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

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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 jiushi—rescue the market in times of crisis.