When Dictators' Power Centralization Backfires: Evidence from China (1949-2000)

• In Event: Graduate Student Research Lightning Round: Authoritarian Regimes, Contested Spaces

Abstract

From absolute monarchs to communist dictators, leaders of authoritarian regimes have attempted to consolidate power by undermining local officials’ ties with their places of jurisdiction. How does this strategy affect these regimes’ development and therefore their legitimacy? Having discovered a significant association between officials with weaker local ties and political radicalism in implementing central policies, this study argues that such strategies to centralize power end up posing threat to the regime’s developmental stability and thus the central government’s own legitimacy.
My argument is evidenced by the economic effects of China’s non-native official appointment system across 1124 counties from 1949 to 2000. The imperfect implementation of the system during this period provides an ideal setting to test this argument. Through an originally and thoroughly constructed national-level dataset of county-level officials, field research, and archival studies, this study tests the system’s impact on county-level development during four landmark periods in contemporary China’s history: (1) the Great Leap Famine (1959-61), the most catastrophic central policy failure that cost 30 million lives; (2) the Agricultural Reform (1978-83) that eventually terminated China’s history of mass famine; (3) the enforcement of the literally bloody policies of family planning; and (4) the economic reform (1985-2000). I find that officials whose birthplaces deviated further from their governing places were significantly more radical and ruthless in implementing central policies, regardless of the advisability of the policies: their jurisdictions witnessed a higher death toll during the famine; they pioneered in the famine-eliminating Agricultural Reform; they were able to push through family planning policies more successfully; finally, they brought about higher, albeit less stable, growth during the Reform era. Findings suggest that non-native officials’ weaker interest ties with their places of governance and their greater need to strengthen their sphere of influence—rather than variances in competence or knowledge—explain their audacity in policy implementation. Such effect was more pronounced in counties with a larger population, likely because their fractured interest groups were less capable of resisting unwanted policies. My field research show that local political trust was pushed to the brink of collapse at times of policy failures like the Great Leap Famine and that non-native officials’ heedless and ruthless policy implementation has led to a lower political trust among the population in areas they once governed.
As such, this study suggests that authoritarian leaders aiming at more sustainable development may need to ease their control on local officials’ power. Such strategies to centralize power, which impair local officials’ downward accountability towards the population, not only undermine developmental stability but may also backfire on the central government’s own legitimacy in the long run.

Author

• Jingyang Rui, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor