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. They are connected to credit systems providing loans for consumption and for small and medium enterprises, which did not exist on this scale in the banking system before. And they are also central in the redefinition of state and citizenship as economic policy is officially oriented towards increasing consumption and as systems such as “social credit” develop. Based on preliminary research of everyday practices and institutional settings, Horacio Ortiz proposes to approach these transformations from the point of view of a pragmatist anthropology of money. In his presentation, he 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. A political anthropology of money is proposed to encompass the diversity of these processes putting the issue of monetary distribution and its meanings at the center of the analysis