Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-02T07:59:43.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The sickle and the garlic chives: Volatility in the Chinese stock market

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Giulia Dal Maso
Giulia Dal Maso*
Affiliation:
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
*
Corresponding author: Giulia Dal Maso, Università Ca’ Foscari, Dorsoduro 3246, 30123 Venezia, Italy. Email: giulia.dalmaso@unive.it
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

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.

Keywords

VolatilityfinancializationChinese stock marketsmeme stocksretail investors
Type
Essay
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 9 , Issue 3: Volatility in finance, art, and culture , 2023 , pp. 58 - 68
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2023 The Author(s)

References

News, Bloomberg (2022) How China looks to be easing its covid zero strategy. Bloomberg, 6 December. Available at: <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-06/how-china-looks-to-be-easing-its-covid-zero-strategy-quicktake-lbc3t6dj?leadSource=uverify%20wall>. Accessed 4 December 2022..+Accessed+4+December+2022.>Google Scholar
Bühler, K. (1934) Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Caifuhao [Good Fortune] (2022) Is it time for the market to shrink and change again? 24 November. Available at: <https://caifuhao.eastmoney.com/news/20221124160650774179050>. Accessed 10 January 2023..+Accessed+10+January+2023.>Google Scholar
Cheng, J. (2022) Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on China's stock market volatility, during and after the outbreak: Evidence from an ARDL approach. Frontiers in Public Health, 10 (May). Available at: <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.810102/full>. Accessed 21 March 2023.Google Scholar
Dal Maso, G. (2015) The financialization rush: Responding to precarious labor and social security by investing in the Chinese stock market. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(1): 47–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dal Maso, G. (2020a) The precarious Chinese financial ecology of expertise: Discontent in the mix. Journal of Cultural Economy, 14(1): 41–53.10.1080/17530350.2020.1751676CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dal Maso, G. (2020b) Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation: Returned Labour and the State-Finance Nexus. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dal Maso, G. (2023) Interview with Robert Meister. Historical Materialism [Online], January. Available at: <https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/interviews/interview-with-robert-meister>. Accessed 21 March 2023..+Accessed+21+March+2023.>Google Scholar
Elyachar, J. (2003) Mappings of power: The state, NGOs, and international organisations in the informal economy of Cairo. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45(3): 571–605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esposito, R. (2008) Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.Google Scholar
Feher, M. (2021) Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age. New York: Zone Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, M. (1984) The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Guo, P. and Hong, Z. (2016) The systematic politicization of China's stock markets. Journal of Contemporary China, 25(99): 422–37.Google Scholar
Haiven, M. (2011) Finance as capital's imagination? Reimagining value and culture in an age of fictitious capital and crisis. Social Text, 29(3): 93–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammer, E. (2015) Adorno's Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hertz, E. (1998) The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keith, M., Lash, S., Arnoldi, J., and Rooker, T. (2013) China Constructing Capitalism: Economic Life and Urban Change. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Komporozos-Athanasiou, A. (2022) Speculative Communities: Living With Uncertainty in a Financialized World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, B. (2016) Introduction. In: Lee, B. and Martin, R. (eds.) Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, B. (2020) Volatility. In: Borch, C., and Wosnitzer, R., (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies. London: Routledge, 46–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, X. (2018) Jiucai de Ziwo Xiuyang [Self-cultivation of the Garlic Chives]. Jiangsu: Fenghuang.Google Scholar
Li, Z., Zhang, W.G., and Zhang, Y. (2021) The information content of Chinese volatility index for volatility forecasting. Applied Economics Letters, 28(5): 365–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LiPuma, E. (2017) The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk and Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marazzi, C. (2008) Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).Google Scholar
Marazzi, C. (2011) Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).Google Scholar
Markets Insider (2022) Is the Chinese market's rebound over? 19 April. Available at: <https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/etf/is-the-chinese-market-s-rebound-over-1031364774>. Accessed 3 May 2023.. Accessed 3 May 2023.' href=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Markets+Insider+(2022)+Is+the+Chinese+market's+rebound+over?+19+April.+Available+at:+.+Accessed+3+May+2023.>Google Scholar
Martin, R. (2002) Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Martin, R. (2012) A precarious dance, a derivative sociality. TDR/The Drama Review, 56(4): 62–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, R. (2015) Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Meister, R. (2016) Liquidity. In: Lee, B. and Martin, R. (eds.) Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 143–73.Google Scholar
Meister, R. (2019) Randy Martin: Politics beyond the commodity form. Social Text, 37(4): 51–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meister, R. (2020) Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mezzadra, S. (2019) Forces and forms: Governmentality and bios in the time of global capital. Positions, 27(1): 145–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2019) The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Mirowski, P. (2013) Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Muniesa, F. (2014) The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nair, B. (2022) As Xi Jinping firmed his grip over China, foreign investors said to exit mainland stocks at record pace. Available at: <https://www.benzinga.com/markets/asia/22/10/29389813/as-xi-jinping-firmed-his-grip-over-china-foreign-investors-reportedly-exit-mainland-stocks-at-record>. Accessed 5 December 2022..+Accessed+5+December+2022.>Google Scholar
Orléan, A. (1989) Mimetic contagion and speculative bubbles. Theory and Decision, 27(1-2): 63–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pang, L. (2022) China's post-Socialist governmentality and the garlic chives meme: economic sovereignty and biopolitical subjects. Theory, Culture & Society, 39(1): 81–100.Google Scholar
Peck, J. (2023) Practicing conjunctural methodologies: Engaging Chinese capitalism. Dialogues in Human Geography, https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231154346CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petry, J. (2020) Financialization with Chinese characteristics? Exchanges, control and capital markets in authoritarian capitalism. Economy and Society, 49(2): 213–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petry, J. (2021) Same same, but different: Varieties of capital markets, Chinese state capitalism and the global financial order. Competition & Change, 25(5): 605–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Read, J. (2009) A genealogy of homo-economicus: Neoliberalism and the production of subjectivity. Foucault Studies, 6: 25–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rethel, L. (2018) Capital market development in Southeast Asia: From speculative crisis to spectacles of financialization. Economic Anthropology, 5(2): 185–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosamond, E. (2020) From reputation capital to reputation warfare: Online ratings, trolling, and the logic of volatility. Theory, Culture & Society, 37(2): 105–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Samman, A., Boy, N., Coombs, N., Hager, S., Hayes, A., Rosamond, E., and Westermeier, C. (2022) After the boom: Finance and society studies in the 2020s and beyond. Finance and Society, 8(2): 93109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Samman, A., and Sgambati, S. (2023) Financial eschatology and the libidinal economy of leverage. Theory, Culture & Society, 40(3): 103–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shiller, R.-J. (1990) Speculative prices and popular models. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 4(2): 55–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shiller, R.-J. (2015) Irrational Exuberance. Third edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tonghuashun [Four Aces] (2021) Available at: <http://backtest.10jqka.com.cn/backtest/app.html#/strategysquare>. Accessed 14 December 2022..+Accessed+14+December+2022.>Google Scholar
Turri, M. (2015) Moneta e linguaggio: una relazione difficile. Synergies Italie, 11: 19–35.Google Scholar
Yap, C.W. (2016) China's new security challenge: Angry mom-and-pop investors as they watch their nest eggs dwindle, some hit the streets in protest. Wall Street Journal, 12 April. Available at: <http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-new-security-challenge-angry-mom-and-popinvestors-1460473432>. Accessed 21 March 2023.. Accessed 21 March 2023.' href=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Yap,+C.W.+(2016)+China's+new+security+challenge:+Angry+mom-and-pop+investors+as+they+watch+their+nest+eggs+dwindle,+some+hit+the+streets+in+protest.+Wall+Street+Journal,+12+April.+Available+at:+.+Accessed+21+March+2023.>Google Scholar
Yasuda, J. (2022) Necessary fictions: The Chinese regulator, irrational investors, and the stock market in China. Chinese Politics and Economy Research Seminar Series, September. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE_nJXwz_Ks>. Accessed 21 March 2023..+Accessed+21+March+2023.>Google Scholar
Wang, Y. (2015) The rise of the ‘shareholding state’: Financialization of economic management in China. Socio-Economic Review, 13(3): 603–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, J. (2017) ‘Stir-Frying’ internet finance: Financialization and the institutional role of financial news in China. International Journal of Communication, 11. Available at: <https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4612>. Accessed 21 March 2023.Google Scholar
Wang, J. (2021) “The party must strengthen its leadership in finance!”: Digital technologies and financial governance in China's fintech development. The China Quarterly, 247: 773–792.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Xueqiu [Snowball finance] (2021) 15 June. Available at: <https://xueqiu.com/8884629701/183025277>. Accessed 23 October 2022..+Accessed+23+October+2022.>Google Scholar
Zhen, S. and Shen, S. (2022) Domestic share buyers’ step in as foreign funds flee China. Reuters, 2 November. Available at: <www.reuters.com/markets/europe/domestic-share-buyers-step-foreign-funds-flee-china-2022-11-02>. Accessed 21 March 2023..+Accessed+21+March+2023.>Google Scholar