Chinese anti-corruption campaigns executed by CCDI (Central Commission for Discipline Inspection) put politicians under high scrutiny. We employ CCDI's inspections as the event and use counterfactual analysis to show that corporations in inspected provinces significantly suppress negative information release evidenced by stock prices following Chen et al. (2001). The variation of political maneuvers to suppress negative information release is consistent with local politician's influences and incentives in affiliated firms, e.g., SOEs or politically connected non-SOEs. SOEs continue to suppress negative information release while non-SOEs experience mean-reversion after inspections. Good governance and auditor's quality partially mitigate manager's incentives to suppress bad news.

We study the governance effect of institutional site visits and focus on corporate payout. Due to the weak investor protection and poor information quality in China, institutional investors resort to site visits as a form of soft activism. We show that site visits lead to an increase of corporate cash dividend, through the mechanism of disciplining management with exit threats. Such effect is more pronounced for visits by state-owned institutions. We further confirm the causal link with both difference-in-difference analysis and instrumental variable regression. The paper contributes to the research on soft activism and governance device of institutional investors in weak institutional environments.