Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation Haigui Returnee Migrants in the Shanghai Financial Market

Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation Haigui Returnee Migrants in the Shanghai Financial Market. A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the award for the degree Doctorate of Philosophy From Western Sydney University Giulia Dal Maso Institute for Culture and Society Western Sydney University 2016 Statement of Authentication The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. Sections of chapter 5 have been previsouly published in Dal Maso, Giulia. “The Financialisation Rush: Responding to Precarious Labor and Social Security by Investing in the Chinese Stock Market.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1: 47-64. ............................................................................... (Signature) Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Professor Brett Neilson and Professor Ned Rossiter for their extraordinary intellectual support, encouragement and incredible patience. They have been invaluable interlocutors and the best supervisors I could hope for. My gratitude also goes to Professor Sandro Mezzadra for his intellectual generosity, guidance and for having encouraged me many times. It is thanks to him that my Chinese adventure started. Particular thanks go to Giorgio Casacchia. His support has been essential both for the time of my research fieldwork and for sustenance when writing. He has not only shared his extensive knowledge of China with me but, in many occasions, he has also used his “roman irony” to down play academic disciplinarisation and defuse my anxiety. Many thanks as well to all the people who assisted me in Shanghai: Professor Li Yihai, Zhang Sen and Sun Weidi at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science; Professor Wang Xiaoming, Professor Xiao Ming, Xu Daoheng from the Shanghai University; Woo Jueren “Marcello,” incredible colleague and friend; Leo Flores, Francesca Valsecchi, Sara Ovidi, Luigi Zunarelli and Jack Luo for their friendship and support during the research. This thesis also greatly benefitted of the insightful comments of Stefano Chinellato and of the help of my friends Liv Hamilton, Theo Clark and Katie Hepworth, who have helped me in the final editing stage. I am also very lucky to have benefitted from the special environment at the Institute for Culture and Society and from its PhD cohort. My special thanks to my comrades Mithilesh Kumar and Andrea Del Bono who have begun this PhD with me and to Tsvetelina Hristova, Oznur Sahin and Andrea Pollio for their friendship and support in the last stage of writing. Finally, big thanks to all the fioi in Venice for always being there, like brothers and sisters. To my Mum, an extraordinary woman. Last but not least to Matt for his love, enthusiasm and tenacity. Table of Contents Abstract i Introduction 1 Chapter outlines 11 Stubjectivity, genealogy, ethnography 16 Chapter 1 22 Governing modern Chinese experts 22 Introduction 22 The shaping of Chinese expertise 25 Knowledge, economy, and education 37 A new education 41 From aesthetics of education to aesthetics of technocracy 44 Conclusion 50 Chapter 2 53 Fostering Chinese talent abroad: the paradox of the returnees (haigui) 53 Introduction 53 Fostering Chinese talent abroad the historical context 56 Contemporary returnees and the figure of the haigui 61 A new middle class, governed “at a distance” 64 From flexible citizens to flexible haigui 72 An uncomfortable “bridging function” 75 From financial education to creative destruction 79 Chapter 3 89 Circuit of expertise 89 Introduction 89 The ambiguity of the China-Australia relationship 91 Conceptualising circuits 94 The precondition of circuits 103 What financial expertise? 119 Conclusion 123 Chapter 4 125 Shanghai: the returning city 125 Introduction 125 A sympathetic view 127 Shanghai as a site of social re-engineering 143 Chapter 5 160 The financialisation rush: Responding to precarious labour and social security by investing in the Chinese stock market 160 Introduction 160 The Fever 162 Investing as a substitute for an occupation 168 Organising the Chinese stock market 173 Distinctive financialisation: the West and China facing financial crisis 175 The state, the dahu and the scattering power of the sanhu 182 Sanhu financial expertise 186 Conclusion 190 Chapter 6 192 The precarious ecology of Chinese financial expertise 192 Introduction 192 Ecology of financial expertise 195 From the fall of the people’s state to the rise of a financialised state 201 Financialisation of the new (poor) discontents 209 Money: a social intruder 218 Conclusion 228 Conclusion 230 Bibliography 242 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 i 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 low- end, 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. ii Introduction After spending 2008 studying Chinese in Beijing on a scholarship I had received from the University of Bologna, I returned to China in 2010 to take up work with the Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente (IsIAO), a publicly funded Italian research institute, which had a newly opened section in Shanghai. It was affiliated with a Chinese university, and I was collaborating with Chinese colleagues in the management of different projects. It was an enjoyable atmosphere and experience, although I remember that during work breaks, I rarely had the company of colleagues for a stroll around the block. During lunch, my Chinese colleagues would remain in the office, bent over their desks, seemingly overloaded by work. Typically they ordered their lunch to the office and ate it in front of the screen. I felt guilty—my work did not seem to be as hard as theirs. One day, I noticed Miss Fang, the administrative executive who had been working with me on a cultural project report, was staring at some data on her screen. At first I was worried that I had forgotten that we had to finish some financial reporting, but when I asked Miss Fang what she was looking at, she replied she wasn’t in fact working—she was mai gupiao (“buying shares”) and investing some of her money on the stock market.

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