The Trading Crowd
An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market

An anthropological study of the Shanghai stock exchange, first published in 1998.

Ellen Hertz (Author)

9780521564977, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 June 1998

260 pages, 1 table
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.39 kg

In 1992, there was an explosion of 'stock fever' in Shanghai. 'From the moment I set foot in Shanghai until my last day there, people from all walks of life wanted to talk to me about the market', Ellen Hertz writes. Her 1998 study sets the stock market and its players in the context of Shanghai society, and it probes the dominant role played by the state, which has yielded a stock market very different from those of the West. A trained anthropologist, she explains the way in which investors and officials construct a 'moral storyline' to make sense of this great structural innovation, identifying a struggle between three groups of actors - the big investors, the little investors, and the state - to control the market.

Introduction: ways and means
Part I: 1. First contact
2. The Shanghai stock market and the tributary state
3. Stock fever
4. City people, stock people
Part II: 5. The big players
6. The dispersed players
7. 'Guojia': the rise and fall of a super-player
8. Conclusion: the trading crowd
Afterwords
Glossary of Chinese terms
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Physical anthropology [JHMP]