Debt at a distance: Counter-collection strategies and financial subjectivities of China’s working-class defaulters during COVID-19

Abstract

This paper undertakes an analysis of publicly posted videos sharing debtors’ strategies for responding to overzealous credit collection agencies during the earliest stages of the pandemic lockdown. It examines how Chinese debtors and credit collection callers responded to the uncertainties surrounding the handling of personal debts when the debtors’ economic activities are heavily restricted. Both parties invoked different imagined collectivities to establish their own moral justifications with regards to debt obligations, state regulations and family values. The paper argues for a recognition of the capacity of debt to collectivize people through loose discursive formations that remoralize debt, recasting the defaulter status as morally acceptable and reshaping their defaulter identities. The imaginative and discursive space built upon debt’s collectivizing potential presents a valuable analytical tool for understanding the social dimensions of debt and the dynamic emerging of financial subjectivities in the contemporary era.