Abstract: After the financial crisis, the traditional perception that insurance industry does not generate systemic risks was broken. By the analysis of its business characteristics and risk contagion characteristics, the conjecture of the ‘media’ role and conduct empirical research regarding the role of the insurance industry in the path of financial systemic risk contagion network was put forward. The empirical research follows the current mainstream research methods, using the tail risk infection network to study the magnitude of its median effect. 34 listed financial institutions including six listed insurance institutions are selected for empirical analysis, and the study period is from 2011 to 2018. According to the "thick tail" and "asymmetry" features of financial market data, the AR-(GJR) GARCH-Skew-t model is chosen to process the stock return sequences, and then the tail dependence degree can be calculated by the Copula function. Finally, the Minimum Spanning Tree and Threshold Method are used to construct risk contagion network in financial market. An index of insurance media centrality index based on betweenness centrality is constructed to explore the role of insurance industry in the systemic risk contagion network. The empirical results are showed as follows:(1) In the risk contagion network of financial markets, the insurance industry plays an important role in connecting the banking market and the security market; (2) The risk contagion effect of Ping An, which is a diversified insurance company, is the strongest, followed by China Life Insurance. (3) In the banking market, Industrial Bank and insurance market are most closely connected, while for the securities trust market is CITIC securities and GF securities. The path and key nodes of risk contagion network are identified in our study, which is very helpful to provide a reference for the formulation of more targeted systemic risk supervision measures. The innovation of this paper is to identify the "intermediary" role of the insurance industry in the financial risk contagion network from an empirical perspective, which is of certain value to academic research and practical systemic risk regulation.

Key words: systemic risk, insurance market, Copula, tail dependence, media