Payments in the pandemic: orchestrating and imagining cross-boundary digital money infrastructures in China during COVID-19

Abstract

Recent scholarship has sought to emphasise boundaries and borders as being complex social institutions that play a vital role in mediating national and global flows. This article examines transactions occurring along the boundary between Hong Kong and Mainland China, which experienced a sudden ‘hardening’ owing to travel restrictions imposed following the outbreak of COVID-19. When individuals found themselves unable to physically cross the boundary as per usual, they instead turned to mobile media to enact everyday transactions – both financial and social – between the two regions. Calling upon the notion of ‘digital passages’, we argue that the appropriation of digital money infrastructures for managing such transactions should act as a reminder for scholars to productively engage with the various forms of boundaries and borders emerging within online spaces.