Sci-Tech Asia Webinar
Dreaming Like a Market: Beneath the Rise and Fall of China’s P2P Lending Platforms
Webinar Description
In the past decade, Chinese people have swarmed into the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending industry as lenders and borrowers. Meanwhile, millions of desperate investors lost their life’s savings on these P2P platforms, many of which turned out to be Ponzi schemes. This talk derives from an article recently winning the Schneider Student Paper Prize Honourable Mention by Society for Economic Anthropology, AAA, and published in Economic Anthropology. It presents a failed yet influential social experiment of digital finance in the world’s largest developing economy and examines the fantasy of beneficial technology in shaping market morality and its unintended consequences.
Speaker
Yichen Rao (University of Hong Kong)
Yichen Rao is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and STS at HKIHSS, University of Hong Kong. His dissertation fieldwork, funded by Wenner-Gren, is about China’s “internet finance” industry. He is an Adam Smith fellow at George Mason University and received Ernst Mach grant at University of Vienna. He studies digital economy, finance and technology in China.
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Sci-Tech Asia Webinar Series
Our Webinar series features scholars from all over the world sharing their on-going research on topics at the intersection between science, technology, and society (STS) in the 21st century. Our virtual seminars are hosted via Zoom and live-streamed via our social media.
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