Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores how financial professionals operating in cross-border finance between China and Europe constitute global hierarchies by combining temporalities of standardized financial procedures, state policies, national identifications and geopolitical confrontations.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is based on interviews and participant observation carried out with financial professionals working in mergers and acquisitions, Venture Capital and Private Equity funds in China and Western Europe, including transactions where large companies based in China purchased small and medium enterprises based in Europe. Mobilizing a conceptual framework that foregrounds the multiple imaginaries of time that are part of everyday practice, it studies how financial professionals distribute money unequally by combining the temporalities of shareholder value, speculation and market efficiency established in standardized methods of valuation and investment, the organizational rules or the bureaucratic organizations where they work and various temporalities connecting to imaginaries of national and cultural conflict and hybridization, Chinese state policies and horizons of geopolitical confrontations. Doing so, they combine sometimes conflicting temporal horizons associated with various moral and political justifications of how money should be distributed unequally worldwide. These include short-term or long-term financial returns, long-term nation-building and tactical arrangements concerning the careers of people involved, such as those of geographically mobile financial intermediaries and of employees of state-owned enterprises in China and of small and medium enterprises in Europe, among others. The presentation explores how the encounters of global China and the global financial industry reproduce and transform global hierarchies of monetary distribution mobilizing various imaginaries to justify them.