Hairuo Jin:

[Chinese retail investors’ (Sanhu 散户)] attachment [to derive meaning from their past failures, unsatisfactory present, and expected future] can be situated in what scholars have described as a form of political depression, particularly what Lauren Berlant (2011) calls cruel optimism: an attachment to a promise widely recognised as fragile, even illusory, yet difficult to abandon, despite hostile circumstances.

This resolve stems from a larger developmental temporality that has deeply structured life in reform-era China and under which malfunction is often treated as evidence of progress rather than failure. From the 1990s, periods of market turbulence were seen less as structural failure than as moments of adjustment within an evolving, maturing system. Sanhus of older and younger generations continue to describe the stock market as ‘primitive’ and ‘developing’, echoing the vocabulary used by the state to narrate the course of national development.