Liu Zhidan and his "Bro\u27s in the \u27Hood": Bandits and Communists in the Shaanbei Badlands (1)(岩津洋二教授追悼号)

Since the appearance of Edgar Snow\u27s Red Star Over China, the achievements of Liu Zhidan (劉志丹) in blending revolutionary ideals with the destructive energy of north Shaanxi\u27s bandit tradition have become well known. Through repeated failures and recoveries, Liu Zhidan perceived that 20th-century China\u27s ubiquitous violence left no alternative for the communists but to seek a military solution. The key to revolutionary success in China was an empowered peasantry fighting in the name of a shared ideal, and Liu Zhidan recognized that, in the remote areas in which the communists sought to "rest their buttocks", armed forces such as those of local bandits and brotherhoods could not be ignored. How to win those forces over to the revolutionary cause, or, failing that, how to nullify and eventually eliminate them became a major strategic problem for Liu and for other early communist militants. Regularly condemned for his attention to such irregular fighters, Liu Zhidan saw that, under the circumstances, they were all "Bro\u27s in the \u27Hood", and that the key to creating a successful revolutionary movement in China was to bring people together, not to isolate them. This paper will examine Liu Zhidan\u27s activities in "Shaanbei" from 1928 to 1932, particularly his contacts with bandits and other local power-holders. It will suggest, among other things, that Liu Zhidan\u27s policy of recruiting bandits to the revolutionary movement was anything but plain sailing. While some bandit chiefs were instinctively amenable to the revolutionary call, others became Liu Zhidan\u27s worst enemies. At the same time, the resistance Liu encountered from his fellow-revolutionaries was often fierce, leading to purges and, ultimately, to what deserves to be termed judicial murder

Social media effect, investor recognition and the cross-section of stock returns

Investor recognition affects cross-sectional stock returns. In informationally incomplete markets, investors have limited recognition of all securities, and their holding of stocks with low recognition requires compensation for being imperfectly diversified. Using the number of posts on the Chinese social media platform Guba to measure investor recognition of stocks, this paper provides a direct test of Merton’s investor recognition hypothesis. We find a significant social media premium in the Chinese stock market. We further find that including a social media factor based on this premium significantly improves the explanatory power of Fama-French factor models of cross-sectional stock returns, and these results are robust when we control for the mass media effect and liquidity effect. Finally, we find that investment strategies based on the social media factor earn sizable risk-adjusted returns, which signifies the importance of the social media premium in portfolio management

A new attention proxy and order imbalance: Evidence from China

In this paper, we propose a new direct proxy for investors' attention in the Chinese stock market: daily abnormal reading quantity of each stock's posts on the Eastmoney guba website. Using A-shares samples of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, we find that our proposed proxy (i) is significantly correlated to existing attention proxies; (ii) leads to contemporarily high returns and long-time reversal; (iii) is related to heterogeneous trading behaviour of different investors. In summary, we add value to the field of investor attention approximation with a new and efficient measure that can be useful for guiding and modelling investor's tradin

Investigation of shear strength and breakdown of mine waste rock

To investigate the shear strength of mine waste rock, large-scale laboratory direct shear tests were carried out on Breccia, Weathered Shale, Breccia on Weathered Shale, and Weathered Shale on compacted clay, under applied normal stresses of 250 kPa, 500 kPa or 1000 kPa. The Breccia, Weathered Shale and Breccia on Weathered Shale samples were loosely-placed and tested dry, representing the bulk of the waste rock dump volume in the field. The Weathered Shale on compacted clay was tested under both dry and wet (the worst case) conditions to represent the interface between Weathered Shale and compacted clay liners within waste rock dumps. The peak shear and normal stresses were corrected for area reduction and plotted to provide the shear strength envelopes, from which shear strength parameters were recommended. To assess the potential for breakdown of the waste rock on wetting, particle size distribution curves were obtained by dry and wet sieving. Also, slake durability indices were obtained for Breccia and Weathered Shale by carrying out slake durability tests. Overall, the results indicated negligible potential for breakdown of the Breccia and Weathered Shale on wetting