Abstract
Although finance is increasingly described as a global phenomenon, this global network exists because of infrastructure and framework provided by political and socioeconomic substantive localities. As a discipline, global studies attempts to understand the workings of supposed global phenomena, and how such perceptions arise in social discourse. To gain a clear picture of the global dynamics of finance, and to critique such supposed dynamics, one must understand the substantive realities in which centers of finance emerge. Such study is critical in the present, with the legacy of the 2008 financial catastrophe. As anthropologist Hayao Miyazaki reflects in Arbitraging Japan, “In the aftermath of … global financial crisis of unprecedented scale, an ethnographically informed analysis of the workings of financial markets and their sociocultural consequences is an urgent anthropological task” (Miyazaki 2013: 9). One important part of this work is to understand the development of financial markets. \r This thesis begins such analysis through interpreting the rise of global finance in Shanghai, China. Shanghai’s communist government-run financial center is a case study that highlights the importance of political influences in the success or failure of financial markets. This thesis finds Shanghai’s financial industry to be a result of China’s Communist party’s economic ambitions that simultaneously engage other financial markets, such as those in the United States and Europe, while remaining a unique manifestation of Chinese political, social, and economic culture.