Making insurance a way of life in China: How culture matters in creating a market

In the early 1990's, commercial life insurance was brought to China at the conjunction of China's transformation from a socialist to a market economy and the global expansion of the insurance industry. The dramatic socio-economic changes in China have created a market niche for life insurance. However, the Chinese cultural contents are not all conducive to adopting life insurance as a new form of risk management. Among these cultural contents are the taboo on thinking and talking about death, especially premature sudden death, that makes selling life insurance extremely difficult. How is a life insurance market possible when the topic of death cannot be discussed?; To understand how a market is constructed, I conducted 14 months of ethnographic research in four life insurance companies in Shanghai between 2000 and 2002. The companies include a foreign, a local, and two joint ventures. In addition, I completed over 230 formal and informal interviews with sales agents, trainers, managerial staff, clients, prospects, and community observers.; My findings illustrate that while the transnational insurers attempted to impose on the locals a new concept and practice of risk management, the local competitors defined life insurance as money management and modified the typical practice of life insurance. The local economic actors transcribed the "something alien" into "something familiar" to make sense of the new entity. The indigenizing process makes the emerging Chinese market take a different trajectory. I argue that a market is possible despite cultural resistance because culture matters in different forms at different levels. The subjective aspect of culture in the Weberian sense circumscribes a range of possibilities of effective economic action. This dimension of culture functions at the structural level and shapes the trajectory of the market formation. At the practical level, the tool-kit property of culture in Swidler's conception and the dramaturgical capacity of culture in Goffman's theory provide economic actors with strategies to deal with cultural and institutional barriers. The strategic use of cultural resources, nevertheless, is patterned by institutional arrangements, the structural level of culture, and the structural positions of the actors.