Repetitive Cycles

No, seriously. Defending the 3,000 points … is a generational matter. Ten years ago, my dad threw all our family’s money into defending the 3,000 points, and now I am doing the same. Two generations made sacrifices in this battle. They should give us a medal for our service to the country.

—An anonymous Chinese sanhu, 2022

There is a joke that resurfaces every few months in online chat groups of retail investors whenever the Shanghai Stock Exchange Index drifts back towards the symbolic 3,000-point line. Sometimes it appears as a meme, sometimes as a weary one-liner, but its meaning is instantly recognisable. ‘Defending the 3,000 points’ (保卫3,000点) is not just a market slogan; it is a ritual of repetition. As these investors either chip in to buoy the stock market or hold on to their shares against panic selling, the financial media frames the moment in uplifting, nationalistic terms such as ‘the 3,000-point defence battle’ (3,000点保卫战), as though market stability was a test of collective faith. Investors have seen the same headlines for more than a decade.

It is as though, after many years, no progress has been made and the market struggles across the same ground. The paradox rises alongside jokes my interlocutors tell each other: the market disappointed two generations in a relatively short period, yet young people continue to invest in it. They do so even in those cases where their parents experienced significant losses. The charted history of market failure is publicly available, endlessly circulated, and widely known, yet still, they try again. In a previous study of Chinese retail investors, Ellen Hertz (1998) conceptualises the stock market in the 1990s as a site where the state’s intervention clashes with market forces, portraying retail investors as liberals. Further, Dal Maso (2023) examines volatility as a political–biopolitical relationship between the state and retail investors, focusing on how state intervention produces a resilient speculative subject (see also Pang 2022). This essay highlights another layer in the dynamics of resilience and volatility: the intergenerational continuities among older and younger investors.

In this essay, I draw on long-term ethnographic engagement with online and offline communities of Chinese retail investors, or sanhus (散户, literally ‘scattered accounts’). I argue that their persistence is structured by a particular temporality through which investors derive meaning from their past failures, unsatisfactory present, and expected future. This attachment can be situated in what scholars have described as a form of political depression, particularly what Lauren Berlant (2011) calls cruel optimism: an attachment to a promise widely recognised as fragile, even illusory, yet difficult to abandon, despite hostile circumstances. Chinese retail investors continue to participate in the market because repeated failures are reframed within narratives of national progress and development. Younger generations’ reflections on their parents’ experiences further demonstrate how loss and failure on the stock market can be accommodated through optimism from elsewhere. Taking the recurring ‘defence of 3,000 points’ as its point of departure, the essay situates this generational joke within the historical transformation of Chinese society and aspirations for self-improvement, the cyclical temporality of financial crisis, and the moral gravity of state intervention. Together, these dynamics of China’s stock market transform structural volatility into a liveable, if exhausting, mode of endurance.

The Chinese Stock Market and Sanhu

The Chinese stock market dates to the commercial exchange houses established in colonial treaty ports such as Shanghai in the mid-nineteenth century. These exchanges were closed during the socialist reforms of the 1950s and were only re-established in the 1990s, after decades under a planned economy. The stock market played a key role in the country’s broader reform and opening process; it was designed to support national development objectives while introducing limited forms of financial liberalisation to mediate the nation’s involvement in global capital markets (Hertz 1998). From the beginning, sanhus formed the majority of stock market participants, quickly becoming a defining, although ambivalent, feature of China’s capital markets.

In the early 1990s, during the first wave of ‘stock fever’ after the exchanges had just re-emerged, most sanhus were urban residents navigating the uncertainties of reform. As documented by early ethnographers such as Hertz (1998), they included laid-off workers, retirees, and new migrants searching for alternative livelihoods in cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. Public trading floors were crowded, noisy, and emotionally charged and served as both financial venues and social spaces. People gathered around electronic tickers, exchanged rumours, argued over price movements, and speculated collectively about the promise of overnight fortunes.

This optimism, however, was repeatedly tested. The late 1990s and early 2000s were marked by long stagnations and sharp corrections. A renewed surge in the mid-2000s culminated in the dramatic 2007 bull market and subsequent crashes influenced by the Global Financial Crisis. The 2015 crash further shaped market history. After a year of exuberant growth fuelled by margin trading and state encouragement, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Index dropped from nearly 6,000 points to 3,000 points. Many sanhus entered at the peak, encouraged by stories of extraordinary gains, only to see their accounts collapse within months. For many, this episode crystallised a sense that the market was structurally hostile to small investors. These cycles of boom and bust became formative experiences, embedding loss, disappointment, and suspicion into their collective memory. Subsequent official investigations into insider trading and market manipulation reinforced the belief that rules were unevenly enforced and that losses borne by individuals were rarely reversible.

The popularity of the stock market since the 1990s reflects its association with the life-changing opportunities embedded in China’s rapid economic growth. It is thus critical to contextualise stock market participation within the rapid changes in social mobility and general expectations of constant development over the past decades. Over time, the social profile of sanhus also shifted. By the late 2000s and 2010s, retail investors were increasingly described as ‘idle’ household investors—people who had not succeeded through education, employment, or entrepreneurship and turned to the stock market as a residual opportunity. Yet, this characterisation became increasingly inadequate. With the spread of smartphones, mobile trading apps, and online financial platforms, sanhus now include a wide range of participants—from taxi drivers and semi-retirees to white-collar workers and state officers—many of whom trade discreetly during work breaks. Trading floors have largely disappeared, now replaced with WeChat groups, forums, and livestreams in which market talk circulates continuously.

Within this three decades of social change, stock market participation has become embedded in everyday economic life, sometimes spanning multiple generations within families, especially those living in urban areas from the early years of economic reform. While the stories in this essay cannot capture the full diversity of sanhus across regions and classes, they offer a window on to how investors in China accommodate disappointments from the economic system.

Our Parents’ Losses

For many young sanhus with whom I spoke, the stock market was not a discovery but an inheritance. Their very first lessons in investment came from watching their parents lose. A man in his late thirties recalled how his father, a Tsinghua-trained engineer, was among the first generation of small investors in the 1990s. ‘My dad treated stock-trading seriously, like a science experiment,’ he told me, laughing. ‘He collected newspaper clippings, listened to market forecasts, even registered for the first batch of phone-trading services in our district.’ When the market crashed in 2008, half the family’s savings disappeared overnight. ‘He kept those shares for years,’ my informant continued. ‘Every evening, he would still watch the financial news, as if one day the prices would come back. They eventually did, but we could have bought another flat with that trapped money.’ It was his father’s enthusiasm that naturally drew my informant’s attention to the world of trading.

Similarly, another young investor offered an account of his mother’s failure in 2015, during yet another spectacular market plunge in the Chinese stock market. He remembered seeing his parents sigh and complain but unable to do anything about it because most of the family’s savings evaporated in the market crash over a few months. He explained of his mother:

She had such faith that the prices would come back soon. When she realised the crash wasn’t temporary, she refused to sell. She said: ‘We’ll wait for the state to fix it.’ But it never came back. That’s when I decided I would learn how to do better. I will use financial knowledge, data, timing, and discipline. The market failed her, but she failed to manage the investment, too. Time has changed. You can’t earn without knowing how the market works. I want to learn how to do better and perhaps help other sanhus escape this fate of losing.

The son also framed his mother’s failure as a sign of the times: the market was still young and it was possible to speculate without knowing much. Yet, the situation has since evolved and today one needs more expertise to navigate the market. These stories, repeated across dozens of interviews, followed the same emotional arc: admiration, loss, and resolve.

This resolve stems from a larger developmental temporality that has deeply structured life in reform-era China and under which malfunction is often treated as evidence of progress rather than failure. From the 1990s, periods of market turbulence were seen less as structural failure than as moments of adjustment within an evolving, maturing system. Sanhus of older and younger generations continue to describe the stock market as ‘primitive’ and ‘developing’, echoing the vocabulary used by the state to narrate the course of national development.

Moreover, in finance, a crisis is not merely a disruption but also a temporal form. As Horacio Ortiz (2014) argues, financial systems rely on recurring breakdowns to renew their claims to rationality and order. Every collapse is framed as a necessary ‘correction’ and every recovery as proof of the market’s fundamental wisdom. Not only have ethnographers of finance identified similar patterns across different contexts, but these observations have long been shared by industry professionals themselves. For instance, Caitlin Zaloom (2010) describes how traders interpret volatility as a moral test of discipline and Karen Ho (2009) notes that Wall Street depends on cyclic purging to justify its own restructuring. Modern financial institutions cultivate temporal habits of waiting, recalibrating, and expecting the next cycle of fluctuation (Bear 2016). In this sense, the financial crisis becomes part of the narrative that shapes people’s understanding of events (Leins 2018). These scholars reveal that crisis produces its own narrative infrastructure—one in which instability is normalised and even celebrated as evidence of progress. Rather than undermining belief in markets, crises often sustain it, generating hopes for a more sophisticated, transparent, or efficient financial system to come.

In China’s financial market, crises are rarely interpreted as temporary dysfunctions or short-term adjustments; instead, they are folded into narratives of trial and recovery. The Chinese case is also special because the state, rather than economic rules alone, takes the moral ground, making instability more tolerable within the broader narrative of progress. Because of substantial regulatory interventions, crises remain in the memories of participants as tales about not only finance but also moments when the state ‘saved’ the market (Dal Maso 2015; Petry 2020).

The 2015 market crash intensified this logic through a subsequent large-scale and highly visible intervention that positioned the state as a guarantor of stability. Through coordinated measures, regulators deployed liquidity support, adjusted transaction taxes, and relied on state-linked institutions to shore up investor confidence. Liquidity was injected through the China Securities Finance Corporation, initially exceeding RMB200 billion and later expanding through broader state-backed funds into the trillions of yuan. Initial public offerings were suspended, major shareholders were temporarily banned from selling, and trading in hundreds of listed firms was halted. State-linked institutions—later described collectively as the ‘National Team’ (国家队)—purchased equities directly to stabilise prices. State-backed funds thereafter retained substantial positions in listed companies, institutionalising the state’s presence in the market. These interventions solidified sanhus’ belief that the state provides the ultimate guarantee of saving the market (see Dal Maso 2015) and that China’s market operates according to a logic of ‘Chinese characteristics’.

Patterns of Endurance

Cycles of crisis and recovery reproduce sanhus as resilient ‘garlic chives’ (韭菜) that continue to grow after harvest (Pang 2022; Dal Maso 2023). Attachment is what enables such resilience. When sanhus of the younger generations complain about fighting the same battle as their parents to ‘defend the 3,000 points’, they are expressing both frustration at recurring setbacks and a commitment to perfect future investment tactics. In this way, the resilience sanhus have in the face of disappointments in the stock market comes precisely from the endurance built through waiting for the market to recover. As discussed in the previous section, their continuing participation is primarily sustained by a belief in the market’s longer-term trajectory as part of the nation’s economic growth. With this belief, the act of waiting through repetitive patterns of loss configures an affective attachment that takes the form of endurance and self-improvement.

Intergenerational memories of loss in the Chinese stock market teach investors how to endure and refine their engagement over time. ‘My dad lost money, too,’ another young trader told me. ‘But he knew nothing about investment, and the market is much more developed and orderly now.’ Loss is reframed as past incompetence, which can be improved upon. The moral of these stories is not to stop trying, but to learn how to fail more efficiently next time. This, perhaps, is the most profound legacy of China’s market reforms: a faith in improvement through repeated failure. When the losses of the previous generations and the memories of market failure are framed as inevitable steps in a developmental process, these memories are not a warning but rather a mistake to fix.

Within the developmental temporal framework, intervals of loss and uncertainty are experienced as opportunities for self-improvement. This temporality is similar to what has been observed across some socialist societies, where the present is a difficult period of personal struggle on the road towards a promised future of collective prosperity (Verdery 1996). Similarly, as Yurchak (2006) wrote of the Soviet Union, the future never quite arrives but remains permanently in preparation, producing a present that is somewhat suspended. In the life of China’s stock market, this suspension becomes the rhythm of participation: one’s suffering and losses are part of the process towards a collective becoming and self-actualisation. Many sanhus engage with this process by working on themselves, like the young man who decided to gain financial expertise and learn trading techniques from different sources.

What further contributes to the normalisation and endurance of loss is the repetitive nature of state intervention. ‘When things fall apart,’ one sanhu joked, ‘the government will always tell us to have faith first, then send in the National Team to buy our panic-sold shares at the lowest price.’ This type of narrative is popular among sanhus and circulates in online forums and group chats. While they ridicule these spectacles and criticise the potentially exploitative National Teams, they also rely on them. They know the state will step in, not to prevent the next crisis, but to deliver on the promise of restoration, representing the determination to pursue future growth and prosperity. The pattern has its own rhythm: panic when the market drops, ridicule of the spectacle, waiting for the National Team, and hope that this time the recovery will hold. What circulates, then, is not simply belief in the market but a habitual attachment to its repetition that forms a foundation of long-lasting optimism.

Moreover, this endurance is produced through a broader attachment to promises of collective prosperity from decades of economic growth forged beyond the stock market. As Berlant (2011: 27) argues, strong attachments to images of the ‘good life’ produce a ‘cruel optimism’ that leads to endurance. Jokes about the market are a way of reproducing resilience, yet they also point to a desire as much for the market’s growth as for constant improvement in people’s livelihoods. Sanhus’ endurance thus reflects Berlant’s (2011: 44) description of a ‘knotty entailment’—a mixture of contradictory feelings and experiences, such as hope and disappointment, cynicism and aspiration. It is reproduced in their life experiences of missed opportunities and the desire for improvement that are rooted deep in the past decades of China’s socioeconomic change.

The disappointment with the market resides in an affective condition in which structural promises of the good life have stalled yet remain the only available horizon for imagining improvement. In this situation, which we might call political depression (Cvetkovich 2012), individuals may become acutely aware of systemic dysfunction while continuing to navigate the very structures they mistrust. For many, every failure leads to a new approach—that is, the promise of a good life remains on the horizon, never fully broken. Among sanhus, this condition is expressed through a mixture of cynicism, endurance, and persistent engagement with the market. The stock market here remains embedded within a broader narrative of national development and personal advancement, making withdrawal from the market impossible without abandoning the pursuit of a better life.

A Sense of Inevitability

By the time my fieldwork ended in November 2022, the 3,000-point joke had reappeared once again. ‘Two generations defending 3,000 points—my family deserves a medal,’ someone wrote in their WeChat moments, as though history were looping in real time. Beneath the humour lay a sense of quiet inevitability: everyone knew the battle to defend 3,000 points would happen again, yet everyone stayed in the stock market, even joking about it. What keeps these investors going is not belief in the present market, but faith in its future transformation and the possibility of self-improvement. The experience of loss becomes part of a collective trajectory towards a better life through a better version of the self. Within this context, the young sanhus treat their losses as evidence that they are living through the nation’s temporary growing pains and will soon benefit from its eventual flourishing, as they equip themselves with new knowledge and techniques. In the end, the battle to defend 3,000 points is not simply about profit or nationalism. It is also about looking for solutions while refusing to exit.

This is not meant to suggest a general framework for all Chinese people, but the coping mechanism behind sanhus’ intergenerational commitment to the market reveals a pattern of attachment that persists through negative experience. This is not political depression in the sense of withdrawal or detachment, but a slower, quieter exhaustion: an attachment by choice sustained by disappointment and the endurance born from within. The Chinese stock market, in this light, is not merely an economic institution. It is also part of the affective infrastructure of modernity that binds people to a developmental future—a space for continual improvement that keeps alive the promise of prosperity.

Featured Image: QuoteInspector / CC BY-ND 4.0

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