The Financialization Rush: Responding to Precarious Labor and Social Security by Investing in the Chinese Stock Market (original) (raw)

The precarious Chinese financial ecology of expertise: discontent in the mix

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2020

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.

Knowing But Not Doing? The Institutionalization of Financial Know-How in China

This article focuses on the organizational practices of traders in the Chinese OTC derivatives markets, the knowledge and techniques they use, and their perceptions of the markets. Such analysis is seen as prism through which to get a larger view of the ongoing expansion and institutionalization of Chinese financial markets and their global integration. The article discusses the mechanisms behind the transfer of expertise and technology (e.g. pricing models) from Western markets into China and the dissemination of this knowhow within the Chinese financial sector. Existing research has shown that organizational practices in Western derivatives markets have been heavily structured by these knowledge and technologies. It is however clear that the expertise and technologies have limited applicability to Chinese financial markets which poses questions regarding the impact on organizational practices. The central question which the article attempts to answer is therefore what, if any, rol...

Same same, but different: Varieties of capital markets, Chinese state capitalism and the global financial order

Competition & Change

Since 2009, China’s capital markets have developed and internationalized to an unprecedented degree, which has contributed to a lot of debates on China’s rise and its implications for the global financial order. Contributing to these debates, this article analyses the development of capital markets in China and their integration into global finance between 2009 and 2019, focusing on three aspects: how Chinese capital markets are developing domestically; how they are integrating with global markets; and how Chinese capital markets are internationalizing, i.e. expanding abroad. Thereby, the article analyses the crucial role of securities exchanges who as organizers of capital markets are powerful actors that exercise considerable influence over these markets and their development. This empirical investigation reveals that while they share some characteristics with ‘global’ capital markets, Chinese capital markets function quite differently. The article argues that China’s state-owned ...

China: Socialism Embraces Capitalism? an Oxymoron for the Turn of the Century: A Study of the Restructuring of the Securities Markets and Banking Industry in the People's Republic of China in an Effort to Increase Investment Capital

Houston Journal of International Law, 1998

I. INTRODUCTION The People's Republic of China (PRC) has been a military power for the last several decades. Because of the government's stringent control of virtually every aspect of human rights, politics, and business policies--such as corporate decisions, financial matters, and economic policy--the PRC did not develop like other industrial nations. As a result, the PRC--the world's most populous nation--lagged behind other developing nations in terms of industrial strength and general economic health. Industries were unable to raise sufficient capital to compete with other global powers; however, in the late 1970s several government officials sought to introduce long-term economic reform to ensure that China would become a global market power.(1) In doing so, China borrowed economic theories from capitalist countries, but incorporated them "on its own terms," leaving the communist government in control.(2) Accordingly, the government remains the "chief...

The Missing History of the Shanghai Stock Exchange (1904-1941)

The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12), Asian Studies Series, Amsterdam University Press, 2022

With the background of foreign concessions in Shanghai, as a result of the Treaty of Nanjing and subsequent treaties between China and Western powers, the Shanghai Stock Exchange (1904-1941) was established by foreign businessmen (mostly British) in Shanghai. This foreign Shanghai Stock Exchange symbolises Western capitalisation in China and deserves the attention of economic historians to investigate its function in semicolonial Shanghai. However, due to constraints in available archives and difficulties in utilising multilingual research materials, the history of the foreign Shanghai Stock Exchange has been untold. Among the inchoate existing literature on stock exchanges in Shanghai, literature in Chinese lays focus on Chinese stock exchanges while literature in English dismisses the foreign stock exchange from the broad context of financial capitalism in China reflected locally in Shanghai. This paper aims to bridge the scholarship between Chinese and English on this topic and put forward the future direction to dig into this important but missing piece of economic history.

Understanding China?s historical development: The profit and the risk that China?s stock market provides investors

Working Papers, 2009

The purpose of this paper is to describe China's unique historical development that transformed the Celestial Empire into the largest economy in the world in the beginning of the nineteenth century, with a GDP that exceeded that of Western Europe, Japan, the US and Russia combined, and the decline during the 'Century of Humiliation', and Mao Zedong's communism that culminated in the 'Three Bitter Years' from 1958 to 1961 that produced the large famine with an estimated death of 20 to 30 million people. After this disaster, aggravated by the 'Cultural Revolution' that followed, came the amazing growth started by Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in 1978, that is only comparable to the United States emergence as an economic giant during the nineteenth century. China's sustained growth, at an astounding 10 percent per year over the last 30 years, is without precedent. Many economists predict this growth rate will continue at 7 to 8 percent per year for several decades. This extraordinary sustained growth was partially fueled by the formation of its rapidly expanding financial market, and the profit and risks that its stock marked provides investors.

Law and Finance: The Case of Stock Market Development in China

Having grown to one of the largest in the world in just over two decades, the stock market of China is cited as a counterexample to the significance of law for financial market development. A thorough investigation of the history of China’s stock market development however finds that law is actually critical to sustaining market growth, in that China's stock market faced an existential crisis in the early 2000s as a result of pervasive market abuse and only after market abuse was greatly curbed by law did the market continue to grow. On the other hand, the trajectory of development in China is growth first followed by law and the improvement of law is driven by market growth. The experience of China hence indicates that law and market growth is in a bidirectional rather than unidirectional causal relation, and the course of development is “growth-law-further growth”. Nevertheless, this virtuous circulation is not a guarantee and market growth may not always lead to stronger law, evidenced by the fact that serious mismanagement is still widespread among listed SOEs in China. Political and ideological restrictions are the root obstacle. Politics and ideologies are fundamental to market development, for they not just obstruct the change from market growth to law, but also explain the growth in the first place. On the other hand, the strength of law is not predetermined by the legal origin of a country, and law can improve even in China, a country without the tradition of rule of law.