CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 64Privacy, Security, and Data ProtectionEthics and Social Impacts of AICOVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing

Cashless China: Securitization of everyday life through Alipay’s social credit system—Sesame Credit

Chong, Gladys Pak Lei·2019·Chinese Journal of Communication
DOI 10.1080/17544750.2019.1583261
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

This study on Alipay’s social credit system, Sesame Credit, examines the governmental practices that have evolved in the platform economy. Credit has grown exponentially in importance in post-socialist, consumption-driven China. Sesame Credit’s unique and massive consumer database is used to evaluate users’ credit trustworthiness. The social credit system formulated by Alipay aligns with the state’s long tradition of guiding and monitoring the population’s behavior. Diverging from earlier communist-style posters and banners as well as propaganda-style slogans, Alipay adapts, appropriates, and transforms technological trends by appealing to subjects’ self-interest. Alipay de-politicizes the system through gamified features and a loyalty-rewards program of rules, rewards, and penalties. Combining ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with 39 young Chinese people in Beijing, this study examines the users’ perspectives, which have been significantly overlooked in examinations of corporate and state surveillance in the Chinese context. This article argues that market actors, such as Alibaba and Ant Financial, create interests, needs, and dependency among user–subjects by both responding to the pre-existing socio-economic desires for security, trust, and good government, and by navigating the socio-cultural and political conditions of privacy and surveillance practices in contemporary China.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/17544750.2019.1583261

Cites

29 of 29 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Private social credit systems such as Ant Financial's Sesame Credit reward consumers for economic and social relationships and behavior, and they legitimize social credit systems more generally.

    “For instance, private social credit systems such as Ant Financial’s Sesame Credit reward consumers for economic and social relationships and behavior, and they legitimize social credit systems more generally (104).”

    From Physical and virtual repertoires of contention (2022) · cites this paper as [104]

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

2 of the 31 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Chong, G. P. L.
Affiliations
Hong Kong Baptist University (HK)
Corresponding author
Chong, Gladys Pak Lei
ORCID
Chong, Gladys Pak Lei
Venue
Chinese Journal of Communication
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2019-03-12
Volume
12
Issue
3
Pages
290-307
ISSN
  • 1754-4750 (ISSN-L)
  • 1754-4769
DOI
10.1080/17544750.2019.1583261
OpenAlex
W2921298364
Cited by
64
References
31
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 27 · 2019: 1
FWCI
22.15
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Chinese Journal of Communication (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • Hong Kong Research Grants Council
  • Hong Kong Baptist University (FRGI/16-17/053)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing
Keywords
Alipay, social credit system, cashless society, platform economy, credit scoring, surveillance, gamification, loyalty rewards, user trust, privacy, Ant Financial, Alibaba, consumer behavior, post-socialist China, user perspective

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review