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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: [email protected]
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Abstract

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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)

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