This thesis is an ethnographic analysis of the Shanghai stock market, based on ten months of fieldwork in the People's Republic of China in 1992. It tells the moral of the stock market, the ways in which its main characters and important moments were constructed into a moral storyline by Shanghainese investors and government officials.;I begin by introducing the notion of "stock fever", situating this mass enthusiasm for the stock market in the context of other forms of mass enthusiasm in China. To determine who invests in the Shanghai stock market, who is bitten by "stock fever", I provide a sociological sketch of "stock people", a sketch which reviews the dynamics of Shanghai social life over the past 50 years.;This general introduction serves as a background for the unfolding drama of the stock market. Both popular and official discourse in Shanghai speak of the movements of the market in terms of three collective actors: "big players", "dispersed players", and "the state". Over the course of 1992, the movements of the stock market were ascribed to the activities of each of these actors in turn, with an imaginary struggle for control over the market dominating stock market discourse.;The outcome of this struggle surprised the Shanghainese, for it became clear by the end of 1992 that the "dispersed players" had "won". In concluding, I examine the implications of this "victory" for the future of market ideology in Shanghai. I also situate my conclusions about the stock market in the context of the on-going debate about the existence and/or nature of "civil society" in contemporary China. I argue that Shanghai society must, for the time being, be conceived as locked in a primary opposition between "the State" and "the People". The stock market hints at something beyond this opposition. I have called this something "the trading crowd".
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