Activist investing isn’t a thing in China. It’s culturally frowned upon to be that confrontational. Liang Jian, a journalist-turned-hedge-fund manager, is on a mission to change that.

Not that Liang, or Nick as he’s known in international circles, would ever be confused with the likes of the brash American activist investors -- the Bill Ackmans and Carl Icahns and Dan Loebs. He’s a newbie with a war chest that’s a fraction of theirs and zero experience in the kind of epic battles for boardroom control that have made those men so famous.

But what Liang, 40, has begun doing -- trying to block Chinese companies from buying back all of their U.S.-listed shares on the cheap -- constitutes perhaps the boldest foray yet into the realm of activist investment in the Asian nation. His tactics have raised eyebrows in Beijing’s tight-knit investment and corporate community and earned him scores of admirers and enemies in the process. He’s been called a barbarian, spoiler and lightweight who lacks the financial resources to carry out the kind of counter-offer he’s proposing.

Liang is undaunted. “We have to fight for ourselves.”

As he tells it, he never intended to become an activist investor when he founded iMeigu Capital Management Ltd. three years ago. He was just looking to manage a little money for himself and a handful of clients with a focus on Chinese Internet stocks traded in New York and Hong Kong. But as corporate executives started putting up a record $31 billion last year to buy back these U.S.-listed companies, often with an eye to resell them in China at higher prices, Liang was taken aback. Not only were most of the offers at deep discounts to the IPO prices from just years earlier, but in some cases they didn’t even match their recent market levels. Somebody, he figured, needed to stick up for minority shareholders.

Two deals struck him as particularly troubling.

Last July, the top executives at E-Commerce China Dangdang Inc., once considered the country’s answer to Amazon.com Inc., said it wanted to repurchase all the shares in the open market for 16 percent less than their average over the prior three months. By that measure, it’s the lowest offer made by any Chinese company seeking to pull its shares off the U.S. market since 2003.

Then in February, the founder of online cosmetic retailer Jumei International Holding Ltd. said he was leading a group looking to buy back all outstanding shares for $7 a piece, less than a third of the IPO price back in 2014. The bid was so low that the company’s $402 million in cash and equivalents would almost be enough to cover the buyout costs.

‘Noisemaker’

The obstacles facing disgruntled minority shareholders are stark.

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