The sickle and the garlic chives
Volatility in the Chinese stock market
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4495276 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Giulia Dal Maso (0000-0001-9255-0613, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 58-68 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Finance and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2059-5999 • E-ISSN: 2059-5999 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2218/finsoc.8990 |
| OpenAlex | W4390596939 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 23 |
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
Business · Economics · Financial economics · Irony · Market economy · Monetary economics · Speculation · Stock market · History · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Finance
The Provoked Economy
The Trading Crowd
The Politics of Operations
Irrational Exuberance
A Precarious Dance, a Derivative Sociality
The Systematic Politicization of China’s Stock Markets
Knowledge LTD, Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative
Practicing conjunctural methodologies
A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
The Social Life of Financial Derivatives
The sickle and the garlic chives
After the boom
The Financialization Rush
Speculative Prices and Popular Models
The rise of the 'shareholding state
Finance as Capital's Imagination
Financial Eschatology and the Libidinal Economy of Leverage
China's Post-Socialist Governmentality and the Garlic Chives Meme
From Reputation Capital to Reputation Warfare
The precarious Chinese financial ecology of expertise
Financialization with Chinese characteristics? Exchanges, control and capital markets in authoritarian capitalism
Capital market development in Southeast Asia
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |