Peer-Reviewed Publications
Revolutionaries for Railways (with Chengyuan Ji) Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming.
This study explores the sources of regional favoritism in government-invested infrastructure projects. We built an original county-level dataset that matches the biographies of 1614 retired communist revolutionaries with information on the expansion of China’s state-directed high-speed railway program. Our findings indicate that a surviving revolutionary makes his birth county significantly more likely to receive the central government’s approval for railway investment. This pattern is robust after accounting for a wide range of alternative explanations and a natural experiment design that exploits variations in the timings of revolutionaries’ natural deaths. Additional evidence suggests that the empowering effect of the retired revolutionaries stems most likely from their assistance in their birth counties’ bottom-up lobbying of the central government. Their moral authority as the founders of the regime helps boost local requests for investment in the eyes of central policymakers. Our findings highlight a bottom-up intergovernmental dynamic that translates personal influence into policy benefits.
Domestic Policy Consequences of International Mega-events: Evidence from China (with Jialei Ma) World Development, 184: 106753.
Mega-events such as the Olympic Games, the World Cup, the World Expos, and the G20 Summit play important roles in international political economy in the age of globalization. But we know little about how they shape domestic politics and policy processes in their host countries. China has emerged as the leading host of various sports, cultural, economic, and political mega-events in the past decades. Employing an original panel dataset of Chinese cities from 2001 to 2019, we find that cities that host mega-events gain an advantage in bargaining with central bureaucracies for policy resources. Using subway investments as an example, we demonstrate that host cities not only obtained centrally regulated infrastructure investments that directly serve the needs of the events, but also achieve development that they otherwise could not. The result is robust with two-way fixed effects models and after accounting for various alternative explanations. We show that host cities gain advantage because the events capture the attention of national leaders. National leaders have power over central bureaucrats’ careers and thus steer their decisions, and they see the success of mega-events as an opportunity to project national strengths. Our findings highlight the domestic policy consequences of international events in the age of China’s rapid rise and integration with the world.
“Vote Buying as Rent Seeking: Land Sales in China’s Village Elections” (with Susan H. Whiting, Tonglong Zhang, Tan Zhao) Studies in Comparative International Development, 57(3): 337–360.
What explains why vote buying occurs in some elections but not others? The phenomenon of vote buying is under-studied in authoritarian, single-party-dominant regimes, especially in non-partisan elections in which competition is candidate-centered rather than party centered. Village elections in China provide a valuable window on the dynamics of vote buying in these conditions. Employing both an in-depth case study and an original, panel survey to provide new, systematic measures of rents and vote buying, we develop and test the following hypothesis: the availability of non-competitive rents accessible by winning candidates explains the variation in the incidence of vote buying in local elections. Our causal identification strategy exploits the timing of land takings and the exogenous nature of formal land takings authorized in state land-use plans at higher administrative levels to test the vote-buying-as-rent-seeking hypothesis. We find that the lure of rents, mainly from government takings of village land, is a key driver of vote buying by non-partisan candidates for the office of village leader. The evidence suggests that vote buying provides information to the authoritarian state about which local elites it should recruit into the rent-sharing coalition.
“Riding on the power of the masses? How different modes of mass mobilization shape local elite bargaining in China” (with Yanhua Deng and Zhenjie Yang) Journal of Chinese Governance, 7(4): 559-582.
When local bureaucrats in China disagree with their superiors, official channels for achieving a policy revision are limited and generally ineffective. However, if the stakes involved are high, they may turn to the power of the masses and draw on public pressure to enhance their negotiating position. In such informal inter-bureaucratic bargaining, local officials might intentionally facilitate popular protest and lead to a situation we call ‘mobilized instability.’ More commonly, they borrow power from ‘consent instability,’ that is, they discreetly leak insider information and instruct their police forces to be exceptionally tolerant. In this article, we use the redistricting case in Changxing county, Zhejiang province as well as other incidents to show how local officials can strategically exploit public pressure, in the mode of ‘consent instability,’ to extract policy concessions. We introduce the concept of ‘mobilized instability’ through an examination of jurisdictional restructuring conflict in Daye county, Hubei province. This analysis suggests that reckless intermediaries might over-mobilize and radicalize the masses, thereby undermining intentions and leading to serious consequences for the public officials. The article concludes that the power of the masses may serve as a credible bargaining chip during informal elite bargaining, but it can also be risky for those who handle it poorly.
“Validating Vignette Designs with Real-World Data: A Study of Legal Mobilization in Response to Land Grievances in Rural China“ (with Susan H. Whiting) The China Quarterly 246: 586-601.
How well do vignette designs capture actual behaviour in the real world? This study employs original survey data featuring both hypothetical vignettes and behavioural questions in order to assess the external validity of descriptive and causal inferences in survey experiments. The survey was conducted in a three-province, probability-proportional-to-size sample of 1,897 rural residents in China and focuses on the legal mobilization of citizens in response to grievances involving land rights. In terms of descriptive inference, we find that relative to the behavioural benchmark, hypothetical vignettes significantly over-estimate legal mobilization in response to a grievance, particularly for higher-cost actions like petitioning the government and litigating in court. We find that data from hypothetical vignettes affect causal inference as well, producing significantly different results regarding the effect of political connections and legal knowledge on legal mobilization. The study makes a contribution by identifying conditions under which hypothetical vignettes are less likely to produce valid inference. It engages a rich literature on disputing and legal mobilization in the field of Chinese politics and helps to resolve debates over the role of political connections and legal knowledge.
“Making Reform Work: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment in Rural China“ (with Fang Wang and Shuo Chen) China: An International Journal 19(2): 25-46.
Why are some reforms successfully adopted while others are not? This article addresses the question by exploring the variation in the adoption of China's "One-Issue-One-Meeting" reform. The reform, initiated by the central government in 2000, encourages rural villages to voluntarily adopt a new governing procedure that seeks to enhance local public goods provision. Using data from the 2005 Chinese General Social Survey, the authors find that villages with a more homogenous population measured by surname fractionalisation are more likely to adopt the procedure. Applying a generalised spatial two-stage least squares estimation, the authors also found a spatial spillover effect of the reform: the likelihood of a village undertaking the reform increases when its neighbouring villages also do so, and such effect is more pronounced if the neighbouring village is economically better off. This suggests a potential learning mechanism underlying the neighbourhood spillover.
“Partnering with the State: Historical Legacies, the Local State Sector, and Foreign Direct Investment in China“ Journal of Contemporary China, 29(123): 369-386.
How does the size of local state-owned sector affect the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) to that region? Using an original county-level dataset for China's Yangtze Delta Region, this article finds that counties inheriting a larger state-owned sector from the planned-economy era have attracted more FDI since the outset of the market reform. The article argues that early foreign investors tended to invest in locales with a robust state sector to build joint ventures with local state-owned firms, as doing so helped them satisfy state regulations and reduce various political and market risks. The legacies of the planned economy also shaped local states' preferences, leading to persistent variations in local economic structure. An instrumental variable analysis suggests that the association is likely causal.
”Consent to Contend: The Power of the Masses in China’s Local Elite Bargain“ The China Review, 19(1): 1-29.
This study explores how local officials tolerate and use mass mobilization to extract policy concessions from above. Local officials strategically tolerate mass mobilization when the demands of the masses are congruent with elements of their own agenda that they are otherwise unable to pursue. Protestors in the streets turn out to be a powerful bargaining chip for local officials: they illustrate ex ante that higher-level leaders risk causing social instability if they reject the masses’ demands. The paper lays out the institutional environment that gives rise to such a strategy, presents a detailed case study focusing on the alliance between local officials and citizens in a mass mobilization regarding administrative re-districting, and discusses the presence of such “consent instability” in other issue areas in China. The result from a survey experiment of Chinese officials is consistent with the hypothesis that officials are more likely to concede to the demands of their subordinates when popular pressure back their demand. The findings reveal a crucial elite-mass linkage in China’s bureaucratic politics that researchers have neglected.
"Is Any Publicity Good Publicity? Media Coverage, Party Institutions, and Authoritarian Power-Sharing" (with Fengming Lu) Political Communication, 36(1): 64-82.
Existing literature identifies non-official media as a tool for rulers to gather information from below. We argue that such media also help identify threats among elites. Motivated by profit, partially free media tend to cover politicians who challenge implicit norms of the regime. These political elites are perceived as threats to the power-sharing status quo, which leads peers to sanction them. We test this argument with evidence from the Chinese Communist Party’s intra-party elections of alternate Central Committee members in 2012 and 2007. With Bayesian rank likelihood models, we find that candidates who appeared more frequently in various partially free media received fewer votes from the Party Congress delegates, and this pattern is robust after accounting for a series of alternative explanations. Detailed case studies also show that low-ranked candidates have more partially free media coverage because they broke party norms.
"Popular Threats and Nationalistic Propaganda: Political Logic of China's Patriotic Campaign" (with Chuyu Liu) Security Studies, 27(4): 633-664.
Conventional wisdom suggests that authoritarian leaders use nationalist propaganda as a tool to strengthen mass support. Yet few studies have provided systematic evidence to account for specific tactics underlying these information manipulations. We argue that autocrats, recognizing the material costs of propaganda, are more likely to target localities with the greatest anti-regime potential. Using a unique dataset of "patriotic education sites" that the Chinese Communist Party assigned throughout China as tools to advance its nationalistic campaign, we found a systematic association between these locations and the scale of anti-regime mobilization in the 1989 pro-democracy movement. The longer the anti-regime protest lasted in a city in 1989, the greater the number of patriotic education sites the city contains. Our findings highlight the strategic way in which autocrats manipulate nationalist propaganda to mitigate popular threats.
Please see the appendix on my coauthor Chuyu Liu's website.
"Term Limits and Authoritarian Power Sharing: Theory and Evidence from China” Journal of East Asian Studies 16(1): 61-85.
Term limits that effectively govern leadership transition play an important role in authoritarian power sharing. A fixed term and a pre-appointed successor – two crucial components of term limits – credibly commit the incumbent ruler to share power with other elites, and also allow the elites to monitor and coordinate against the ruler's transgression of the power-sharing agreement. While the successful adoption of term limits often requires an even balance of power among the ruling elites in the first place, once adopted it initiates an evolving bargain over allocation of political power among multiple generations of leaders that further keeps any one faction from dominating the others. I corroborate this argument using a biographical dataset of elite members of the Chinese Communist Party from 1982 to 2012. The findings suggest that the Party's incumbent leaders and their rivals (i.e., predecessor and heir-apparent) shared equal chances in promoting their associates—which proxy their political influence—and this pattern has become more salient since the 16th party congress, when the term limits that currently govern China's leadership transition became fully fledged. This result also sheds light on the role of informal, patronage-based promotion in the institutionalization of authoritarian politics.
Working Papers (available upon request)
“China’s Entrepreneurial Provincialization” (with Warren Lu)
“Taxation without Representation?“ (with Yifan Zhang)
Book Reviews
“Book Review: Delegation and Development: Local Government in China’s Market Transition (by Xiang Gao).“ Journal of Chinese Political Science, 26: 771–773.
“Book Review: Information for Autocrats: Representation in Chinese Local Congress (by Melanie Manion).” The China Review, 16(3):248-250.
“Book Review: Capital, Coercion, and Post-Communist States (by Gerald Easter).” Comparative Political Studies, 46(9): 1143-46.
Publications in Chinese
2024.《发展的偶然性》(The Contingency of Development)，载《读书》2024年第五期，第3-12页。
2024.《信息、规模与有效治理——比较视野下的中国经验》(Information, Scale, and Effective Governance: The Chinese Experience in Comparative Perspectives)，载《国家现代化建设研究》2024年第二期，第98-110页。
2023.《公民因何遵从：政策执行中的价值认同与社会规范》(Why Citizens Comply: Values and Social Norms in Policy Implementation)（与马佳磊、严洁合著），载《新视野》2023年第三期，第121-128页。
2022. 《在田野中丰富意义：以府际政策博弈研究为例》(Enriching Meanings in Fieldwork: Evidence from a Study on Intergovernmental Policy Bargaining)，载《公共管理评论》2022年第三期，第198-205页。
2022. 《发展中的发展政治学》(Developmental Politics in Development)，载《开放时代》2022年第三期，第172-184页。
2021. 《科层激励结构的魅影：基层治理中政策执行变形的类型与成因》(The Phantom of Bureaucratic Incentive Structure: Types and Causes of Policy Implementation Distortion in Grassroots Governance)（与马佳磊合著），载《北大政治学评论》2021年第三期，第146-164页。
2019. 《产权制度的中国经验及其学术意义》(Property Rights Institutions in the Chinese Context and Their Academic Implications)， 载《北大政治学评论》2019年第一期，第58-72页。
2018. 《基于历史的因果识别设计在政治学研究中的应用》(History-based Causal Inference in Political Science Research)， 载《公共管理评论》2018年第二期，第3-12页。