Affective infrastructure: Platform capitalism and the making of indebted subjects in China

Drawing on thousands of digital narratives from Chinese online debtor communities, this paper investigates the paradoxical expansion of platform-mediated debt in a traditionally high-savings society. It demonstrates how platforms systematically manufacture indebted subjects through a three-stage trajectory: ‘benevolent lure’ at enrolment, ‘managed crisis’ of illusory control during entanglement, and ‘coercive inversion’ triggered by algorithmic betrayal. By conceptualizing the platforms as an ‘affective infrastructure’ – an apparatus engineered to produce, manage and capitalize on borrowers’ affective states – this study reframes our understanding of financial subjugation in the digital age. Ultimately, this paper shifts the analytical focus from discrete financial transactions to a processual regime of affective governance, revealing how platforms actively choreograph the lived experience of over-indebtedness at the intersection of platform power, state-led governance and contemporary precarity.