SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Chinese authorities created four new asset management companies (AMCs) in 1999, which have since undergone profound transformations that 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 the AMCs as an expression of state spatial–temporal strategy, which involved attempts 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.