State Capacity, Encirclement, and Ethnic Violence: Evidence from China

• In Event: Ethnicity and Patterns of Violence

Abstract

How does the repressive capacity of a state affect the onset of violence perpetrated by ethnic minorities? This paper goes beyond the size and spending scale of the national military and conceptualizes repressive state capacity as a state’s ability to encircle potential minority rebels with an ethno-national population allegiant to the central government. It argues that encirclement can isolate potential rebels from personnel and information transfer across international and domestic borders, and from executing successful retreat in case of an armed confrontation with the government. To test the theory, I compiled a novel dataset on 100 counties and 174 state-sponsored Han Chinese settlements (i.e. bingtuan) in Xinjiang, China. I find that counties surrounded by bingtuan settlements from multiple directions that form an encirclement are associated with significantly fewer violent minority insurgencies. The results are robust to controlling for a variety of economic, demographic, and bureaucratic conditions. Instrumenting encirclement with Soviet threat between 1959-1982 yields the same results. The paper highlights the sophistication in the spatial placement, as opposed to the size, of security personnel in affecting civil conflict onset. It also builds on an emerging empirical literature that aims to characterize the geo-spatial distribution of ethnic groups by studying the heterogeneity within, rather than across, ethnic group dyads.

Author

• Anna Zhang, Stanford University