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The Emperor Strikes Back: Political Status, Career Incentives and Grain Procurement during China's Great Leap Famine*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2014

James Kai-sing Kung
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Abstract

Using China's Great Leap Famine as example, this article shows how political career incentives can produce disastrous outcomes under the well-intended policies of a dictator. By exploiting a regression discontinuity design, the study identifies the causal effect of membership status in the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee—full (FM) Versus alternate members (AM)—on grain procurement. It finds that the difference in grain procurement between AMs and FMs who ranked near the discontinuity threshold is three times that between all AMs and all FMs on average. This may explain why Mao exceptionally promoted some lower-ranked but radical FMs shortly before the Leap: to create a demonstration effect in order to spur other weakly motivated FMs into action.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , October 2014 , pp. 179 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*James Kai-sing Kung is Yan Ai Foundation Professor of Social Science and Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (sojk@ust.hk). He thanks two anonymous referees, Daron Acemoglu and Gary King for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft, Ying Bai for excellent research assistance, and the financial support of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (Grant 642010). The remaining errors are all mine.

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