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Paper short abstract

China’s P2P fintech boom promised “inclusive” democratic finance but collapsed into digital Ponzi schemes and predatory cash loans. Drawing on ethnography, this paper shows how platform design turned financial inclusion into a machinery of dispossession.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how “financial inclusion” became a vehicle of mass dispossession in China’s decade-long experiment with fintech. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2018 and 2023 among investors, borrowers, and platform workers in the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending sector, it traces how digital platforms transformed everyday hopes for mobility into speculative extraction. China’s fintech boom did not emerge from a lack of banking access but from dissatisfaction with state-dominated, conservative financial infrastructures. Platforms such as Alipay popularized a vision of “democratic finance” through user-friendly design, real-time returns, and populist rhetoric that framed financial participation as part of the Chinese Dream. P2P platforms extended this affective infrastructure into high-risk credit markets, repackaging peer lending into guaranteed “wealth-management” products while alienating the ethics of mutuality that the term “peer” implied. Under conditions of unregulated competition, this inclusionary script depended increasingly on deception: simulated profits, unfounded guarantees, and referral-driven expansion. When competition intensified, platforms shifted to short-term “cash loan” models that combined data extraction, algorithmic scoring, and coercive repayment practices, producing cycles of debt, shame, and social breakdown. By 2020, nearly 6,000 platforms had collapsed, wiping out millions of households’ savings. Placing China in dialogue with global fintech trajectories, the paper argues that inclusion is not inherently empowering. When mediated through platform infrastructures and investor-driven growth, it can become a technique for distributing risk, extracting value, and normalizing financial violence—an exportable model now spreading across the Global South.