Rank-and-file party members serve not only to implement distinctively Chinese policies, such as the one-child policy. They are also involved in fulfilling universal state-building tasks, such as tax collection. To maintain the material base of their polity, state-builders everywhere need to find ways to raise fiscal resources. In transition economies like China, tax extraction runs into problems of asymmetric information coupled with administrative transaction costs that are high compared to the tax potential: In the rural economy, small sums are extracted from numerous individuals engaging in increasingly diverse economic activities. In the urban economy a large part of the economic activity occurs in the informal sector, where small and medium-sized companies come and go. The argument of this chapter applies to both sectors: Party networks help the state to extract resources, either by convincing and coercing citizens to contribute to common projects, or more generally by solving severe asymmetric information problems between the lowest level of the state hierarchy and grassroots society, at low cost. As a result, the state is better at extracting fiscal resources in places with dense party member networks, both in rural and in urban areas. In short, local party organizations help to maintain the material foundation of the People's Republic.

This chapter contrasts with – but by no means contradicts – conventional views of authoritarian regime parties as networks for patronage distribution. One exemplary model, which incorporates leading research on the functions of parties in authoritarian polities, analyzes the dictator's commitment problem vis-a-vis his followers and describes regime parties as tools serving to effectively share the benefits of power. In a nutshell, the patronage approach to regime parties holds that party members are politically loyal in exchange for material benefits. This approach implies that in time of crisis, when the state has fewer benefits to distribute, the loyalty base of the party quickly dissipates, so that parties would be of limited use to authoritarian regimes. Based on this observation, researchers have questioned whether the patronage approach can fully explain the usefulness of parties for authoritarian regimes, pointing to the importance of understanding the nonmaterial sources, such as legitimacy based on historical achievements and the way in which regimes mobilize the resources on which they rely in the first place.

China's authoritarian government has been successful in exercising authority over much of the vast East Asian landmass, partly because it was able to take advantage of the grassroots presence of its Leninist party organization. The one-child policy, one of the most ambitious policies of the twentieth century, could not have been so effectively implemented if it had not been for the CCP's rank and file, present in the villages and the factories throughout the country. Similarly, tax collection benefits from the presence of party members at the grassroots level. In fiscal terms, the costs of party members’ informal privileges are small compared to the gains associated with the activities of local party members. In the cities and in the countryside, across various types of tax revenues, party members help to increase taxation rates, substantively contributing to the material base of the People's Republic by alleviating asymmetric information problems. Having a strong party presence at the grassroots helps enforcement.

The central claim that the party's rank and file functions as faithful implementers, deployed for tasks of the highest priority, must be refined in two respects. First, historically, the Great Leap Forward appears as an instance when, rather than enforcing central policy, the most committed party members resisted it. This was possible only because at the time the CCP had not yet entirely morphed from a revolutionary party to a party in power. Less than ten years after risking their lives for the Communist cause, some party members retained a strong revolutionary commitment, which motivated the high-risk behavior of foot-dragging. In a very limited way, revolutionary zeal allowed the party to function as a self-corrective device, although on the whole resistance was rare and could not prevent tens of millions of deaths. Second, another refinement concerns the function of the party in times of crisis, when rank-and-file members go far beyond their ordinary role of implementing policies. During the severe turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao called on ordinary people to attack the institutions of the party state, CCP members were left without clear instructions.

To achieve effective authoritarian governance, the best regime party is not one that slavishly implements policies, but one that functions as a self-corrective device, where disobedience limits the devastation brought about by bad policies that delegitimize the regime. Generally speaking, as the result of Leninist discipline, the CCP is not such a party. However, this chapter suggests that China's Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), along with its horrific famine, is a partial exception where the strongest local party cells slowed down implementation. Such party cells were disobedient, because the catastrophic movement occurred less than a decade after the Communist takeover, for which some cadres had risked their lives. Only because at that point in time the CCP's local leadership had not yet fully transformed itself from a party-of-revolutionaries to a party-in-power could we observe foot-dragging. In order for party members to push back, it took policies that were not just bad, but deadly. The pushback against the policy was the exception rather than the rule and had a statistically significant yet substantively small effect. All of this does not bode well for the party: The CCP is closer to an unquestioning implementer than an effective self-corrective device. This sobering result points to the institutional limits inherent to authoritarian regime parties.

Chapters 3 and 4 have shown that strong party grassroots help with implementation. Chapter 8 shows how the party grassroots contributed to regime survival in the midst of the Cultural Revolution turmoil, because party members acted on their own initiative in the interest of political stability. This chapter suggests that in at least one historical instance, some members dragged their feet on self-destructive central policies, thereby (marginally) dampening their catastrophic impact. Only because local experiences of the revolution were still fresh, its legacy influenced the behavior of local cadres, rank-and-file party members, and – possibly to a lesser extent – ordinary citizens. The following Section 7. 1 discusses the Great Leap policies. Section 7. 2 describes local variation in policy implementation and proposes a nuanced hypothesis about this variation, to be tested in Section 7. 3.

Political parties are pivotal institutions, in democratic and authoritarian contexts alike. Almost all seventy-one nondemocracies, in 2015 governing 44 percent of the world population, have parties. In most of these countries at least one party is tightly controlled by the ruling clique, such as United Russia, the United Malays National Organization, and Turkey's Justice and Development Party. In contrast to other autocratic arrangements, such as military dictatorship and personalistic rule, partybased authoritarianism has proven itself effective in governing modernizing societies and mitigating democratization pressures. But how do parties contribute to effective authoritarian rule? And what are the origins of effective regime parties? The first question calls for a study of contemporary autocratic governance. The second question takes us back to history. The literature provides answers to both questions, but incomplete ones. The case of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is the focus of this book, promises to change the way we think about the functions and origins of effective authoritarian regime parties.

This book demonstrates that an authoritarian regime party can provide the organizational infrastructure that allows a state to project authority throughout its realm. By implication, the book explains why authoritarian regimes are usually more effective in some parts of their territories than in others: The uneven presence of rank-and-file party members makes an important difference for policy implementation on the ground. The CCP's rank and file empowers the state at the local level, precisely because the overwhelming majority of party members is not in bureaucratic positions, but works outside the government. Chapter 2 develops a new theory of authoritarian regime parties, after which the following two chapters test the theory's observable implications for subnational variation in contemporary state-building outcomes, and describe causal mechanisms. To do so, Chapter 3 analyzes the particularly challenging enforcement of the one-child policy, and Chapter 4 turns to the universally relevant statebuilding task of collecting taxes.

The next two chapters turn to the historical origins of local party strength, arguable found in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1939–1945). Chapter 5 shows that Japanese occupation shielded the Communists from persecution by the incumbent Nationalist government and allowed the party to recruit members behind enemy lines, shaping membership patterns at the time of the Communist takeover in 1949.

Having demonstrated in the previous two chapters that the party's penetration of local communities is extremely consequential, this chapter turns to history in order to explore why the party is so much more present in some localities than in others to begin with. Founded in 1921, the CCP was on the run for the first decade and a half of its existence. After the party's near-defeat in Southern China and the Long March, the survivors took refuge in a remote mountain area known as the Yan'an base area, with few prospects of future success. Yet the fate of the party was to change dramatically, because the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 granted the CCP a second chance. The enemy not only shielded the party from persecution by the incumbent government, which under the circumstances had little choice but to agree to a united front. In addition, the foreign aggression facilitated recruitment among civilians most affected by the war. Behind Japanese enemy lines, Communists set up local party branches and even full-fledged governments. Many of these institutions would be kept intact until the foundation of the People's Republic. This chapter explains how the geographic patterns of Japanese occupation shaped the party's rank-and-file power base until the eve of the Communist takeover in 1949. That these early membership patterns persisted even after 1949 and are still reflected in the party's power base today is demonstrated by the following Chapter 6.

As reflected in the epigraph, Mao Zedong recognized that the Japanese invasion provided the CCP with a golden opportunity for mobilizing the masses and for reviving the Communist movement.

China's recently abolished one-child policy was one of the most ambitious, successfully implemented government policies of the twentieth century. The stunning goal of Chinese family planning was to reduce fertility to about one birth per woman, down from five births per woman in the early 1970s. Along with the military draft, family planning stands out as an extremely intrusive manifestation of state power. In China, the one-child policy not only had to deal with strong preferences for multiple children, but also with deeply rooted expectations that every woman must give birth to a male inheritor of the family tradition, a goal that often puts tremendous pressure on couples to reproduce beyond the first, legal child. Exercising biopower over a diverse population of a billion people is a daunting enterprise. For political scientists, family planning is a fascinating phenomenon, where the party state has managed to extract compliance with a policy that – even if ultimately it may be for the common good – clashes with citizens’ individual preferences. Whether one approves of family planning or whether one objects to it, it has been a spectacular display of state power.

The case of the one-child policy exemplifies, in one critical policy area, the role of the CCP's local membership for policy enforcement at the grassroots level. Given the high political priority of the one-child policy, it is to be expected that the party state deploys its most powerful tools to ensure smooth implementation – and as this book argues, the party's rank and file are an essential instrument in the state's toolbox. In sync with the following chapter on tax extraction, this chapter provides evidence that the Leninist apparatus empowers the Chinese state throughout its realm. Moreover, the one-child policy provides an opportunity to clarify – analytically and empirically – the separation of party and state. Far from being a formality without substantial implications, the party and the government remain distinct institutions with distinct functions. The boundary separating the two has evolved over time as the result of discrete choices, which have resulted in a relatively efficient design.

After the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949, instead of contending themselves with geographic patterns of control inherited from the war, party leaders were keen on penetrating areas where up to that point Communists had little of a presence. In the 1950s and 1960s, policy planners were well aware that later acquired territories posed distinct governance challenges to the Communist regime. For instance, by 1949 land reform had already been completed in one third of the country's territory, but not in the two thirds classified as newly liberated areas – indicating not only different ownership structures, but the persistence of traditional systems of local authority. Along with a quick expansion of the CCP's membership, strategies to grasp firm control of grassroots society throughout the realm were, by and large, successful. However, this success does not imply that the CCP controls its territory uniformly, or that historically inherited patterns of control vanished without a trace.

In the seven decades after the foundation of the People's Republic, the geographic power base of the CCP has shifted remarkably little, despite great political upheaval. Comparing party penetration, that is party members per citizens across provinces in 1956 and 2010, a correlation coefficient of 0. 78 indicates that membership patterns drifted, but did not change dramatically. Membership patterns in the early years of the People's Republic go a long way predicting membership patterns today: 61 percent of the variation in membership patterns in 2010 can be explained as a result of membership patterns in 1956. Is China's political geography “under the thumb of history”? Clearly, China's political geography, as reflected in party membership patterns, proved very persistent over time – the question is why. Are recruitment priorities targeting the same geographic areas? Or are membership patterns sticky, following historical precedence and adjusting only slowly to new priorities?

The first section of this chapter argues that the party's recruitment procedures result in path-dependent outcomes. The strategic priorities, formulated by Organization Departments at all levels of the hierarchy in membership recruitment plans in the 1950s, aimed to cover the territory with a more uniform party member network.