Literature suggests two distinct paths to stock market development: an approach based on legal protections for investors, and an approach based on self-regulation of listed companies by stock exchanges. This paper traces China's attempts to pursue both approaches, while focusing on the role of the stock exchanges as regulators. Specifically, the paper examines a fascinating but unstudied aspect of Chinese securities regulationpublic criticism of listed companies by the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges. Based on both event study methodology and extensive interviews of market actors, we find that the criticisms have significant effects on listed companies and their executives. We evaluate the role of public criticisms in China's evolving scheme of securities regulation, contributing to several strands of research on the role of the media in corporate governance, the use of shaming sanctions in corporate governance, and the importance of informal mechanisms in supporting China's economic growth.

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China's courts have in recent years engaged in significant reforms designed to raise the quality of their work. Yet such top-down reforms have been largely technical and are not designed to alter courts' power. Courts have also encountered new challenges, including rising populist pressures, which may undermine their authority. The most important changes in China's courts have come from the ground up: local courts have engaged in significant innovation, and horizontal interaction among judges is facilitating the development of professional identity. Recent developments have largely avoided two central questions facing China's courts: why have courts been permitted to develop even limited new roles, and what additional roles, if any, may they play within the Chinese political system?

php?id=239089. The figure includes both first instance cases and appeals. Id. 6 The contrast to earlier years is even more striking: official court statistics state that China's courts handled just 300,787 first instance civil cases and 14,618 civil appeals in 1978, the year China began its economic reforms. Hence civil cases have increased more than fourteen-fold since then.

Over the past five years, Chinese courts have placed tens of millions of court judgments online. We analyze the promise and pitfalls of using this remarkable new data source, highlighting the takeaways for readers who face similar issues using other collections of legal texts. Drawing on a dataset of 1,058,986 documents from Henan province, we first document problems with missing data and call on scholars to treat variation in court disclosure rates as an urgent research question. We then outline strategies to learn from a corpus that is vast and incomplete. Using a topic model of administrative litigation in Henan, we complicate the conventional wisdom that administrative lawsuits are an extension of contentious politics that give Chinese citizens an opportunity to challenge the state. Instead, we find a high prevalence of administrative cases that reflect an underlying dispute between two private parties, suggesting that administrative lawsuits often represent an attempt to enlist help from the state resolving a civil dispute.