Chinese authorities created four new asset management companies (AMCs) in 1999. These have since undergone profound transformations which have been influential in China's contemporary integration into the world market. Conventional interpretations see these powerful AMCs in largely technical and asocial terms. By contrast, we employ a critical geographical analytical framework to understand the transformation of these AMCs as an expression of the state's spatial–temporal strategy to create conditions of political economic stability now by displacing the conditions of financial instability and crisis into the future. This strategy does not come without unintended and destabilizing consequences, nor is it without class-based social and political implications.
