Walter Hutchens’ Blog

The deadline for submitting our panel proposal for the AAS conference is fast approaching. Today I sent Mary Cooper an abstract of my paper. The AAS imposes a 250 word limit on such abstracts. My paper now runs about 70 pages and has more than 300 footnotes. After some struggle, I finally produced an abstract I felt satisfied with. But it was 289 words, not including the paper title and my name. Cutting that last 39 words was painful. Here’s how it came out:

Shareholder Litigation in the PRC: Material Disclosure about China’s Legal System?
ABSTRACT
When laws and regulations governing China’s securities markets are enacted, “investor protection” is routinely claimed as a purpose. The Supreme People’s Court invoked this customary mantra in 2003 when it unveiled rules enabling PRC investors to sue listed companies for disclosure fraud. Under the new rules, individual investors can sue to recover losses when companies have failed to provide transparency into their operations as PRC law requires. This suggests some strengthening of the PRC’s nascent civil society and legal system. However, careful analysis of the new rules and the context in which they operate reveals that many daunting obstacles confront plaintiffs. In most cases, investors will have to sue government-owned companies in government-controlled courts. In fact, they may do so only after obtaining specific government authorization. The ability of investors to struggle as a class against defendants is also significantly curtailed. Based on these constraints, it appears unlikely this form of litigation will create powerful incentives for compliance with China’s existing disclosure requirements. Indeed, the new rules may do more to protect the state’s interests rather than those of investors. In this sense, China’s approach to shareholder litigation itself makes “material disclosure” about China’s evolving legal system, revealing how the structure of PRC courts and the state’s role as an economic actor can conflict with the enforcement of individual rights through civil litigation. Such litigation thus provides a window onto the emergence of the rule of law and civil society in China and underscores ongoing tensions within PRC reform efforts.

Having compressed it this far, I told Mary that I am now going to whittle it down to a t-shirt slogan and haiku, and that I will grant her a license to the lucrative US west coast distribution rights.

Actually, the discipline of compressing a paper into a short paragraph is helpful. It forces you to focus on the core things you want to say, both in terms of your argument and the essential context of the topic. This made me recall the quip–I thought from Mark Twain–apologizing for writing a long letter because he had insufficient time to compose a short one. In a quick search for a citation to the quote, I found that people have attributed this remark to Mark Twain, Pascal, George Bernard Shaw and even Abraham Lincoln. A detailed discussion is here.

In fact, 250 words is a veritable tome compared to the sound-bite level of much public discourse, as I learned from my experience earlier this summer being interviewed by CNN. Though I thought the segment did a good job conveying the essentials of a complicated situation (a new wave of media suppression in China), it gave me a clear sense that in television, any thought not expressed in a few seconds in unlikely to get airtime.