Aid and Authoritarian Consolidation: Evidence from China, Vietnam and Cambodia

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries & Critical Political Science
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Abstract

Strong authoritarian institutions are the cornerstone of authoritarian durability. In particular, three sets of authoritarian institutions are important: parties, states, and militaries (Slater 2010). Yet the origins of such institutions are less widely understood (Slater 2010, Levitsky and Way 2015). I examine the question of why some authoritarian regimes develop relatively strong authoritarian institutions, while in others authoritarian institutions remain relatively weak through an analysis of a subset of regimes: communist regimes in the developing world. Through case studies of China, Vietnam and the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (Cambodia), I argue that international aid—particularly communist aid—has played an instrumental role in the consolidation of authoritarian institutions in communist regimes, but that the impact of communist aid is contingent on both party strength, as well as the amount of aid. Party strength, in turn, is predicated on pre-revolutionary subnational territorial control.
In particular, I argue that communist aid enhanced institutional capacity in communist regimes in four ways. First, aid extended state control over the economy and in particular facilitated the construction of a centrally-planned economy dominated by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Second, aid deepened state leverage over urban workers in the SOE sector. Third, aid enhanced state fiscal capacity by allowing regimes to extract rents from SOEs. I characterize the process of these three mechanisms as “resource-intensive state building.” Fourth, military aid enhanced the coercive capacity of the military. The nature of communist economic aid—which was typically either turnkey industrial projects or commodity aid—meant that only when there was institutional complementarity between both donor and recipient would these institution-strengthening features be realized. This finding challenges the conventional wisdom that aid is useful primarily because it is a fungible source of patronage (Bueno de Mesquita, Smith et al.). As I have shown elsewhere, Soviet aid is associated with the stability of communist regimes, but the destabilization of non-communist regimes (Heurlin).
The paper uses three case studies to develop the theoretical argument. The People’s Republic of Kampuchea emerged in 1979 out of a Vietnamese-led invasion. As such, at the time that it took power the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP) was an extraordinarily weak authoritarian party. Soviet and Eastern European aid was also very limited in scale. The KPRP therefore faced extraordinary difficulties in its attempt to consolidate a centrally-planned economy. The KPRP experienced very limited state building and consolidation of its authoritarian institutions. By the early 1990s the KPRP renounced communism, renamed itself the Cambodian People’s Party and the newly re-named State of Cambodia underwent a process of political liberalization culminating in an UN-supervised election.
The People’s Republic of China emerged in 1949 with a relatively strong party (the Chinese Communist Party) due to its lengthy control of “base areas” established during the civil war. Soviet aid was moderate in scale and concentrated on the “156 projects”: Soviet aid-financed SOEs in the heavy industry and national defense sectors. The projects allowed the construction of a modern SOE sector in inland areas that increased state domination of a new urban SOE workforce. The 156 projects, in turn, contributed to state fiscal capacity by generating rents that were captured by central planning. Soviet aid, however, ended suddenly in 1960 due to the Sino-Soviet split. Lack of fiscal resources and the presence of a highly personalized party resulted in a state building pattern in the 1960s-1970s I characterize as “mobilization-intensive state building.” Mobilization-intensive state building focuses on ideologically-motivated mobilization through political campaigns that further strengthens domination of society and coercive capacity but at the expense of state fiscal capacity.
Although the Indochinese Communist Party was relatively weak at the time of the August Revolution in 1945, by the time North Vietnam emerged in 1954 it had strengthened considerably due to its territorial control of base areas in the north. Chinese, Eastern European, and especially Soviet aid were high and continued (with the exception of Chinese aid) throughout the Cold War. Aid enabled Vietnam to establish and consolidate central planning institutions, dominate the “commanding heights” of the economy through an SOE sector and dominate urban workers. Vietnam exemplifies the pattern of “resource-intensive state building.”
In sum, the results suggest the need to pay closer attention to the role of international factors in the consolidation of authoritarian institutions and to re-think the role of aid in authoritarian state building.

Author

• Christopher Heurlin, Bowdoin College