From dreams to ruins : the life and afterlife of China's "internet finance" desiring-machines

Abstract

P2P lending, starting in the UK in 2005, ideally resembles an online community of mutual aid between lenders and borrowers. But the P2P booms in China since 2012 were not about the success of mutual online communities. Instead, the platforms, and the “internet finance” industry they represented, thrived through credit expansions and money schemes that rode on the desires, anxieties, and dreams of lenders and borrowers in the names of financial inclusion and financial innovation. The rapid expansion of these platforms, with the promise of easy access and profitable returns, and without proper regulation, cultivated the perfect environment for the growth of risks and failures. Since 2014, thousands of platforms have collapsed, making millions of investors unable to withdraw their money as if experiencing a "bank run". This PhD dissertation is based on 20 months' ethnographic fieldwork in China's internet finance industry from 2018 to 2020 when the collapses of these platforms became increasingly frequent and massive. The dissertation interprets these internet finance platforms as linguistic desiring-machines and addresses why these desiring-machines turned from the agents of dreams and hopes to the culprits of nightmares and ruins over the past decade. Through understanding the life and afterlife of China’s internet finance industry, this dissertation converses with the anthropology of finance, media and ethics, the philosophy of money, the Lacanian psychanalysis and Deleuzian post-structural theories of desires. The schemes provide a window into broader questions about money and credit as modes of information that, in shuttling between the virtual and the actual, can be forgotten, remembered, and transformed or transmuted into nonmonetary forms of value. The dissertation contributes to the field of economic anthropology, Chinese studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) through the deep analysis of the sociotechnical systems of money and bring those technologies into relation to the domain of the imaginary or the desiring subject in China’s context.