In 1992, an explosion of "stock fever" hit Shanghai. Ellen Hertz's anthropological study sets the stock market and its players in the context of Shanghai society, and probes the dominant role played by the state, which has yielded a stock market very different from those of the West. She explains the way in which investors and officials construct a "moral storyline" to make sense of this great structural innovation, identifying a struggle among the big investors, the little investors and the state to control the market.