Marketization through contestation: reconfiguring China's financial markets through knowledge networks

This article unpacks a particular case of market making by scrutinizing the richness of market meanings, the diversity of market actors and the contested nature of market knowledge and practices, in the context of developing banking regulation and financial services in China. Based on personal interviews and secondary data, it examines how China's financial markets are reconfigured through heterogeneous knowledge networks ranging from mobile transmigrants and regulatory counterparts in other countries to different financial institutions within China. China's WTO accession is not a straightforward liberalization of its banking sector but a contested process of negotiations between the Chinese government, regulatory bodies and foreign and domestic banks. This process of knowledge translation and conflict resolution is key to revealing the temporary and unstable character of markets and demonstrates how the entanglement of different knowledge networks opens up conjectural space for new forms of market meanings and practices.