Making Money Visible

Making money visible: Digital money and financial precarity amongst Chinese migrant workers Tom McDonaldIn the summer of 2016, I and my students were in the industrial city of Shenzhen, South East China, conducting a small exploratory study aimed at gaining an overview of migrant factory workers' attitudes towards digital money platforms.Over two weeks, we had spoken to many migrant factory workers, uncovering a range of differing attitudes towards the platforms and their use.On one extreme, some migrants seemed to conduct almost all of their daily economic life through these technologies, ranging from purchasing snacks in convenience stores to sending remittances back home to their villages in rural China.At the opposite end of the spectrum other migrants largely eschewed these technologies in preference of cash transactions for the majority of uses (Figure 1).Plenty of migrants lay somewhere inbetween, adopting particular features of the platforms as suited their own lives.As is so often the case in anthropology, the 'data' reflected not clear observable correlations, but rather a 'mishmash' of differing preferences and attitudes.However, the popularity of Yu'e bao (an online savings account linked to the Alipay payment platform) stood out amongst our interactions.Almost all of the migrants we encountered used this function, often choosing to keep most of their cash savings stored in this way, instead of using traditional cash deposit accounts with (typically State-owned) banks.