:42:05,760 --> 00:42:11,280 any action oriented towards social exchanges that occurred on it would in fact 492 00:42:11,280 --> 00:42:16,839 be treated with suspicion by others. He said if you send out friend requests 493 00:42:16,839 --> 00:42:21,730 on Alipay a lot of people just won't accept the invitation. They think you're 494 00:42:21,730 --> 00:42:25,120 actually trying to borrow money from them or something like that. 495 00:42:25,120 --> 00:42:31,260 So the perceived limited sociality of interactions on Alipay actually gave rise 496 00:42:31,270 --> 00:42:36,210 to factory workers regarding it as being the most somewhat most 497 00:42:36,210 --> 00:42:42,100 professional or 专业, most specialized platform for managing money that was 498 00:42:42,100 --> 00:42:47,920 that was ideal for sizeable transactions often involving hundreds or even 499 00:42:47,920 --> 00:42:53,720 thousdands of renminbi. Or for online purchases from large impersonal institutions, 500 00:42:53,720 --> 00:42:59,320 such as supermarkets, travel agents, or utility companies, or unknown entities, 501 00:42:59,320 --> 00:43:04,359 such as Taobao merchants. As one male participant explained 502 00:43:04,360 --> 00:43:08,840 it's for that kind of purchase like travel tickets, plane tickets, hotels, 503 00:43:08,840 --> 00:43:14,640 then I'll use Alipay. This comment I think is really really telling, as although 504 00:43:14,640 --> 00:43:19,599 WeChat Wallet and QQ Wallet offer virtually identical functions for 505 00:43:19,600 --> 00:43:25,000 facilitating such purchases, this worker nevertheless remained adamant 506 00:43:25,000 --> 00:43:30,760 that Alipay was best suited for such sizable transactions. And so the notion 507 00:43:30,760 --> 00:43:36,069 of polymedia here is again really useful in helping to make sense of how in the 508 00:43:36,069 --> 00:43:40,960 process of weighing up choices between roughly equivalent platforms, 509 00:43:40,960 --> 00:43:46,420 users actually base their decisions on the specific sets of social relations that 510 00:43:46,420 --> 00:43:50,680 they associate with each of these platforms rather than on the constraints 511 00:43:50,680 --> 00:43:56,230 of one platform over another. The relative detachment of Alipay from 512 00:43:56,230 --> 00:44:01,540 workers' existing social networks and from everyday interactions gave 513 00:44:01,540 --> 00:44:06,760 Alipay transactions a kind of sociality that while not entirely absent, 514 00:44:06,760 --> 00:44:12,130 nonetheless seems somehow depersonalized when compared to the sending of money 515 00:44:12,130 --> 00:44:16,500 between friends or to the small face-to-face purchases 516 00:44:16,500 --> 00:44:19,700 that WeChat was understood to be ideal for. 517 00:44:19,700 --> 00:44:25,320 So workers' growing relationship with the Alipay platform itself 518 00:44:25,320 --> 00:44:30,740 became particularly apparent through considering Yuebao 519 00:44:30,740 --> 00:44:34,740 which was a feature within Alipay that provided users 520 00:44:34,740 --> 00:44:38,580 with a kind of savings account style functionality. 521 00:44:38,580 --> 00:44:44,400 So this was first introduced in 2013. When it was first introduced in 2013 522 00:44:44,400 --> 00:44:49,840 what was important is Yuebao differed from the third party payment services 523 00:44:49,840 --> 00:44:55,440 that I've just described in that although it was built into Alipay's payment platform, 524 00:44:55,440 --> 00:45:00,220 it's actually more of a money market fund which pays users interest on 525 00:45:00,220 --> 00:45:05,000 funds that are deposited on the platform. So the minimum deposit for Yuebao 526 00:45:05,000 --> 00:45:06,660 is just 1 RMB. 527 00:45:06,660 --> 00:45:09,520 However funds can be withdrawn without notice 528 00:45:09,520 --> 00:45:12,880 and Yuebao offers interest rates that were slightly more 529 00:45:12,880 --> 00:45:17,640 generous than that of accounts held with conventional banks. 530 00:45:17,640 --> 00:45:21,400 Yuebao interest was also paid on a daily basis. 531 00:45:21,400 --> 00:45:25,380 As you can see here it's like yesterday's profits, 2 RMB. 532 00:45:25,380 --> 00:45:30,160 Whereas banks normally only paid interest monthly or annually. 533 00:45:30,160 --> 00:45:36,000 So while many workers struggled to meet the high cost of living in Shenzhen 534 00:45:36,000 --> 00:45:42,820 those who were able to save small amounts would often deposit these monies in 535 00:45:42,820 --> 00:45:47,800 their Yuebao account. One worker described to me the satisfaction that 536 00:45:47,800 --> 00:45:53,960 was derived from seeing his money grow every day even if it was just by a few 毛 [cents]. 537 00:45:53,960 --> 00:45:58,960 So the importance of Yuebao amongst low-income individuals such as 538 00:45:58,960 --> 00:46:04,450 migrant factory workers was also particularly apparent. Participants have 539 00:46:04,450 --> 00:46:09,970 very limited investment options and they were generally extremely wary of any 540 00:46:09,970 --> 00:46:15,180 investment channel which carried a risk of losing one's initial outlay. 541 00:46:15,180 --> 00:46:22,180 In light of these limited options factory laborers instead often prioritized 542 00:46:22,180 --> 00:46:25,960 an assured return and the safety of their funds 543 00:46:25,960 --> 00:46:31,020 which they saw Yuebao as offering. Furthermore money stored in Yuebao 544 00:46:31,020 --> 00:46:35,530 was perceived to be somehow favorably detached from their familiar 545 00:46:35,530 --> 00:46:40,720 social networks as at the time of conducting this fieldwork funds first 546 00:46:40,720 --> 00:46:44,920 needed to be transferred out of Yuebao into a users main Alipay 547 00:46:44,920 --> 00:46:50,280 account before they could then be sent to other individuals or used for purchases. 548 00:46:50,280 --> 00:46:56,260 So Wang Jing has also noted how money market funds like Yuebao 549 00:46:56,260 --> 00:47:01,140 have made financial investment available to anyone who can access the Internet. 550 00:47:01,140 --> 00:47:04,020 She's argued that this not only widens 551 00:47:04,020 --> 00:47:09,010 participation in financial activities in China but it also results in a close 552 00:47:09,010 --> 00:47:14,230 working partnership between technology companies and also financial enterprises. 553 00:47:14,230 --> 00:47:19,170 So while Wang's chief focus is on the structural transition occurring at this 554 00:47:19,170 --> 00:47:25,640 institutional level my own study I think seems to demonstrate how workers' 555 00:47:25,640 --> 00:47:30,550 enthusiastic adoption of Yuebao and of Alipay more generally represents more than 556 00:47:30,550 --> 00:47:35,080 just an outcome of these kind of macro-level structural shifts. 557 00:47:35,080 --> 00:47:39,940 Worker's agency in affecting such a repositioning away from banks and to work 558 00:47:39,940 --> 00:47:47,000 and towards technology firms must also be acknowledged as should the class 559 00:47:47,000 --> 00:47:50,640 equality dimensions that permeate such decisions. 560 00:47:50,640 --> 00:47:56,160 As one of our female factory worker participants really wonderfully described, 561 00:47:56,160 --> 00:47:59,980 she said banks treats VIPs and us differently. 562 00:47:59,980 --> 00:48:05,500 VIPs have gold cards, diamond cards. When they go to use bank cashiers 563 00:48:05,500 --> 00:48:09,100 the people meet each other and then there is this separation between 564 00:48:09,100 --> 00:48:13,360 rich and poor, high and low status. But when you use Alipay it's all 565 00:48:13,360 --> 00:48:16,460 operated on your phone so it's not the same. 566 00:48:16,460 --> 00:48:21,080 So workers' participation in these forms of online investment 567 00:48:21,080 --> 00:48:24,550 raised really important questions around how 568 00:48:24,550 --> 00:48:31,060 the new capacities for engaging in financializing activities actually have 569 00:48:31,060 --> 00:48:36,610 implications for working class subjectivity. With digital money services 570 00:48:36,610 --> 00:48:42,400 allowing workers to increasingly pursue their own individual and private investments, 571 00:48:42,400 --> 00:48:45,120 workers can no longer simply be assumed to be 572 00:48:45,120 --> 00:48:50,720 passive subjects of global monopoly capital, but are themselves increasingly 573 00:48:50,720 --> 00:48:55,820 active adopters of various logics of financialization. 574 00:48:55,820 --> 00:49:00,800 While the chief beneficiary of workers' decisions to store funds on Alipay 575 00:49:00,800 --> 00:49:04,640 is undoubtedly the Alibaba Group itself 576 00:49:04,640 --> 00:49:07,220 this instance nonetheless speaks to the growing 577 00:49:07,220 --> 00:49:12,569 contradictions that are inherent in the novel working class subjectivities that 578 00:49:12,569 --> 00:49:17,180 are being made possible through digital money in China. 579 00:49:17,980 --> 00:49:19,780 So to conclude. 580 00:49:19,780 --> 00:49:24,980 This paper opened by questioning whether the increasing convergence 581 00:49:24,980 --> 00:49:29,520 between digital money platforms and social media actually represented 582 00:49:29,520 --> 00:49:34,740 a reflection of what Emily Martin had posited to be the unusually 583 00:49:34,740 --> 00:49:37,160 social nature of money in China. 584 00:49:37,160 --> 00:49:41,960 Through the above comparison of migrant factory workers' varying 585 00:49:41,960 --> 00:49:47,840 attitudes towards three different digital money platforms, 586 00:49:47,840 --> 00:49:54,500 it can be seen that while WeChat Wallet's integration with 587 00:49:54,510 --> 00:50:00,300 existing offline social networks and monetary behaviors seemingly corresponds 588 00:50:00,300 --> 00:50:05,490 with this idea of sociality this just isn't representative of all platforms. 589 00:50:05,490 --> 00:50:10,770 QQ Wallet by contrast was felt by workers to be comprised of somewhat 590 00:50:10,770 --> 00:50:15,720 disorderly social connections and was therefore unsuitable for digital money, 591 00:50:15,720 --> 00:50:21,620 whereas the detachment of Alipay, and its savings feature Yuebao, 592 00:50:21,620 --> 00:50:28,380 from laborers' everyday networks of connections was conversely the very 593 00:50:28,380 --> 00:50:34,920 factor that gave it its appeal. So this variation then would seem to 594 00:50:34,920 --> 00:50:40,770 problematize Martin's assertion of the existence of a Chinese cultural logic 595 00:50:40,770 --> 00:50:46,120 that sees money as being somehow inherently socially integrative. 596 00:50:46,120 --> 00:50:51,119 Rather than asking whether digital money might be more or might be less 597 00:50:51,120 --> 00:50:55,560 social than its predecessors, this study has instead demonstrated 598 00:50:55,560 --> 00:51:00,620 how distinct forms of sociality actually become associated 599 00:51:00,620 --> 00:51:04,260 with competing digital money platforms. 600 00:51:04,260 --> 00:51:09,420 This I feel is particularly significant for migrant factory workers 601 00:51:09,420 --> 00:51:14,700 who are appropriating digital money who are often acutely aware of these varying 602 00:51:14,700 --> 00:51:19,980 forms of sociality and also seek to be able to move between them in ways that 603 00:51:19,980 --> 00:51:27,030 are conducive to their own social lives and aspirations. This insight I feel can 604 00:51:27,030 --> 00:51:32,130 begin to form a basis from which to address the second question that is 605 00:51:32,130 --> 00:51:36,880 raised by the convergence of money into China's communicative media, 606 00:51:36,880 --> 00:51:41,460 which was whether or not such a confluence might actually extend 607 00:51:41,460 --> 00:51:46,880 the social possibilities of money and might potentially rework rigid social divides 608 00:51:46,880 --> 00:51:51,580 and so in so doing ameliorate some of the challenges and difficulties 609 00:51:51,580 --> 00:51:54,940 encountered in the course of working class life. 610 00:51:54,940 --> 00:51:58,940 This question has particular significance when one 611 00:51:58,950 --> 00:52:04,140 considers the widespread claims by different voices that champion the 612 00:52:04,140 --> 00:52:09,140 digitization of money in China as both expanding financial inclusion and 613 00:52:09,140 --> 00:52:15,480 economic opportunity for the country's low-income populations. Analysis of this 614 00:52:15,480 --> 00:52:20,670 fieldwork data has helped to reveal how these heterogeneous forms of 615 00:52:20,670 --> 00:52:24,960 sociality which are produced by the circulation of money through these 616 00:52:24,960 --> 00:52:31,350 platforms can at times actually allow factory workers to confront the various 617 00:52:31,350 --> 00:52:37,040 resource institutional and social constraints that they face in various ways. 618 00:52:37,040 --> 00:52:41,640 At other times though these specific forms of sociality may actually 619 00:52:41,640 --> 00:52:47,240 entrench such obstacles. The social ways that money moves between workers through 620 00:52:47,250 --> 00:52:52,320 WeChat forms for instance an antithesis to the logics of capital that they 621 00:52:52,320 --> 00:52:56,720 encounter on the factory floor, fostering relations between workers 622 00:52:56,720 --> 00:53:01,320 that can help to combat the social isolation they often otherwise face. 623 00:53:01,320 --> 00:53:06,420 By contrast QQ's strong association with old school friends and strangers, 624 00:53:06,420 --> 00:53:10,220 whom migrants increasingly wish to limit their exchanges with, 625 00:53:10,220 --> 00:53:17,080 combines with the tendency for money on QQ Wallet to be used in game based interactions, 626 00:53:17,080 --> 00:53:21,800 facilitating Tencent's attempts to extract wealth from its users. 627 00:53:21,800 --> 00:53:29,100 The depersonalized nature of transfer and storage of money on Alipay centers 628 00:53:29,100 --> 00:53:33,440 around a form of sociality that's premised chiefly on interactions 629 00:53:33,440 --> 00:53:39,520 with institutions, including Alipay itself, while also fostering more individualistic 630 00:53:39,520 --> 00:53:43,920 forms of accumulation often driven by emerging logics of 631 00:53:43,920 --> 00:53:49,260 financialization amongst workers. The breadth of socialities that are produced 632 00:53:49,260 --> 00:53:53,910 through migrant workers appropriation of digital money carries two important 633 00:53:53,910 --> 00:53:59,280 theoretical implications. First they underline the need to repudiate these 634 00:53:59,280 --> 00:54:03,960 techno-deterministic accounts of the digitization of money in China 635 00:54:03,960 --> 00:54:09,540 as somehow being destined to facilitate economic and social inclusion by 636 00:54:09,540 --> 00:54:14,700 challenging the assumption that novel monetary technologies will inevitably 637 00:54:14,700 --> 00:54:22,240 generate more wealth for their users. What matters to workers is not simply 638 00:54:22,240 --> 00:54:28,020 whether using particular digital money platforms will ultimately make them 639 00:54:28,020 --> 00:54:32,700 more money but rather whether the kinds of sociality that's actually being 640 00:54:32,700 --> 00:54:38,070 produced through their use can address the forms of exclusion that are present 641 00:54:38,070 --> 00:54:42,810 and that they face in their everyday lives. Secondly though this paper 642 00:54:42,810 --> 00:54:47,610 also contributes to a deeper understanding of the emergence of the 643 00:54:47,610 --> 00:54:52,050 digital working class in China by highlighting how money's communicative 644 00:54:52,050 --> 00:54:56,120 and it's symbolic capacities are actually being extended 645 00:54:56,120 --> 00:55:02,700 through money's increasing role within communicative media 646 00:55:02,700 --> 00:55:06,530 such that digital money is becoming a key means through which 647 00:55:06,530 --> 00:55:12,380 working class subjectivities are being produced, shared, and actually explored. 648 00:55:12,380 --> 00:55:17,340 This affirms recent understandings of class as shifting, contextual, 649 00:55:17,340 --> 00:55:21,839 and also processual. While factory workers' sentiments 650 00:55:21,839 --> 00:55:26,519 towards digital money platforms may sometimes be shared with other social 651 00:55:26,519 --> 00:55:31,319 groups in China, being able to contextualize workers attitudes against 652 00:55:31,319 --> 00:55:35,999 the very distinctive economic, institutional, and social barriers that 653 00:55:36,000 --> 00:55:41,080 they face actually affords these viewpoints with a unique specificity. 654 00:55:41,080 --> 00:55:46,999 At a moment then when money and media technologies in China are increasingly 655 00:55:46,999 --> 00:55:53,959 undergoing an increased convergence, and as non-Chinese technology companies 656 00:55:53,960 --> 00:55:59,940 seek to also emulate this supposed success, acknowledging the handworkers 657 00:55:59,940 --> 00:56:04,540 actually having transforming the social possibilities of money can give 658 00:56:04,540 --> 00:56:09,980 rise to really important discussions about what we ourselves may actually 659 00:56:09,980 --> 00:56:13,500 want money to mean. Thank you very much.