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  6. “Social” Money and Working-class Subjectivities: Digital Money and Migrant Labour in Shenzhen, China

“Social” Money and Working-class Subjectivities: Digital Money and Migrant Labour in Shenzhen, China

File(s)
CCCI_McDonald_Tom_FA19.srt (69.86 KB)
srt file with transcription for video
CCCI_McDonald_Tom_11.14.2019.mp4 (3.76 GB)
video file
Permanent Link(s)
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/69655
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Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture Series
Author
McDonald, Tom
Abstract

Tom McDonald, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Hong Kong University - Scholars of Chinese society have predominantly regarded the region’s money to represent an unusually “social” artefact. The dramatic proliferation of “digital money” services within Chinese social media platforms in the last decade would seem to further confirm the social character of Chinese money. I present a comparison of the diverse views held by migrant factory workers in Shenzhen towards different digital payment platforms which, however, suggests that rather than digital money necessarily being more or less social, different platforms instead extend the possibilities of sociality in varying ways. I argue that acknowledging the production of such novel working-class subjectivities through digital money ought to be central to efforts to assess the potential of these technologies for addressing the social, institutional and economic exclusions faced by Chinese migrant labourers. This in turn can enrich our understanding of the emergence of a new “digital working-class” in China, by revealing how such contemporary working-class subjectivities are shifting, contextual and processual in nature.

Description
Video of full lecture with presentation slides edited into the video.
Sponsorship
Cornell East Asia Program
Date Issued
2019-11-04
Publisher
East Asia Program, Cornell University
Keywords
history
•
East Asia
•
China
•
digital money
•
working class
Related Version
https://vimeo.com/374424135
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Rights URI
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Type
video/moving image
Accessibility Feature
captions
Accessibility Summary
Closed captions available

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