Abstract
This chapter analyses the distinctive features of Chinese financialisation in which the state strategically involved the masses and substituted the welfare and social space previously provided by the communist units (danwei), which were dismantled through Deng’s reforms. The opening of stock exchanges in Shenzhen (1990) and Shanghai (1992) triggered a “stock fever” (gupiaore) that swept the population, offering individual investors a chance of personal gain and new social spaces to regroup in an ersatz of community belonging. The so-called sanhu (lit. scattered investors) emerged as the main actors of this financialisation. Through the state’s interventions it strengthened the “myths of origin” of the contemporary Chinese regime; financialisation gave rise to government slogans such as “To enrich is glorious” and “Dream a Chinese dream.”
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Notes
- 1.
Interview with Mr Feng, 12 August 2013, Shanghai.
- 2.
Mah-jong is a famous traditional Chinese gambling game that involves superstitious beliefs and is exclusively played by men. It has a strong role in Chinese history and culture and is often mentioned to explain the contradictory nature of the Chinese entrepreneurial ethic: while the Chinese have always been keen to scrimp and save money for the long-term sustenance and security of their families, often they suddenly risk it all by playing mah-jong. Since the Ming-Qing period gambling, with its possibility of bringing financial ruin to entire families, always scared people to death (Basu 1991). It seems that for some sanhu, investing in the stock market has somehow replaced mah-jong , a by now denigrated, past form of gambling, substituting for it the authoritative modern power that the stock market evokes. Furthermore, here the consequences of losing are less visible: winning or losing money is lived individually. In mah-jong , on the other hand, when someone loses, he owes money to his tongzhi (comrade) and if he is unable to repay, he will certainly lose face among the community. Losing face, diu mianzi , could lead the family into isolation and the man will carry the burden of taking the whole family into ruin. Instead, the stock market is open to women (from professionals to housewives) and men of all ages.
- 3.
Interview with Mei, 7 June 2013, Shanghai.
- 4.
The Composite Index is a way of measuring market performance over a period of time. It is calculated by grouping equities, indexes or other factors combined in a standardised way.
- 5.
After the reform, the central government’s revenues declined steadily relative to GDP (falling from 31.1 per cent in 1978 to 15.7 per cent in 1989), while private household savings surged, with deposits in state-owned banks increasing from 21.06 billion yuan in 1978 to 519.64 billion yuan in 1989. Shareholdings from these large amounts of household savings provided the government with a lucrative opportunity to collect taxes from the banking sector to finance investment in SOEs (see Wong Man Lai and Yang 2009, 412).
- 6.
Interview with Mr Xu, 17 August 2013, Shenzhen.
- 7.
Interview with Zheng, 22 June 2013, Shanghai.
- 8.
For a further analysis of the rise of finance and financialisation, see Krippner (2011, 4).
- 9.
Historically, this kind of move could recall the wages reform (launched by the Chinese state at the beginning of the eighties with the aim to liberalise the job market), which triggered mass protests all over China and culminated in the Spring 1989 Tiananmen sit-in. This could be taken as an eloquent example of how opening policies, pushed by a market rationale, often displace the population instead, in an elusive search for the state as guarantor.
- 10.
Both the SSEC and SZSC indexes suffered a 70 per cent drop from their historical high during the period from October 2007 to October 2008.
- 11.
Interview with Yimou and Jiang, 24 August 2013, Shanghai.
- 12.
In a linguistic financial regime, a universally accepted convention is a process in which a multitude of economic actors becomes a community by selecting/electing a supra-individual convention in order to turn it into an interpretative model valid for all players in the game of the market. By electing the convention, the multitude makes itself into a community (Marazzi 2008).
- 13.
Interview with Hong, 9 July 2013, Shanghai.
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Dal Maso, G. (2020). The Financialisation Rush. In: Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6824-4_6
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