Abstract

By means of the slogan of Chinese «ecological civilization», the Chinese financial apparatus has started to recruit the potent forces of «green» labelling to target the multitude of individual mom and pop investors, in Chinese called sanhu. The article shows how these financialized subjects, known to be driven by short-term interests and irrational behaviors, are requested by the state to shift their investment choices towards more stable green assets. Through a discourse analysis of online investor platforms and forums, the article analyzes how the sanhu use of financial jargon, memes and allegories reveals how these subjectivities have mixed and contradictory dispositions. Taking investors’ participation in the stock market as a fulcrum of Chinese financialization, I examine how a new shade of green supplements a new governmental project that aims to produce financialized, yet environmentally conscious, subjects, and how in turn the latter contest and exceed this attempt.