Technologies of the Financial Self: Digital Finance and the New
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TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINANCIAL SELF: DIGITAL FINANCE AND THE NEW INVESTING PUBLIC IN CHINA By JING WANG A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Communication, Information and Library Studies Written under the direction of Philip Napoli And approved by New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FINANCIAL SELF: DIGITAL FINANCE AND THE INVESTING PUBLIC IN CHINA by JING WANG Dissertation Director: Philip Napoli In June 2013, Alibaba, the largest e-commerce company in China launched an online investment application, Yu'ebao which allows people to use their dormant cash in their e-purse, Alipay for financial investment. The app is extremely user-friendly and the Yu’ebao users can invest as little as one Chinese Yuan (about 15 cents). Alibaba doesn't charge any transaction fee, and the investors usually get higher return compared to their savings or investment deals with banks. In less than a year, Yu’ebao had attracted more than 100 million active users who enjoyed being lay investors without technical or financial constraints. College students, retirees, office workers, and lately rural populations have joined this investment group by easily connecting their bank accounts with their digital investment accounts. By January 2018, Yu’ebao and many other similar apps created by Chinese Internet companies had rendered more than 300 million digital investors who constitute the largest digital financial market in the world. In the past decade, the increasing applications of digital technologies in the Chinese finance contexts have been endorsed by the government, fulfilled by the Internet companies, and popularized among Chinese people from all social strata. ii Taking digital finance in China as a set of money-related communicative practices, this dissertation examines who these communicators are and how they interact with the digital financial service providers and regulators with what social, cultural, and political consequences in the domestic and transnational contexts. This project is based on a variety of qualitative research including semi-structured interviews, participant observations, policy and regulation analyses, and media content analyses. The preliminary research started in winter 2012 and the fieldwork was conducted in summer 2016 and summer 2017 in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou China. Following the Introduction and Methods chapters, this dissertation uses four chapters to respectively study digital finance’s users, makers, regulators, and the media representations of the interactions between these three groups of actors. I argue that the Chinese government and the Internet corporations have utilized digital technologies to integrate more people in the financial market. At the same time, these lay investors have made digital investment part of their everyday life in which they use the Internet, mobile phones, digital apps to manage their everyday money-related practices (payment, loans, investment, gift-exchange etc.), to govern their emotions, and to adapt to the contingency and volatility embedded in the contemporary financial economy. The emerging investing public is the product of two co-occurring processes in the past decade–digitization of the Chinese financial market and financialization of the Internet companies in China. Communication scholars have studied the significance of digital technologies in a wide array of settings, such as information behavior and knowledge construction (e.g., Agosto & Hughes-Hassell, 2005), new media and political engagement (e.g., Campell & Kwak, 2011), digital journalism and news production (e.g., Anderson, 2013; Usher, iii 2014), and transformation of media and cultural industries (e.g., Winseck, 2010). This project is the first one of its kind to study the social and cultural dimensions of communication technologies in financial practices. In addition, this research links political economy of communication (e.g., Hong, 2011; Mosco, 2009; Schiller, D. 2007; Zhao, 2008) with the humanistic social studies of finance (e.g., Appadurai, 2011; Lipuma & Lee, 2004; Martin, 2002; Fridman, 2017). Political economists in the field of Communication draw attention to the economic and political factors underpinning the power relations in media and communication industries. Such relations orient the flow of information, technological resources, and financial capital in society at large; whereas humanistic approaches to finance look at social constructions of discourses surrounding financial theories, models, and practices. In this project, the connection between these two research areas enables a comprehensive view of the relations between information, communication, and finance in China’s context. The latter provides a thick description of the emerging cultures of finance, whereas the former unravels political and economic conditions in which the cultural discourses are at play. iv Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. ii List of Illustrations ............................................................................................................. vi List of Tables ................................................................................................................... viii List of abbreviations .......................................................................................................... ix Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1. Methods ............................................................................................................23 Chapter 2. Technologies of the Financial Self ...................................................................32 Chapter 3. Chinese Fin-Techs in the Making ....................................................................64 Chapter 4. From Fin-Techs to Reg-Techs..........................................................................98 Chapter 5. Fin-Techs in New Media ................................................................................127 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................153 Appendices .......................................................................................................................172 References ........................................................................................................................188 v List of Illustrations Figure 01 A street food truck in front of the NYU Stern School of Businesses Figure 02 A caricature of “income increase outperforms GDP growth” /Sina.com Figure 03 Chinese fin-techs as a social domain: actors and interactions Figure 04 A screenshot of a wealth management app interface Figure 05 Xiao's financial apps in a folder titled “Finance” Figure 06 A screenshot of one-week promotion with a 6.5% return rate Figure 07 Liu and his son were showed around the S company on the open-house day Figure 08 A customer service staff explaining the company’s Code of Conduct, or xinwei guifan to the investors. Figure 09 Four pledges and the board of CBC’s benchmark interest rate. Figure 10 The Product-Manger-centered workflows in the making of fin-tech apps Figure 11 A diagram of function Figure 12 A sample mappings (ying she) between the risk levels and asset levels Figure 13 A workflow of iteration process Figure 14 The regulated fin-tech categories in 2012-2014 Figure 15 The regulated fin-tech categories in 2015-Mar. 2018 Figure 16 The policy makers during the year 2012-2014 Figure 17 The policy makers during the year 2015-Mar. 2018 Figure 18 A new advertising form: “bandage” used by Ni Wo Dai/screenshot from Aiqiyi Figure 19 A pastiche used in Chinese drama The Mystic Nine/screenshot from Aiqiyi Figure 20 A “creative insert” advertisement used in The Mystic Nine/screenshot from Aiqiyi Figure 21 A “creative insert” advertisement used in The Advisors Alliance/screenshot from Youku Figure 22 An over-the-top (OTT) advertisement of Dian Rong on Xiaomi cell phone vi Figure 23 A scenario advertisement for Ant Financial’s micro-loans Figure 24 A scenario advertisement for Ant Financial’s Alipay services Figure 25 A giant billboard for Dianrong at the main entrance of Javits Center, Manhattan, New York. Figure 26 A caricature of the Diaosi economy in China Figure 27 A Diaosi image on the advertising banner of Yirendai in the 5th Fin-tech Summit at the Javits Center, New York Figure 28 A group of old-fashioned stock people (laogumin) in Shanghai are viewing stock changes via a street screen. vii List of Tables Table 1 Comparison of two types of fin-tech companies Table 2 Early sandbox policies by the major fintech countries Table 3 A list of ICT policies applied in Chinese financial sector (2010-2015). Table 4 The comparison of regulated fin-tech categories in two stages (2012-2014 VS 2015-Mar. 2018) Table 5 The comparison of policy makers in two stages (2012-2014 VS 2015-Mar. 2018) Table 6 Institutional factors within and beyond the traditional financial system Table 7 The seven major fin-tech companies and their promoted products/brands (2015- 2018) Table 8 The major fin-tech advertisers and their media choices viii Abbreviations ABC Agricultural