Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation

This book focuses on the subjectivities of stock market investors to explore tensions within the Chinese state’s engagement in contemporary financial capitalism. The book 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.

Giulia Dal Maso is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna. Her research examines historical and contemporary dimensions of financialisation. She has published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Historical Materialism, Social and Cultural Geography and Journal of Cultural Economy.