Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/309565 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Citation: 
[Journal:] Finance and Society [ISSN:] 2059-5999 [Volume:] 9 [Issue:] 3 [Year:] 2023 [Pages:] 58-68
Publisher: 
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
Chinese stock markets
financialization
meme stocks
retail investors
Volatility
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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