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.