Digital Riba and Algorithmic Finance: Challenges of Digitized Usury in China’s Integrated Payment Landscape

This paper investigates the phenomenon of "Digital Riba"—the digitization and algorithmic facilitation of usurious lending practices—within China's highly integrated platform-based financial ecosystem. It posits that the convergence of ubiquitous digital payments, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence has not only scaled but also structurally transformed exploitative credit, embedding it seamlessly into daily transactional and social platforms like Alipay and WeChat Pay. This integration normalizes debt acquisition, while AI-driven personalization enables hyper-efficient, potentially predatory targeting of financial vulnerabilities. The analysis reveals that prevailing regulatory frameworks, focused primarily on static interest rate caps, are conceptually outpaced by these socio-technical systems. Addressing Digital Riba therefore necessitates a governance paradigm shift beyond usury laws towards holistic regulation of algorithmic fairness, data sovereignty, and the ethical design of financial ecosystems themselves. The Chinese case offers critical insights into the global challenges of governing finance in the age of platform capitalism and artificial intelligence.