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.Footnote 1
These reflections, made by anthropologist Emily Martin on what she viewed to be the particularly social nature of money in China, stemmed from her ethnographic fieldwork conducted amid the apparent onset of capitalization in the Taiwanese countryside between 1969 and 1975. Examining a range of rural economic institutions such as labour, marriage and rotating credit societies, Martin argued that Chinese cultural understandings of money possessed unique characteristics, most notably in the way money serves to facilitate social integration by acting as a “road opener” within relationships.
The spectacular recent growth of digital payment platforms in China has once again engendered a sense of intrigue around Chinese money, this time driven not so much by a sense of the idiosyncratic nature of local vernacular practices but instead by an awe of the apparent sophistication, ubiquity and variety of ways that money – in its newly digital form – is now being put to use. For example, a recent article in The New York Times proclaims that “China is systematically and rapidly doing away with paper money and coins.”Footnote 2 This enthusiasm is in part a reaction to the conspicuousness of China's digital payment platforms in everyday life, made tangible through prominently displayed signage in shops and stores confirming the acceptance of various online payments, along with the novel sight of consumers carrying out transactions by smartphone rather than with cash or cards.
The above phenomena make visible a deeper infrastructural transformation: the convergence of many popular digital payment platforms into existing social media.Footnote 3 This distinctive techno-social formation raises two important questions for scholars. First, does the apparent enthusiasm among Chinese internet users for the integration of digital payment platforms into social media reflect a more general shared cultural recognition of money as possessing inherently social characteristics? 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 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 have any bearing upon working-class life?Footnote 4
This study will answer these questions by drawing on the testimonies and observed behaviour of migrant factory workers from the Chinese city of Shenzhen 深圳. Because these workers experience intense constraints on their financial resources and social mobility in that they often run short of cash or must borrow from friends or family, they stand to be among those 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. Jack Qiu has claimed that the extensive use of low-cost information communication technologies (ICTs) by migrant factory workers is leading to a “working-class network society” and the formation of a “digital working-class” in China.Footnote 5 Building on this proposition, I draw on my fieldwork data to argue that the exceptional cultural power of money means that its digitization has become a central process through which the dynamics of class subjectivity now play out. Such processes are, however, neither preordained nor bound to proceed in uniform ways.
This paper is divided into four sections. First, I highlight the impressive body of scholarship on the distinctive social capacities of money in China, arguing that the emergence of digital money necessitates further scholarly inquiry. Second, I describe the methods I employed to gain an understanding of migrant factory workers’ attitudes towards digital money, as well as introducing Qiu's concept of the digital working class for thinking through digital money's role in the production of working-class subjectivity. In the third section, I examine workers’ differing strategies for appropriating three major Chinese digital payment platforms: WeChat Wallet (weixin qianbao 微信钱包), QQ Wallet (QQ qianbao 钱包) and Alipay (zhifubao 支付宝). I document how participants see WeChat Wallet as best suited for small everyday transactions with friends and family, QQ Wallet as generally too risky for the involvement of money, and Alipay as ideal for the storage/transfer of significant sums. My analysis reveals how different platforms tend to engender distinctive working-class subjectivities which extend sociality in various ways. I argue that this variance demonstrates that the circulation of digital money on these platforms involves not only the transfer of specific forms of economic capital but also the transaction of distinct cultural and political values. The fourth section concludes by discussing the broader implications of the study, exploring how the manifold logics inherent in digital-money use underline the processual and shifting nature of working-class subjectivity in contemporary China.
“Social Money” and “Social Media Money” in China
The prominent position of money in Chinese society has been well documented by China scholars, who have recorded its critical role in ritualized gift-giving during major life events including weddings,Footnote 6 funerals,Footnote 7 celebrations of offspring surviving infancyFootnote 8 and annual Chinese New Year festivals.Footnote 9 Forms of “paper currency” or “spirit money” are often used to mediate exchanges with cosmological entities such as gods, ghosts and ancestors.Footnote 10 While these ritual exchanges suggest the cultural distinctiveness of Chinese money, it was Martin's 1986 lecture series comparing money in China and the United States that was foundational in explicitly theorizing the socially agentive nature of Chinese money.Footnote 11
In these lectures, Martin draws on the works of Marx and Simmel to highlight what she sees as the two major paradoxes in the meaning of money. The first paradox, she claims, is centred on money's socially integrating function, whereby it increases the density of social interaction while simultaneously enhancing the freedom and autonomy of individuals. The second paradox focuses on money's socially disintegrating facets, allowing potentially anything – including people – to be quantified through it, promoting attitudes of indifference and giving rise to destructive emotions such as greed and desire. Martin claims that “the way money articulates with forms of exchange based on kinship and community” in rural Taiwan “has held the disintegrating potential of money in check.”Footnote 12
Although the rural Taiwanese society Martin studied in the 1970s differs markedly from the contemporary mainland Chinese urban setting that concerns my study, Charlotte Bruckermann and Stephen Feuchtwang nonetheless assert the utility of Martin's argument in explaining the guanxi 关系 based exchange practices that permeate reform-era China.Footnote 13 They foreground how ostensibly social monetary exchange can have damaging outcomes for some involved, for instance when businesspersons or powerful individuals use such occasions to extract wealth from others. Bruckermann and Feuchtwang demonstrate this through reference to Yan's study of guanxi gift-giving practices in early reform-era rural China, where – contrary to classic anthropological tenets of gift exchange – gifts flow up social hierarchies, enhancing the status of recipients instead of givers.Footnote 14 This leads rural residents to view gifting for maintaining guanxi networks in positive terms, despite such practices often exacerbating imbalances and inequalities within social hierarchies.
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. These include concerns regarding bribery, where money sullies traditional principles of guanxi exchange based on familiarity;Footnote 15 individualistic young couples “extorting” their parents for ever-increasing amounts of bride wealth;Footnote 16 and groups of elite males using extravagant, morally contentious forms of consumption to facilitate social bonding.Footnote 17 The tension Georg Simmel describes between money's socially integrating and disintegrating aspects is implicit in all of these narratives, as is the idea that money's “social” qualities are what can engender immoral actions by those who handle it.Footnote 18
In spite of the differences in empirical settings between Martin's Taiwanese field site and my own in contemporary Shenzhen, her assertion of the distinctive, integrative nature of money in Chinese culture as enabling dense exchanges and increasing personal autonomy ostensibly resonates with the recent growth of digital money in China. New payment platforms facilitate monetary exchanges within existing friendship and kinship networks while also allowing users to pay for goods and services at physical shops, restaurants, online marketplaces, taxis, food delivery providers, travel agents and utility companies, seemingly granting increased convenience and autonomy over how money can be put to use.
The few existing qualitative studies on the social implications of digital money in China have tended to reproduce assumptions that money is inherently socially integrative by emphasizing its relational capacities. For instance, it has been argued that WeChat Wallet's digital “red envelope” (hongbao 红包) feature has digitized a Chinese tradition while simultaneously transforming it into a “social game,” strengthening associational life through increased solidarity and emphasizing shared culture.Footnote 19 Another study claims Chinese migrant workers’ incorporation of social media into their everyday transactions and petty business endeavours serves to deepen human feelings and emotions between fellow workers.Footnote 20 While such exchange practices may in some instances play a role in the maintenance of social relations, the assumption that the increased volume and occurrence of monetary exchanges brought by digitization will invariably produce more, or deeper, social relations needs to be avoided if reliable assessments of the potentially socially integrative (or disintegrative) effects of digital money are to be made.
More macro-level approaches suggest that the broader public participation in investment practices made possible by Chinese “fin-techs” championing digital money has amassed financial capital in the country's powerful internet enterprises.Footnote 21 This seemingly echoes global trends towards increased levels of control and concentration of capital through the “distributed power” of financial electronic networks that draw on the individual decisions of millions of investors.Footnote 22 While these approaches help to map out the structural shifts of power and capital between institutions, they tell us comparatively little about the social significance of individual investment decisions to the persons who make them. Doing so requires sustained engagement with the users of the technologies themselves, within the contexts of their own social lives.
Conducting Fieldwork on Factory Work
Migrant factory workers uniquely embody many of the economic contradictions at the heart of China's rapid technological and social development. Today, Shenzhen and other urban manufacturing hubs in mainland China have cemented the country's position as an industrial powerhouse, capable of producing goods to fulfil the world's consumptive yearnings. A drastic intensification of the capitalistic hallmarks of labour processes has also accompanied this transition, with contemporary Chinese production line workers finding themselves the subjects of the “monopoly capital” of a global factory system that exploits China's rural–urban inequalities, workers’ aspirations and their consumptive desires.Footnote 23
Under such conditions, workers have been shown to draw extensively on a plethora of affordable “working-class ICTs” to maintain existing social networks, form new connections with fellow migrant workers, obtain information essential for survival in their new environs and facilitate both control and resistance between capital and labour.Footnote 24 As such, it has been important for researchers to develop methodologies adapted to the unique contexts of technology use by such workers.
The data presented in this paper form part of a three-and-a-half-year project researching digital money and migration in China.Footnote 25 Fieldwork for the project started in June 2016 and continued until November 2018, although much of the data presented below were collected during the summer of 2016 in an industrial factory area on the outskirts of the city of Shenzhen. This research involved a combination of group and individual interviews and ethnographic observation centring on 16 key migrant factory-labourer participants, along with more casual discussions and interactions with dozens of other migrant workers also residing in the area. All migrant participants were either currently working in local factories, or had done so for significant periods in the preceding months. The majority of our key participants were “second generation” male migrant workers in their early 20s, as the largest factory in the neighbourhood, a sprawling Foxconn campus specializing in laptop computer assembly, primarily recruited from this demographic.
Key to my fieldwork approach was an attempt to “de-centre” the digital, by seeking to understand how digital money appears within the broader context of participants’ lives.Footnote 26 While being unable to gain access to the factories where participants spent their working hours, I nonetheless found myself “hanging out” with workers in nearby parks, public squares, canteens, malls and their rented accommodation. This provided additional possibilities to observe the broader monetary ecologies that workers inhabited, witnessing the consumptive opportunities and public messages concerning digital money that they encountered in their daily lives. This information ended up being instrumental in helping to discern the distinct qualities that migrant workers attached to different digital money platforms.
While participant observation and interviews provided valuable insight into the “social” uses of digital money by workers, Qiu's description of the emergence of a “digital working class” in China proved especially useful in shaping the analysis of such data.Footnote 27 By examining how formal and informal circuits of labour are connected through “short circuits” of “survival labour” and “playbor,”Footnote 28 Qiu is able to conceptualize the digital working class as being dynamic in both structure and relational processes, while also noting the shifting working-class subjectivities of Chinese workers.Footnote 29 I posit that money's capacity to act as the direct materialization of economic capital, but also as a channel for the communication of social and cultural meaning, makes it particularly appropriate for teasing out the ways in which working-class subjectivities are being negotiated.
Social Media and their Monies: A Platform Perspective
The following section examines the three main digital money platforms used by migrant workers: WeChat Wallet, QQ Wallet and Alipay.Footnote 30 These platforms were launched at different times and for different purposes. The pioneer of internet-based payment services in China is arguably Alipay, which was launched in 2004 as part of the Alibaba e-commerce platform, with a mobile app subsequently released in 2009.Footnote 31 WeChat Wallet and QQ Wallet are both operated by the Tencent company, which owns the social media networks (WeChat and QQ, respectively) within which they are located. Tencent initially developed its own Tenpay digital payment app in 2005, primarily for online gaming and music purchases within the QQ platform. In 2013, it took these payment technologies and integrated them into the WeChat Wallet app.Footnote 32 A similar QQ Wallet function was also added to the QQ mobile app the following year.Footnote 33
The growth of these platforms has been rapid. Between 2012 and 2016, payments made through Alipay experienced a 23-fold increase, from less than 0.5 trillion yuan to 11.5 trillion yuan. WeChat payments during the same period saw an 85-fold jump, from 0.1 trillion yuan to an estimated 8.5 trillion yuan.Footnote 34 Tencent does not publish data for QQ Wallet payment volumes, often instead subsuming these figures into those given for WeChat owing to the shared technologies underlying both services. However, in 2015 QQ did have the highest number of monthly active users on its platform at 853 million (641 million for its mobile app),Footnote 35 compared with 697 million and 450 million for WeChat and Alipay, respectively.Footnote 36
Over the years, all three digital payment platforms have grown increasingly alike and offer similar functionalities. They allow users to enact or receive transfers from other individuals and to pay for services and goods in either online or offline contexts. To take full advantage of these features, all platforms encourage users to link a conventional bank card to their account so that funds may be transferred to and from the platform.
While the increasing homogeneity of these platforms and their service offerings suggest a like-for-like choice on the part of users, some differences do exist in the corporate strategies of their operating companies. These companies seek to distinguish their own platforms from those of competitors through specific promotions. They also sometimes create “payment ecosystems” for buying certain goods or services (purchases on online shopping marketplace Taobao must be processed through Alipay, for instance).
However, emphasizing corporations as the only source of diversity among the ostensible similarity of competing payment platforms risks overlooking how users’ own engagement with technologies becomes an additional avenue for the inscription of differences onto these platforms. While workers’ distinctive understandings of different platforms may not be immediately apparent, dismissing these perspectives as unimportant perpetuates what Qiu has referred to as the “dramatically lopsided academic field” in Chinese internet studies, which disproportionately focuses on professionals, commercial enterprises and government activities, “while having scant interest in working-class people and the issues they face.”Footnote 37
Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller's notion of polymedia provides an additional theoretical tool for helping to overcome this problem, by seeking 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 the constraints (i.e. cost, effort, etc.) imposed by each media to the social and emotional consequences of their use. This, they claim, makes polymedia “about a new set of social relations of technology, rather than merely a technological development of increased convergence.”Footnote 38 Polymedia is thus particularly suited to understanding digital media use in China, because it can reveal the distinctive sets of relationships that users associate with each platform, despite the apparent similarities between them. Understanding the structure of these relations provides an avenue for making sense of the potential interactions between digital money and nuanced working-class subjectivities.
WeChat Wallet: “for between friends”
Participants often described WeChat Wallet as being particularly “convenient” (fangbian 方便), owing to its close integration with the WeChat social media platform on which it resided. WeChat acted as the nucleus of participants’ frequent daily online interactions with close friends and family. WeChat Wallet used WeChat's contact list to allow money to be easily sent to these individuals, facilitating monetary exchanges between migrant workers and other friends or family members who also had an account.
The exchange of digital red envelopes via WeChat Wallet occupied a prominent position in workers’ interview discussions regarding WeChat transactions. While these digital red envelopes were generally yet to replace the paper versions given and received during major festivals and life stages, they had nonetheless spawned several new monetary practices within everyday transactions. For example, many workers explained that when settling a small debt with their friends (such as splitting the bill for a meal in a restaurant), they would typically send the money owed using a digital red envelope instead of WeChat's standard “transfer” function. Both functions achieved the same goal of moving funds between users; however, the former was described as carrying more renqing 人情, or feeling.
While sentiments around the fun and friendly nature of digital red envelope transactions are widely shared among Chinese internet users, their use becomes especially important to migrant factory workers as a means of coping with the constrained social opportunities resulting from meagre salaries and extended working hours. Several participants enthusiastically described how distributing digital red envelopes within WeChat messaging groups composed of fellow migrant workers constituted a form of relatively undemanding socialization. As opposed to digital red envelopes being sent to selected individuals, distribution to 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 fastest to the notification. Sending digital red envelopes in groups created moments of intense co-presence against otherwise asynchronous online interactions.
For instance, Xi, a male migrant worker in his early 40s, recalled often lying on his dormitory bed after completing lengthy production line shifts, too exhausted to contemplate socializing outside.Footnote 39 Xi explained that sending red envelopes to other workers within a WeChat group helped to establish a congregative, socially vivacious atmosphere online, avoiding the inconvenience and expense of meeting up in person. This was particularly valued given the isolating nature of production-line work, where communication with co-workers during shift times was virtually impossible. Around 8pm every night saw a brief flurry of messages being exchanged within multiple workers’ WeChat groups as different individuals sent small amounts of money into groups to be “grabbed” (qiang 抢) by their friends. The comments of Wu, a male migrant worker, encapsulate how such exchanges could be particularly effective at engendering group excitement: “If you send a red envelope into the group, it may only be 5 yuan, but let's say you send it and split it between 30 people who compete for it … I reckon this is enlivening an atmosphere.” This effervescent atmosphere often became, for a short while at least, self-sustaining, as one envelope sent to the group often prompted others to send further red envelopes in turn, with users playing an “active participatory role … as makers of the social sensorium.”Footnote 40
This instance is a particularly powerful example of “playbor,” which Qiu asserts can draw on both material and immaterial resources to act as a short circuit between formal and informal circuits of labour. Qiu notes how informal networks can “borrow symbols, communicative strategies and of course technologies and technical practices, from the formal side to enrich their social and cultural repertoire,” and in so doing, achieve particular affective outcomes.Footnote 41 In the above case, the generalized exchange of money arising from participation in workers’ WeChat groups embodies an alternative set of logics that stand in contrast to the imperative towards the production of surplus value which otherwise governs factory workers’ engagement in wage labour. This in turn produces a specific form of sociality through which workers’ connections with fellow migrants are strengthened, helping to address some of the challenges of social isolation resulting from the limited social networks they possess.
Although the monetary amounts of individual red envelopes sent by participants into WeChat groups remained small, the affective impact of such exchanges was nonetheless dramatic. Perhaps most revealing in this connection was migrant workers’ strongly held resolve that exchanges of digital red envelopes within WeChat groups should not be driven by desire for personal gain. When participants were asked whether their use of red envelopes had brought a net gain or loss, many responded that it did not matter anyway, because the point of such exchanges was to foster “emotion” (ganqing 感情) with one's friends.
The belief among workers that individual calculations of profit should not figure in the use of this function was in fact so strong that participants were generally unaware of the presence of features allowing them to view their red envelope transaction history (on WeChat), or the net balance of all red envelope transactions (on Alipay). One participant, who accessed this feature on my request, was shocked to learn he had cumulatively lost several hundred yuan through sending red envelopes over the years. Such feelings were exacerbated by the fact that, as mentioned in Wu's quote above, single instances of red envelope exchange generally involve only a few yuan, which, when combined with the random allocation of funds, should notionally prevent any single user from gaining large amounts of money.
The logic of digital red envelope distribution within WeChat groups thus shares certain traits with Martin's description of rotating credit societies, in which she stresses that members did not pool money with the intention of accumulating profit. Rather, the pooling of funds “is seen as creating an obligation to engage in another interaction at a later time.”Footnote 42 This logic is arguably even more applicable in the case of Chinese factory workers, where the small amounts of money involved in individual transactions combined with their daily frequency and the randomized nature of pay-outs to emphasize the “pure interaction” of such exchanges and generalized reciprocity.
In addition to WeChat Wallet transactions facilitating monetary exchanges between friends, the platform was also increasingly tied to participants’ consumptive practices. WeChat Wallet was the most widely accepted payment platform in the small stores that lined the crowded alleyways in the neighbourhood surrounding the factories. Alipay was generally accepted in large supermarkets, department stores and online retailers. By contrast, WeChat Wallet could be used in a wider array of venues located near the factories, including convenience stores, hole-in-the-wall eateries and market stalls, which primarily sold cheap goods and services to low-income migrant labourers. Although many venues accepted both payment platforms, enough distinctiveness existed in their distribution for workers to associate WeChat Wallet with these smaller neighbourhood stores. 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 don't provide this network.”
Workers also maintained that the platform was primarily suited for small transactions. One male migrant worker felt this represented the chief difference between the two platforms. He claimed to adhere to the following simple rule-of-thumb: “If it's a small amount of money, use WeChat; if it's a big amount, use Alipay.” In this sense, WeChat Wallet appeared to live up to its name, akin to a personal wallet 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 increase the density of their social interactions through payment repertoires associated with the platform. Migrant worker Chen gave one such example: “I often go to a particular [food stall] and I've added their WeChat. After I have eaten I will just leave, and on the way back I'll transfer the money, and it's fine.” 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 becomes visible. Furthermore, digital money here serves to intentionally delay payment, running counter to popular discourses, which, as Bill Maurer notes, generally assume that these technologies invariably deliver greater speed and efficiency.Footnote 43 In this instance, Chen's temporal reordering and spatial relocating of the consumption of a service away from the moment of payment allows both himself and the vendor to reaffirm their mutual trust on a daily basis. Here, the repertoires surrounding the exchange of money are shown to fulfil communicative functions through which migrant workers are able to add density to their daily social interactions in the urban space.
The association of WeChat Wallet with neighbourhood stores and the distinctive payment repertoires this generates provide further evidence of digital money's role in working-class life. The circulation of money through this platform often serves purposes other than facilitating the accumulation of economic value, and the communicative exchanges accompanying these flows must not be ignored. While large stores have “official” business accounts for receiving Alipay and WeChat payments, specialist QR code scanners and signage provided by the payment platforms, local storeowners instead rely on personal WeChat accounts, makeshift QR codes printed on paper, and improvised monetary repertoires around payment. In these instances, workers draw upon and adapt corporate cultural practices surrounding online payment to sustain a community-based, supportive economy whereby the purposeful use of digital money within migrant chat groups, among friends and with small local traders exemplifies money's propensity to act as “grappling hooks” sent out to build relations in an urban environment governed by impersonality and solitariness.Footnote 44
QQ Wallet: “too many people”
Although QQ Wallet was also developed within an existing social media platform, participants regarded the convergence of money and communicative media on this platform to be unappealing, leading to it being the least popular of the three payment platforms. A key concern was the perception that those using the platform lacked integrity. Participants generally stored greater numbers of contacts on their QQ accounts than on WeChat, and felt that they knew comparatively less about their QQ contacts.
The fact that the social media platform QQ was launched over a decade before WeChat (1999 and 2011, respectively) helps to explain workers’ distrust of other QQ users. Participants reported that their QQ accounts were predominantly composed of persons from their hometown or previous classmates from school, many of whom they had now fallen out of contact with. As a result, while workers tended to be relatively selective with regards to whom they added as a contact on WeChat, QQ was instead seen as littered with persons known as a result of workers’ prior circumstances, which they had comparatively little control over at the time. The composition of contacts on QQ meant that interactions occurring on the platform were often non-committal, unplanned and sporadic. They were just as likely be mediated through the platform's online games or personal photo albums than they were via instant messaging. While this led to QQ being regarded by workers as well suited for entertaining oneself through interactions with distant others – and explains QQ's enduring popularity as a social media platform – this also gave rise to uncertainties over QQ Wallet's suitability for mediating financial transactions.
On the rare occasions when participants did use QQ Wallet, it was often within online multiplayer games, where money held on the platform could be exchanged for Q coins (Q bi 币) or other in-game currencies used for buying “virtual goods” (such as weapons or skills) that could aid gameplay. Sometimes, these were also gifted to other players. So, although money stored on QQ Wallet did sometimes end up being used in social ways, it was primarily for the kinds of short-lived pleasurable activities felt to typify the QQ platform as a whole. The antipathy of participants towards such game-based currencies can be partly explained by drawing on the findings of a separate study into virtual currency use in China, which observed how attitudes towards Q coins differ depending on age: adult internet users tended to dismiss Q coins as facile, while younger gamers maintained the authenticity of this form of money.Footnote 45
Closer analysis of the circulation of money within QQ Wallet reveals two dimensions of sociality that are distinctive from those experienced through WeChat Wallet. First, rather than transfers chiefly creating social cohesion, monetary exchanges on QQ Wallet instead permit the formal structure of Tencent to draw on workers’ immaterial resources (game-based interactions, attention, effort) by constructing value around the multiple game-based currencies operated by the company. This facilitates the extraction of material resources (i.e. “real” money) from workers.Footnote 46
Second, the fact that many workers opt to eschew QQ Wallet entirely in favour of both WeChat Wallet and Alipay suggests that familiar connections based on static notions of shared hometown and schooling are giving way to more dynamic processes of relational formation, where workers are acutely aware of their positioning within shifting social networks and seek to avail themselves of the opportunities presented by this.
A further shaping force around workers’ attitudes towards QQ Wallet came from participants having also previously befriended strangers through QQ, meaning their contact lists also frequently contained multiple persons whom they had never met in face-to-face encounters. While these forms of “strangership” provided additional sources of amusement and opportunities for self-reflection, the presence of unknown others on QQ also gave rise to numerous concerns about the safety of money stored therein.Footnote 47 Male migrant labourer, Wang, explained: “If you are talking about QQ, in my own opinion I don't think QQ is that safe … WeChat is comparatively safer. For QQ, I only have to know your account number, then it is possible to hack your QQ.”
While it may appear to be common sense to avoid monetary transactions with strangers online, polymedia is again useful in understanding the platform-specific nature of such attitudes (as discussed below, facilitating exactly these kinds of exchanges was a key element of Alipay's appeal). Concern that strangers might hack into friends’ accounts and impersonate them led many participants to respond to QQ messages from friends requesting money transfers with phone calls aimed at confirming whether such requests were genuine. The perceived risk of online fraud on QQ was widespread enough for local authorities to run public information campaigns warning against falling victim to online scams. However, these films did little to engender a greater feeling of safety, or to sway participants from the conclusion that QQ Wallet was the least secure of the three digital money platforms.
To summarize, in contrast to WeChat, QQ's abundance of users appeared both chaotic and unknowable, leading the platform to be judged as largely incommensurate 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. The intention was to use money to keep distant relations amicable and non-committal, rather than deepening obligation.
Alipay: “only an economic connection”
Unlike WeChat Wallet and QQ Wallet, Alipay was not integrated into an existing social media platform from the outset. Instead, its emergence was tied to the growth of the online shopping marketplaces, Alibaba 阿里巴巴 and Taobao 淘宝, both also owned by the Alibaba Group. In its earliest incarnation, Alipay chiefly acted as an escrow service, mediating payments between merchants and their customers. Features were subsequently added for transferring funds between individuals and fulfilling a range of other everyday transactions. Over the years, Alipay attempted to compensate for the absence of integration with existing social media platforms by introducing additional new “social” features, for example by allowing users to share information on purchases with friends. However, these efforts have not always been positively received.Footnote 48 Rather than Alipay's lack of connections with existing online social networks detracting from its appeal, workers suggested that the platform's isolation in fact made it more suitable for larger transactions, or the storage of significant sums of money.
Participants often cited Alipay's distinctive handling of users’ contacts as evidence of the platform's limited social nature. In common with WeChat and QQ, Alipay featured a contacts list; however, none of the participants interviewed reported linking Alipay to their phone contacts, instead preferring to add others to this list manually for the explicit purpose of transferring funds. By contrast, both WeChat Wallet and QQ Wallet 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. Male factory worker Li summed up the distinction in terms of Alipay offering improved control over which persons should be included in this payment platform: “In reality [Alipay's contacts] are choice-based. Normally, you will manually add people. But generally speaking … if you don't have any financial exchange, then you won't add [them].”
Another migrant worker, Zhao, similarly suggested that Alipay was reserved for purely monetary exchanges that were ostensibly devoid of social interaction: “Normally, there is no communication with contacts on 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 labourer Deng said that because people understood Alipay to be a venue reserved for financial transactions only, any action oriented towards social exchanges occurring on it would be treated with suspicion by users: “If you send out friend requests [on Alipay] … a lot of people will not accept the invitation. They think you are trying to borrow money or something like that.”
The perceived limited sociality of interactions on Alipay gave rise to factory workers regarding it as being the most “professional” (zhuanye 专业) platform for managing money, ideal for sizeable transactions involving hundreds, or even thousands, of yuan, or for online purchases from large impersonal institutions (i.e. supermarkets, travel agents, utilities companies, etc.) and unknown entities (i.e. Taobao merchants). As one male participant explained, “It's for that kind of purchase … like travel tickets, plane tickets, hotels … then I will use Alipay.” This comment is telling, as although WeChat Wallet and QQ Wallet offer virtually identical functions for facilitating such purchases, he nevertheless remained adamant that Alipay was the best suited for such sizeable transactions.
The notion of polymedia is again useful in helping to make sense of how, in the process of weighing up choices between roughly equivalent platforms, users base their decisions on the specific sets of social relations they associate with each platform, rather than the constraints of one platform over another. The relative detachment of Alipay from workers’ existing social networks and everyday interactions gave Alipay transactions a kind of sociality that, while not entirely absent, nonetheless seemed depersonalized when compared to the sending of money between friends, or the small face-to-face purchases that WeChat Wallet was understood to be ideal for. Although users sometimes interacted with individual Taobao merchants through built-in chat clients, such exchanges typically remained focused on facilitating sales or the provision of customer service, rather than building long-lasting solidarity.
Participants’ insistence that Alipay's benefits emerged from the platform's transactional, depersonalized nature does not, however, mean that money circulating on the platform should necessarily be thought of as less “social.” Rather, it reveals a different aspect of such sociality through the relationship users were willing to forge with the Alipay platform itself. Participants repeatedly described how they felt they were able to trust Alipay's status as a “third party” (disanfang 第三方) mediator of transactions with strangers, and as a place to store their money.
Workers’ growing social relationship with the Alipay platform itself became particularly apparent through considering Yu'e bao 余额宝, a feature within Alipay that provides users with savings account-style functionality. First introduced in 2013, Yu'e bao differs from the third-party payment services described above in that although it is built into Alipay's platform, it is actually a money-market fund, paying users interest on deposited funds. The minimum deposit is only one yuan, funds can be withdrawn without notice and Yu'e bao offers interest rates that are slightly more generous than those of accounts held with conventional banks, which are fixed by the People's Bank of China. Yu'e bao interest is also paid on a daily basis, whereas banks typically only pay interest monthly or annually.
Yu'e bao has proven tremendously popular among Chinese internet users, with the amount stored on the platform increasing from 0.2 billion yuan in 2013 to over 810 billion yuan in 2017.Footnote 49 Participants overwhelmingly described Yu'e bao in positive terms, with almost all reporting using this service. 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 Yu'e bao account. One migrant worker described the satisfaction derived from seeing his money grow every day, even if it was only by a few mao 毛.
The importance of Yu'e bao among low-income individuals such as migrant factory workers was particularly apparent. Participants had limited investment options and were generally extremely wary of any investment channel that carried a risk of losing one's initial outlay. While special features built into Alipay (or via traditional banks) also made investing in stocks possible, many migrant workers felt such speculation to be dangerous. Many participants aspired to engage in entrepreneurial activities like opening a restaurant, shop or Taobao store, but these were also felt to carry an unacceptably high risk of losing money. In light of these limited options, factory labourers instead prioritized an assured return and safety of funds.
Furthermore, money stored in Yu'e bao was perceived to be favourably detached from familiar social networks, as (at the time of conducting fieldwork) funds needed to be first transferred out of Yu'e bao into a user's main Alipay balance before they could be sent to other individuals or used for purchases. Jing Wang notes how money market funds such as Yu'e bao have “made financial investment available to anyone who can access the internet.”Footnote 50 She argues that this has not only widened participation in financial activities in China but has also resulted in a close working partnership between technology companies and financial enterprises. While Wang's chief focus is on the structural transition at the institutional level, my own study demonstrates how factory workers’ enthusiastic adoption of Yu'e bao, and Alipay more generally, represents more than just an outcome of these macro-level structural shifts. Workers’ agency in affecting such a repositioning away from banks and towards technology firms must also be acknowledged, as should the class equality dimensions that permeate such decisions, as one female factory worker related: “Banks treat VIPs and us differently, VIPs have gold cards, diamond cards. When they go to use bank cashiers, the people meet each other, then there will be a 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.”
Workers’ participation in these forms of online investment raises important questions around how the new capacities for engaging in financializing activities have implications for working-class subjectivity. With digital money services increasingly allowing workers to pursue their own individual private investments, it can no longer be simply assumed that workers are the passive subjects of global monopoly capital. Rather, they 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 inherent in the novel working-class subjectivities that are being made possible by digital money in China.
Conclusion
This paper opened by questioning whether the increasing convergence between digital money platforms and social media represented a reflection of what 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 behaviours seemingly corresponds with this idea of sociality, this is not representative of all platforms. QQ Wallet was felt by workers to be comprised of disorderly social connections and therefore unsuitable for digital money, whereas the detachment of Alipay (and its savings feature Yu'e bao) from labourers’ everyday networks of connections was, conversely, the very factor that gave it its appeal.
This variation would seem to problematize Martin's assertion of the existence of a Chinese cultural logic that sees money as being inherently socially integrative. Rather than asking whether digital money might be more or less “social” than its predecessors, this study has instead demonstrated how distinct forms of sociality become associated with competing digital money platforms. This is particularly significant for migrant factory workers appropriating digital money; they are acutely aware of these varying forms of sociality and seek to be able to move between them in ways that are conducive to their own social lives and aspirations.
This insight can begin to form a basis from which to address the second question raised by the convergence of money into China's communicative media, which was whether or not such a confluence might extend the social possibilities of money, potentially reworking rigid social divides, and in so doing, ameliorate some of the challenges encountered in the course of working-class life. This question has particular significance when one considers the widespread claims by voices championing the digitization of money in China as “both expanding financial inclusion and economic opportunity” for the country's low-income populations.Footnote 51
Analysis of the fieldwork data has helped to reveal how the heterogeneous forms of sociality produced by the circulation of money through these platforms can, at times, allow factory workers to confront the resource, institutional and social constraints they face in various ways. At other times, these specific forms of sociality may also entrench such obstacles. The social ways in which money moves between workers through WeChat forms an antithesis to the logics of capital they encounter on the factory floor, fostering relations between workers which combat the social isolation they otherwise face. By contrast, QQ's strong association with old school friends and strangers, with whom migrants increasingly wish to limit exchanges, combines with the tendency for money on QQ Wallet to be used in game-based interactions, facilitating Tencent's extraction of wealth from its users. The depersonalized nature of the transfer and storage of money on Alipay centres around a form of sociality premised chiefly on interactions with institutions (including Alipay itself), while also fostering more individualistic forms of accumulation, driven by emerging logics of financialization among workers.
The socialities produced through migrant workers’ appropriation of digital money carries two important theoretical implications. First, they underline the need to repudiate techno-deterministic accounts of the digitization of money in China as 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 produced through their use can address the forms of exclusion present in their working-class lives.
Second, 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 symbolic capacities are extended through its increasing role within communicative media, such that digital money is becoming a key means through which working-class subjectivities are produced, shared and explored. This affirms recent understandings of class as shifting, contextual and 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 distinctive economic, institutional and social barriers they face affords such viewpoints with unique specificity. At a moment when money and media technologies in China are undergoing increasing convergence – and as non-Chinese technology companies seek to emulate this supposed success – acknowledging workers’ hand in transforming the social possibilities of money can give rise to important discussions about what we ourselves may want money to mean.
Acknowledgements
The work described in this paper was supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (project number: HKU 27606617) and The University of Hong Kong Seed Funding for Basic Research.
Biographical note
Tom MCDONALD is an anthropologist based at the department of sociology, The University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on technology and society in China. His first solely authored monograph, Social Media in Rural China: Social Networks and Moral Frameworks (UCL Press, 2016), details the findings emerging from 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Chinese countryside, examining how social media use reconfigures social relations and morality. His current research examines the adoption of digital money platforms among low-income individuals in China. He has published articles in several respected academic journals, including American Anthropologist, Ethnos and Information, Communication & Society.
