Risky expertise in Chinese financialisation : haigui returnee migrants in the Shanghai financial market

Abstract

By investigating the subjectivities of Chinese student-returnees (haigui) from Australia who pursue careers in the Shanghai financial market, this thesis explores the tensions resulting from the Chinese state's engagement in contemporary financial capitalism. The thesis approaches financial expertise as an empirical object of analysis to ask how subjectivity is produced within the process of Chinese financialisation and how this impacts upon the Chinese state in the current conjuncture of capitalism. In the wake of the global economic crisis, the financial expert has often been portrayed as the faceless figure of a technocracy whose growing power has undermined and partially eclipsed the legitimacy of democratic representation and the state sovereignity, as happened in Greece in summer 2015. Yet, globally circulating narratives lack an analytic lens that can look beyond a western-centric view of capitalism. In China, despite the severe financial crackdown""which also begun in the summer of 2015""the state still seems firmly in control. To investigate the distinctiveness of Chinese financialisation I adopt a genealogical method that traces the history of expertise""and the figure of the expert""since the first period of Chinese modernisation, in the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that the contemporary production of experts marks a discontinuity within Chinese modernity. While in the modern period experts trained abroad were always considered strategic for the state political project, now such figures (haigui), even if still fostered and encouraged to return to China by state policies of education and migration, are pushed aside and considered superfluous to this same project. The findings in this thesis are based on ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, which included qualitative, semi-structured interviews with haigui from Australia as well as participant observation in brokerage rooms (branches of securities companies). These empirical investigations show that these returned financial experts are frequently unable to step into their preferred roles as consultants and mediators. They find themselves faced with a state securitised environment that they cannot penetrate, and a Chinese ecology of financial expertise dominated by guanxi (connections of influence within the party-state, often disguised). A common means by which haigui cope with this professional impasse is to turn to autonomous, self-managed investment in the stock market, abandoning their claim on expert advisory roles. Such autonomous financial action is not a path they would have necessarily sought. Since its inception in the wake of Deng Xiaoping's reforms, I argue that the Chinese state has used the stock market as a means of securing social legitimation by providing a prearranged space where the disaggregated and vulnerable subjects left behind by the dismantlement of the collective work units of the Maoist period (danwei) can congregate. The two Chinese stock markets (Shanghai and Shenzhen) serve as devices from which some may derive a living or even wealth in the context of a dismantled welfare state. Once they enter the stock market arena, the haigui are assimilated into a pool of lowend, non-expert actors of Chinese mass financialisation, the so-called "scattered players" (sanhu) of the market. The investment strategies of haigui thus acquire the same characteristics of informal expertise and contingent practice associated with the sanhu. The thesis shows how the officially sponsored "Chinese dream" has taken the form of a "stock fever""an irresistible tide which is sweeping these subjects towards a commitment to making money at all costs. Investing in the stock market gradually becomes, for the haigui as for the sanhu, a self-referential activity. The state gradually disappears from the horizon of their subjectivity, so that the stock game, the dream of enrichment, becomes absorbing and substitutes for other alternatives. As the language of money supplants and obliterates other loyalties among the haigui, the state risks losing its grasp on the subjectivity of these dethroned experts, who become first indifferent and alienated and then potential unruly subjects.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English