Abstract
By observing individuals’ engagement in the Chinese stock markets, this chapter describes the emergence of a Chinese ecology of financial expertise and a new redistributive model in which financial labour is at stake. In the moment the haigui reject their formal training as financial workers, they begin to act like, and metamorphose with, the mass of scattered investors, the sanhu. The intersubjectivity between these actors becomes a mirror that reflects their common subjection to money as the ultimate arbiter—one which supplants state loyalties. In this context and under recurrent financial crises, the state risks losing its grip on the subjectivity of trained and untrained experts, who first become alienated and then potential unruly subjects.
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Notes
- 1.
Through its initiatives and entanglement in the global circuit of capital, China has become the holder of the largest foreign exchange reserves in world history and has now gained the power to heavily condition US debt.
- 2.
See my analysis in Chap. 2.
- 3.
Interview with Jing, 8 November 2013, Shanghai.
- 4.
Interview with Jun, 28 November 2013, Shanghai.
- 5.
As I explain in Chap. 6, if China aligns with global international standards and regulation, it will need to eliminate “A” shares, the ones the sanhu can invest in.
- 6.
This pathway was generated as Fordist capitalism was no longer able to suck surplus value from living working labour (Marazzi 2010, 32). This initiated a process of massive delocalisation of production to countries with cheaper labour costs, the casualisation of labour, precarity, de-unionisation and, in turn, a process of financialisation through which capital’s search for profit was carried out of productive processes by means of a new shareholding value.
- 7.
These conversations were heard when attending conferences and talks while studying for my Masters dissertation in both Qinghua University in Beijing and at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science.
- 8.
Mutatis mutandis, in the eyes of Chinese reformers this doctrine seems to perform in a similar pattern to one of the pillars of neoliberal doctrine, the “trickle down” economic effect.
- 9.
For instance, the policy of the first secretary of the CCP, Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) was based on an alliance with the bourgeoisie as the driver of the economic development.
- 10.
Pun Ngai speaks about the “denial” of communism: in China, through the negation of the collectivist model of the past, subjectivities enthusiastically reposition themselves within an exalting competition and individual skills in a “free” market, with the belief that such a market could guarantee individual freedom (Pun and Lu 2010). In a different approach, the unreality of communism is linked to the absence (for the moment) of a proletariat as a class per se. For instance: “Among the new workers, it hardly seems to be an awareness of being a subject. When it comes to their identity, just a few of the new workers identify themselves as such, most of them seem to identity with who oppress and exploit them. As an Opium, the developmentalist ideology has imposed a dominant position and it makes even more difficult to free the subjects it oppress with new values to free themselves” (Guo 2015).
- 11.
In Chinese xingongren , a recently proposed substitute for the outdated term nongmingong (“workers of peasant origin”) , indicating migrant workers of rural origin. The Chinese language clearly distinguishes between gongren (manual workers in the industry, blue collars) and laodongzhe (workers in any field, paid with some kind of wage), as French and Italian also do (respectively ouvrieurs/travailleurs; operai/lavoratori), though not English. Besides, xin “new” here is xin-, a prefix like “neo-,” deprived of any temporary connotation, as a link to contemporaneity or to “modernisation” of the job market could be. Perhaps a better translation could be “neoworkers.” As it sounds in Chinese, this term clearly stresses the distance between this new form of migrant with their precarious condition and the old workers (in industry, mines etc.) with a secure job for life, normally in the same company or unit. See, for instance, Lü (2013).
- 12.
This term came into use especially after Deng Xiaoping’s early 1992 tour of China’s southern provinces, after which a business fever erupted. This business fever was often described with the saying: “One billion people, 900 million businessmen, and another 100 million waiting in line.” “Jump into the sea” (from a word used in imperial China to mean “turn professional,” said of an actor or actress who starts a career as a prostitute), was re-interpreted in the sense of “bravely sail offshore,” as a call to those in every profession (from researchers and academics to civil servants) to discard the security of public sector employment and adventurously try to make money.
- 13.
Interview with Xun, 15 August 2013, Shanghai.
- 14.
Literally zhangting (stop the growth), an abbreviation for zhangdie tingban (limit growth and drop lists) , a system to stop the explosive growths and drops and limit the speculations on the share markets.
- 15.
The term is used to cover all financial intermediaries that perform bank-like activity but are not regulated as one. These include mobile payment systems, pawnshops, peer-to-peer lending websites and mostly hedge funds, the industry Xun was working for.
- 16.
Interview with Cai, 12 May 2013, Shanghai.
- 17.
These practices are indeed not to be referred to as just “Chinese.” Investigations on financial experts acting in Western markets have shown how embracing a cynical attitude towards and distance from formal financial training, is a crucial part of the development of the financial system and financial policy-making (Holst and Moodie 2015, 44).
- 18.
Information about this text is taken from an online review by Wang Xiaoming “Sick soul and deformity Revolution—Lu Xun’s ‘Story of Ah Q’” (n.d., http://www.eywedu.com/luxun/pl005.htm).
- 19.
Interview with Wei, 12 August 2013, Shanghai.
- 20.
Interview with Gui, 25 May 2013, Shanghai.
- 21.
“The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it” (Marx 1973, 706).
- 22.
Once again, the emergence of financialisation and the shift of capitalist accumulation from material towards more immaterial forms of production does not mean that what went before has ceased to exist; on the contrary, it signals the rise of a mutual existence—as the surplus gained by the labour cost in the production labour regime is invested and valorised in the latter, which in turn corresponds to another labour regime.
- 23.
A school of intellectual thought that is critical of capitalism and aspects of the Chinese economic reforms and in favour of elements of Maoist-style socialism, which includes significant role for state planning, the preservation of state-owned enterprises and a renewed spirit of collectivism.
- 24.
For instance, Wang Xiaoming returned to the examination of the works of Chinese thinkers of the first wave of modernity who were engaged in defining an anti-capitalistic modernity for China based on the spiritual values of “great unity,” “universal peace” and so on.
- 25.
It has to be remembered that the redefinition of the social contract between the state and the people was already a key theme in China in the sixties, when the CCP formulated the theory of “modern revisionism” whilst accusing the Soviet Union of having changed its political colours. Two themes, the “peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism” and “a state of the entire people,” were considered the core of this criticism. Regarding the latter, according to Khrushchev, the dictatorship of the proletariat “had ceased to be indispensable in the USSR” and “the state, which arose as a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, had, in the new, contemporary stage, become a state of the entire people.” The Chinese considered this a betrayal of Marxist-Leninism, in other words, as a shift from a contract signed by the state with one part of its people, that is, the working class, to another contract in which the contractor is much wider and subsumes its working class and its combativeness.
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Dal Maso, G. (2020). The Precarious Ecology of Chinese Financial Expertise. In: Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6824-4_7
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