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theses

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.
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, 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.

ETD_9286

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Jing Wang

doi:10.7282/t3-43kj-b323

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.