Meeting or beating earnings expectations (“MBE”) is a signal that is closely monitored by market participants. Benchmarks for earnings expectations can take various forms, including: i) earnings level (reporting positive earnings); ii) earnings change (reporting earnings growth); and iii) analysts’ expectations (reporting a positive surprise). There is a large body of prior literature, mostly in the U.S. setting, that investigates the relationship between earnings benchmarks, earnings management, and future stock performance. The MBE signal based upon analysts’ expectation is the most dominant in U.S. capital markets. In the U.S., it has been shown that meeting or beating analysts’ expectations provides valuable insights about a firm’s future expected performance (Koh et al., 2008), allows firms to command higher price-earnings multiples (Lopez and Rees, 2002; Barth et al., 1999), and results in abnormal stock returns (Balsam et al., 2002). These significant market rewards, combined with the myopic perspective on quarterly and annual earnings, create a powerful incentive to manage earnings to ensure that analysts’ expectations are met or exceeded. The persistent use of earnings management to meet or beat analysts’ expectations in the U.S. has been called the “numbers game” (Levitt, 1998). The rapid development of the Chinese stock markets provides fertile grounds for exploring earnings benchmarks, earnings management, and future stock performance in a different regulatory environment. Prior literature has mostly focused on the two most prominent accounting-based regulations facing Chinese listed companies – delisting policies (Green et al., ۲۰۰۹; Li et al., 2014) and stock issuance rights (Chen and Yuan, 2004; Yu et al., 2006); however, most of this prior literature was conducted before China moved towards full convergence with both International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and International Standards on Auditing (ISA), while concurrently adopting the Split-Share Reform (SSR) with the intent of reducing state ownership of Chinese listed shares by eliminating certain non-tradeable shares. These reforms were expected to benefit Chinese capital markets by improving reporting quality (Deloitte, 2006) and the role of owners in corporate governance (Jiang et al., 2008).