China has seen a dramatic proliferation of platforms offering digital monetary services, offering convenient forms of transactions, saving and investment. This has been accompanied by a rise in instances of online fraud, along with attempts by state organ’s and the country’s financial institutes to raise public awareness and prevent such instances. Concerns around the security of new technologies are generally accepted as emerging from the inherent flaws in the platforms themselves, or from unintentional misuse or mistreatment of personal data by users. However, in ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst migrant workers in Shenzhen, many of these technologically literate workers understood the safety of various forms of monetary management (both online and offline) not through the design and architecture of the platforms, but rather in relation to the kinds of sociality associated with such services.

This meant that they tended to attribute greater degree of trust to digital money services that were perceived of as being less, rather than more social. This talk maps out an apparent hierarchy of trustworthiness afforded to China’s new digital many platforms by the participant group. I also argue that such behaviour appears to challenge the accepted anthropological understanding of money in China as being an especially integrative and social artefact in comparison to those elsewhere.