Introduction: ways and means --
First contact --
The Shanghai stock market and the tributary state --
Stock fever (gupiao re) --
City people, stock people --
The big players (dahu) --
The dispersed players (sanhu) --
'Guojia': the rise and fall of a super-player --
Conclusion: the trading crowd.

In this study the author sets the stock market and its players in the context of Shanghai society, and it probes the dominant role played by the state, which has yielded a stock market very different from those of the West. A trained anthropologist, she explains the way in which investors and officials construct a 'moral storyline' to make sense of this great structural innovation, identifying a struggle between three groups of actors - the big investors, the little investors, and the state - to control the market