Digital Media and Risk Culture in China’s Financial Markets

This book analyzes the risk cultures in China that have emerged from the entanglement of new communication technologies and financial markets, examining the role that digital media play in Asian modernity and offering an alternative narrative to that of the West. The book illustrates the impact of exclusively Asian digital media on power dynamics within risk definition, arguing that such digital media empower individuals, enabling them to compete with an expert-oriented risk culture controlled by Government- and banker-led media outlets. Here, small investors are stepping up to be major actors in defining risk and are collectively producing risk cultures based on interpersonal relations instead of contractual obligations, in which insider information is valued over professional analysis. Meanwhile, investors are trapped in a risk culture paradox that they themselves have produced, as they attempt to take advantage of other actors’ uncertainties and eventually produce risks for the entire market.