Hybrid Regulatory Regime in Turbulent Times: the Role of State in China’s Stock Market Crisis in 2015-2016

Abstract: The hybridization of socialist state control with increasingly complex financial markets has generated unusual features in China’s financial regulatory regime. Using the 2015-2016 stock market crisis as a case study, this article draws on the Legal Theory of Finance (LTF) to analyse the state-market interface and crisis governance in China’s stock market. It illustrates the shift of China’s stock market governance away from traditional administrative hierarchies to more plural and hybrid forms of ownership, control and regulatory governance. By examining the policy process, market dynamics and crisis management in the evolution of China’s 2015-2016 stock market crashes, it identifies the endogenous dilemmas of regulatory elasticity and campaign-style enforcement in China’s hybrid regulatory regime, which have amplified policy noises and led to a destabilizing feedback loop between policy-induced market turbulence and market-induced organizational turbulence inside the regulatory bureaucracy.