Tang, Xiangchu;
(2025)
Buying insurance is like adopting a child: risk prevention, familial duty, guanxi and social media in modern China.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
According to the World Health Organization, China is now an aging society: life expectancy continues to rise and the proportion of the population over 60 years old continues to increase. These demographic changes are leading to policy changes in how the national state, families and individuals plan for old age and for health care provision, and they are also prompting Chinese insurers to adapt to a new situation. This thesis is a study on the social construction of risk, specifically how new technological affordances are reshaping the practice and culture of marketing risk and insurance in China. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in two Chinese insurance companies, I investigate how they evoke their clients’ perception of risks. I pay close attention to how technologies such as genetic testing and social media aid insurers in making risks visible and compelling. I show how insurers call upon traditional family duties to justify the need for their products, duties that extend forwards and backwards to future and to previous generations. I show that insurers have been able to construct new, close, relationships with clients thanks to the wide adoption of WeChat. The WeChat platform creates a constant co-presence among its users, within the company it intensifies power dynamics and supervisions, while in the local communities, it makes agents members of the neighbourhood, it has helped to extend offline friendships online and to construct an online mutual-support community which makes buying insurance as “helping friends.” In the study, I also reflect on my positionality as researcher and member of the communities I am studying and I think through that experience adopting the lens of the Chinese concept of guanxi, which from my understanding necessitates “reciprocity”. Overall, my research casts a light on the technocultures of contemporary China within that critical industry, the insurance industry, whose job is to secure our uncertain future.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Buying insurance is like adopting a child: risk prevention, familial duty, guanxi and social media in modern China |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Science and Technology Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10211912 |
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