When digital money meets relational surveillance: overseeing and reshaping people’s ordinary lives, emotions, and social relations in small towns and villages through Alipay

Abstract

This study situates Alipay, China’s biggest financial platform, at the convergence of a communication medium that conveys symbolic messages, including the state’s political campaigns of the Chinese Dream and shared meanings of positive emotions, and a cultural technology that aims to improve, train, and monitor Chinese citizen subjects through a set of surveillance practices. I coin the term relational surveillance to broaden our understanding of how surveillance practices incorporate emotional differentials and power dynamics inherent in economic interactions, and how the characteristics of these interactions matter for the ways through which surveillance practices affect people’s social lives in small towns and villages. I suggest that everyday surveillance practices serve to establish, maintain, and reconfigure social relationships among users as borrowers, financial platforms as lenders, and local governors as facilitators and regulators. These practices involve the management of emotional connections toward economic well-being and the ritualization of self-monitoring, self-tracking, and self-disclosure as a special form of bookkeeping and record-keeping.

Keywords:

• Relational surveillance
• digital money
• Alipay
• social relationships
• China
• emotions
• local power dynamics
• financial platform

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to the anonymous reviewers and guest editors of this special issue for their excellent constructive feedback. I also offer my special thanks to Dr. Clifford Christians and Dr. James Hay, who offered valuable comments during my writing process.

Disclosure statement

There are no competing interests.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ran Ju

Ran Ju (Ph.D., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) combines cultural studies with sociotechnical perspectives to explore platform economy, algorithmic politics, and everyday governmental practices and struggles. She is also interested in researching the cultural production on digital platforms through the intersectional lens of gender, race, and class.