An Anthropology of Chinese Digital Payment Systems Wechat Pay and Alipay

Digital payment systems Alipay and Wechat Pay, created only a few years ago, are now used daily by hundreds of millions of people. Based on preliminary research of everyday practices and institutional settings, this presentation proposes to approach these transformations from the point of view of a pragmatist anthropology of money. The presentation focuses on the co-constitutive multiple meanings and practices that make money, and sees the following processes as happening together: the transformation of daily practices of money, the development of new financial relations of power through credit systems, and the re-definition of citizenship, state and nation in the particular Chinese institutional setting. An anthropology of money is proposed to encompass the diversity of these processes