Giulia Dal Maso | Università di Bologna (original) (raw)

Papers by Giulia Dal Maso

Finance and Society, 2023

This essay explores the meaning that volatility assumes in the Chinese stock market context. Draw... more This essay explores the meaning that volatility assumes in the Chinese stock market context. Drawing on discussions from 'mom and pop' online forums, it argues investors operate in a relational position with the Chinese state regulators that both sustain and threaten their market activities. Chinese stock markets are known to be the most volatile in the world. To face the state's arbitrary intervention in the market, investors must constantly juggle the options of either leaning on and trusting the regulators' capacity to protect and rescue their stocks or engaging in risky margin trading and short-selling activities. This contradictory behavior is reflected in the popular self-mocking meme that keeps circulating in investors online forums, the one of the jiucai (meaning 'garlic chives'). The investors often use it with irony to describe their own tendency to throw cash into the markets again and again, hoping to regain the money they lost in previous investments, never learning a lesson. Linking the financial with the biopolitical dimension, the essay takes the jiucai meme to show the extent to which volatility points to the production of new subjects whose resilience involves the adoption of practices of speculation to conjure a future for themselves that is reborn multiple times.

ERQ, 2023

By means of the slogan of Chinese «ecological civilization», the Chinese financial apparatus has ... more By means of the slogan of Chinese «ecological civilization», the Chinese financial apparatus has started to recruit the potent forces of «green» labelling to target the multitude of individual mom and pop investors, in Chinese called sanhu. The article shows how these financialized subjects, known to be driven by short-term interests and irrational behaviours, are requested by the state to shift their investment choices towards more stable green assets. Through a discourse analysis of online investor platforms and forums, the article analyzes how the sanhu use of financial jargon, memes and allegories reveals how these subjectivities have mixed and contradictory dispositions. Taking investors’ participation in the stock market as a fulcrum of Chinese financialization, I examine how a new shade of green supplements a new governmental project that aims to produce financialized, yet environmentally conscious, subjects, and how in turn the latter contest and exceed this attempt.

Made in China, Dec 31, 2022

nt Forest is a Chinese app that connects users' behaviours to an environmental protection scheme.... more nt Forest is a Chinese app that connects users' behaviours to an environmental protection scheme. Developed in 2016 by Ant Group's Alipay-an affiliate of Alibaba's gigantic mobile-payment platform-Ant Forest has gamified carbon footprint tracking, allowing users to participate in tree planting and conservation as they consume online. If you buy sustainable products, choose paperless options, take your bike instead of your car, and correctly manage your waste, you are rewarded with virtual green energy points that go towards planting and growing a real tree. Significantly, Ant Forest matches virtual experience with reality. By collaborating with a Chinese nongovernmental organisation (NGO), the app claims it has managed to plant trees covering MADE IN CHINA / 2, 2022 PROMETHEUS IN CHINA 144 Ant Forest Mobile App. PC: Shangri-la.com. The Promethean Ant Forest Alibaba's App as a Financialising Environmental Tool Giulia DAL MASO Ant Forest is a Chinese app developed by Alibaba that claims to leverage its technology to solve environmental problems within and beyond China. By financialising and gamifying individuals' carbon footprints with scores and rewards, it allows users to participate in tree planting as they consume online. Through the frame of 'environmentality', this essay discusses how Ant Forest manipulates the environment as a site of financial and biopolitical calculation. In contrast with accounts of Chinese authoritarian environmentalism, the article calls for a wider reckoning with the ongoing process of nature's financialisation, which is both reinforcing and reinforced by forms of sovereign and governmental power.

Focaal , 2022

Th e article examines the fi rst Chinese green bond issued in Europe to explore how a green bond ... more Th e article examines the fi rst Chinese green bond issued in Europe to explore how a green bond is created and how it can be issued across boundaries. Raising questions of "green" valuation at multiple scales, it follows the way the bond's proceeds hit the ground in Portugal, refi nancing wind farms previously built under a Feed in Tariff (FiT) regime. It shows how if on the one hand green bonds are designed as abstract and fungible instruments, then on the other they are spatially situated and predicated upon the larger dynamic of global fi nancial accumulation with its recurrent and contingent crises. In this context, the rush over renewables intersects with expansive Chinese fi nancial monetary policy and the EU austerity process.

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2020

By describing features of Chinese financialisation through en masse stock market trading, the art... more By describing features of Chinese financialisation through en masse stock market trading, the article concerns the development of a Chinese financial ecology of expertise. This indicates a new precarious knowledge regime in which the relationship between the state and the financial subjects it fosters is increasingly defined through financial terms. It argues that the Chinese financialisation should be investigated alongside the state's project directed at financialising human capital and encouraging stock trading as a reaction to an increasingly contractualised labour market and vanishing welfare state. By observing investing strategies of both formally trained expert investors and untrained investors, it emerges how the preeminence of investing activities in the market risks exceeding that of waged labour. The Chinese stock market becomes a site to observe not only the reworking of the relationship between money and wages in China, but also the formation of a financialised redistributive regime in which the state's legitimacy becomes increasingly dependent on its capacity to jiushirescue the market in times of crisis.

Historical Materialism, 2019

The paper investigates the distinctly Chinese intertwining of expertise and state & financial cap... more The paper investigates the distinctly Chinese intertwining of expertise and state & financial capital to enrich the current understanding of neoliberalism as a hegemonic governing rationale. Since the summer of 2015, China has been experiencing one of its most severe financial crises since the adoption of a ‘socialist market economy’ in 1978. However, globally circulating narratives have failed to look beyond a Western-centric corollary, rehashing a critique of the Chinese one-party system and its lack of a ‘genuine’ free market. By exploring the specific genealogy of Chinese capitalism, and the distinctive Chinese financial-market structure, the article will show how the scientific authority of experts formulated amongst neoliberal thinkers never permeated the Chinese idea of knowledge. In the Chinese variety of financial capitalism, expertise is seen to lie not so much in the wisdom of individual experts as in their socio-political support, which legitimises their economic interve...

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2015

The presentation provides an account of the distinctive features of Chinese financialisation. It ... more The presentation provides an account of the distinctive features of Chinese financialisation. It argues that in China, "mass financialisation" was strategically led by the state in an effort to compensate for the social outcomes that resulted from the dismantling of the communist model of collective work units (danwei) subsequent to the opening economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping. Since the opening of the stock exchanges in Shenzhen (1990) and Shanghai (1992), a wave of 'stock fever' (gupiaore) has swept the population. The presentation shows how the Chinese stock market offers a chance for further enrichment in the context of a shrinking welfare state and increasing individualisation of society, while also functioning as a social space where individual investors can regroup in an ersatz of community belonging. Focusing on the disaggregated subjectivities left behind by the state-driven dismantling of the danwei, particularly sanhu [literally "scattered investors"] as one of the most emblematic actors to have emerged during the whole process, I provide an account of the current phase of Chinese mass financialisation. I argue that this set of state interventions succeeded in strengthening the "myths of origin" of the contemporary Chinese regime: financialisation acted as the ground in which government slogans such as "to enrich is glorious," "richness is within range," and "dream a Chinese dream" were subsequently formulated. Biography Giulia Dal Maso is a PhD student at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. Before starting her PhD she lived in China for 5 years where she worked at the IsIAO (Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente) Shanghai office. Giulia's research focuses on the way in which financialisation is emerging in China. In particular, her dissertation analyses tensions between diverse understandings of 'expertise' held by different actors investing in the Shanghai stock exchange.

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies

By examining the 'post' financial crisis scenario in Central Eastern Europe (CEE)... more By examining the 'post' financial crisis scenario in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) the paper assesses the role of Western banks in the region and how their penetration and 'resilience' is influenced by their parent and subsidiary structure. While taking stock of the variegated post-socialist transformation in CEE, it employs a genealogical method to explore how the universal bank model and its current 'bifurcation' into parent and subsidiary bank provides a lens through which to investigate a new form of dependency within the uneven geography of Europe. In the light of Rudolf Hilferding's theory of the universal bank and the theorization of financial capital, it illustrates how the present form of bank capitalization overlaps with previous forms of imperial expansion. If on one hand subsidiaries sit at the intersection between the core (home country) and the periphery (host country)-reproducing some of the old spatial hierarchy of capitalism; on the other they also enable new patterns of value extraction that go beyond these relations of dependency. Their autonomy in raising capital and in responding to local host jurisdiction in their "second home market" opens a new financial dimension of extractions that escape the oversight of national and regional regulatory regimes.

World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2017

The experience of studying abroad positioned the haigui in a border area between China and the re... more The experience of studying abroad positioned the haigui in a border area between China and the rest of the world, possessing a twofold belonging with one foot abroad and one foot at home. Shanghai too, known variously as the "Paris of the East" and "New York of the West," sits astride China and "the Rest" and shares with the haigui a lack of clear national identity (Meng 2006, vii). In Shanghai, the haigui can hop between one identity and another, cling onto their Chineseness, develop domestic connections (guanxi) and share a Chinese national dream, while at the same time remaining plugged in to the community of "global experts" and cultivate foreign habits, eat Western food, buy foreign products, enjoy Western-style nightlife and so on. Shanghai's attraction for them is its place as a "world financial centre." Here their financial imaginary can be grounded and instantiated in the global dimension of trading and its supervision (cf. Sassen 2008, 363). As financial centre, Shanghai hosts a complex and thick environment made of cultures of interpretation that enable the haigui to affirm themselves into local and global collaborations and facilitate financial transactions (2008, 363). Once landed in Shanghai the aspiration of haigui returning from Australia is to position themselves as the best subjects to enable an "interpretative" exchange between Australian and Chinese firms. Here they expect to find the concentration of capital, institutions and infrastructure as well as the circulation of both Chinese and foreign financial practices

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 2021

By examining the 'post' financial crisis scenario in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) the paper asses... more By examining the 'post' financial crisis scenario in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) the paper assesses the role of Western banks in the region and how their penetration and 'resilience' is influenced by their parent and subsidiary structure. While taking stock of the variegated post-socialist transformation in CEE, it employs a genealogical method to explore how the universal bank model and its current 'bifurcation' into parent and subsidiary bank provides a lens through which to investigate a new form of dependency within the uneven geography of Europe. In the light of Rudolf Hilferding's theory of the universal bank and the theorization of financial capital, it illustrates how the present form of bank capitalization overlaps with previous forms of imperial expansion. If on one hand subsidiaries sit at the intersection between the core (home country) and the periphery (host country)-reproducing some of the old spatial hierarchy of capitalism; on the other they also enable new patterns of value extraction that go beyond these relations of dependency. Their autonomy in raising capital and in responding to local host jurisdiction in their "second home market" opens a new financial dimension of extractions that escape the oversight of national and regional regulatory regimes.

Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation

Finance and Society, 2023

ERQ, 2023

Made in China, Dec 31, 2022

Focaal , 2022

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2020

Historical Materialism, 2019

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2015

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies

World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2017

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 2021

Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation

This paper aims at examining how, in the emerging financialization of the Chinese economy, a whol... more This paper aims at examining how, in the emerging financialization of the Chinese economy, a whole new set of economic imaginaries is gripping the country, emanating from both within China and from abroad. Many factors are shaping the imaginary of Chinese financialization: the desire to depict the financialization as an index of progress and a national achievement, not as a threat; the hope to shape a domestic and global financial space within which financialization can operate smoothly; the effort to keep it under centralized control; and the difficulty of dealing with the spontaneous emergence of subjectivities which could question the whole process. Due to their self-learning practices, their large numbers and their irrational actions towards investment, these players are increasingly disturbing state financial operations.
Predominantly, the imaginaries, linked to financialization, have taken the form of a "stock fever", i.e. an all encompassing tide which is engulfing the whole society, without distinguishing between rich and poor, formal and informal experts, urban and rural. One of the seedbeds of this fever is the widespread and easily accessible financial advice books, specifically “how-to manuals”, biographies of millionaires, how-to-become -millionaires, how-to-invest-to-become-millionaires, and the so-called jinrong wenxue financial literature. This piece is characterized by an “of praise” and an “encomiastic tone”, in which enrichment through financialization is depicted as rational, normal, and widespread, and above all perfectly feasible.
One outstanding by-product of this approach is the invention of the so-called “absence of hatred towards rich people”. This could be considered partly as a consequence of the “official” encouragement to become rich but also as a clear manifestation of how strongly the financialization is exerting its cultural hegemony over the local society. The emergence of financial literature, along with its users (later to become players), reveal the main features and tensions which characterize the way financialization is occurring in China, particularly with regard to one of its cradles and epicenters, Shanghai.

book, 2020

This book focuses on the subjectivities of stock market investors to explore tensions within the ... more This book focuses on the subjectivities of stock market investors to explore tensions within the Chinese state's engagement in contemporary financial capitalism. It adopts a genealogical method to investigate how the production of foreign-trained financial experts (haigui) and informal experts (sanhu) points to paradoxes in China's efforts to cultivate financial expertise. Chinese financialisation relates to the state's project of financialising human capital in reaction to a contractualised labour market and the vanishing welfare state. Through ethnographic inquiry, Dal Maso shows the Chinese stock markets are crucial to the new redistributive regime where wage labour risks losing its primacy. Here, one can observe how the relationship between money and wages in China is being reworked and witness the development of a new economic order in which the state's legitimacy becomes increasingly dependent on its capacity to jiushi-to rescue the market in times of crisis.