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ID:
158293
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| Summary/Abstract |
One of the main drivers of China’s e-commerce boom is the dramatic expansion of the country’s Internet finance industry, which has grown and diversified at a staggering rate over the past decade. The emergence of Chinese Internet finance has been discussed in largely positive terms as facilitating commercial activity. It has also been linked to the wider developmental goal of promoting financial inclusion through the provision of financial services to previously excluded populations. Emerging from the global microfinance movement, the concept of financial inclusion depicts increased access to financial services (particularly credit) as an inherently beneficial means of empowering the poor and driving bottom-up economic development. This article challenges this dominant narrative of beneficial digital financial inclusion in China. It draws on the growing body of literature critiquing the global financial inclusion movement, and examines examples of exploitation, fraud, instability, and extraction related to expanded digital financial coverage in contemporary China. It then demonstrates that digital financial inclusion is part and parcel of the Chinese government’s plans to create a social credit system in an attempt to construct a “trustworthy society.” In this way, digital financial inclusion can be seen as a key element in a wider project of expanding surveillance through big data in order to close down spaces for those seeking to contest the hegemonic socioeconomic order. The article argues that these examples illuminate fundamental processes implicit in the expansion of the commercial Internet finance industry. In this way, while the extension of digital financial inclusion in China benefits certain groups, it also necessarily serves to reproduce patterns of inequality and exploitation.
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| 2 |
ID:
192512
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| Summary/Abstract |
China's nationwide social credit system (also called social rating system) aims to collect and analyze data on companies and individuals to assess their economic and social influence, civic qualities, responsibility, and financial reliability. The digital deterrence system for regulating public life appears to be a continuation of the Chinese social experiments of the second half of the 20th century. This time, however, social engineering uses previously unknown technical means free from the disadvantages of subjective evaluation and application under set parameters. Digitalization has thus provided another tool for assessing social behavior - an additional control system based on strict mathematical principles and, importantly, unlike legal systems, operating in real time. In terms of its regulatory function, it is comparable to ethnical norms and morality.
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