Did the communists contribute to China’s rural growth?

Lu, Yi; Luan, Mengna; Sng, Tuan-Hwee

doi:10.1016/j.eeh.2019.101315

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…(2020), we measure local famine severity as one minus the ratio of the size of the cohorts that lived during the famine (1959–1961) over that of the cohorts that lived before the famine (1955–1957) based on the 1990 China Population Census Data. In line with the existing literature (Cao et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2020; Lu et al., 2020), we use the number of victims as a measure of the impact of the Cultural Revolution using data from Walder (2018), which were constructed based on information from local gazetteers.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Comrades from the town: How did a factory‐commune pairing policy during the Send‐Down Movement propel rural industrialization in China?

Lai

Shi

et al. 2023

Econ of Transit and Inst Chang

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This paper traces the institutional root of China's rural industrialization to a historical policy, which paired factories in urban areas with people's communes in the countryside during the Send‐Down Movement in the 1970s. The policy, initially intended to improve the lives of sent‐down youth (SDY), is believed to have provided some initial impetus for industrial development in rural areas before the marketization reform that began in the late 1970s. Based on a manually collected county‐level panel dataset of Zhejiang Province, we find that following the implementation of the pairing policy in 1974, counties that received a higher concentration of SDY, relative to their rural population, achieved faster growth in per capita industrial output of commune enterprises. Our results are consistent with various historical accounts. In addition, our tentative evidence shows that the pairing policy had a prolonged effect on rural economic development, lasting into the 1980s. Overall, our findings reveal the importance of some pre‐reform institutions in shaping China's unique paths towards industrialization.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As suggested by Lu et al. (2020), CCP members had a great influence on the development of the rural economy in 1970s. If the pairing policy promoted local incentives to develop the rural industry, the development process of the rural industry would be faster in areas with more CCP members.…”

Section: Further Analysismentioning

confidence: 92%

Comrades from the town: How did a factory‐commune pairing policy during the Send‐Down Movement propel rural industrialization in China?

Lai

Shi

et al. 2023

Econ of Transit and Inst Chang

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“…Second, the nature of the state in imperial China is complex and nuanced. The traditional concept of imperial China as an oppressive and omnipresent autocracy is intuitive, but it is F I G U R E 1 2 The extension of the reach of the Chinese state under the communists (Lu et al, 2020) 23 Bramall (2019) reports that the gross industrial output of the commune and brigade firms (the predecessors of TVEs) in Jiangsu province grew by an annualised 34 percent between 1971and 1978. Nationally, by 1978, the value-added of TVEs already accounted for 6% of China's GDP (Naughton, 2018, p. 274).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The People's Republic Until the Early 1980smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A commune typically comprised a dozen or so brigades, which in turn comprised a dozen or so production teams that directly administered the rural households (Figure 12). This organisation structure allowed the state to account for every individual living in China for the first time in history (Lu et al, 2020 Opper, 2012). Others, however, credit the organisational framework laid down during the Maoist period for China's post-Mao take-off (Bramall, 2007;Fairbank, 1992;Oi, 1999;Rawski, 2011).…”

Section: The People's Republic Until the Early 1980smentioning

confidence: 99%

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The state in Chinese economic history

Qian

Sng

2021

Aust Econ Hist Rev

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We survey the recent economics and history literature on the Chinese state to investigate its role in China's long‐term socioeconomic development. We highlight three insights. First, unlike in Europe, where interstate competition helped give rise to capitalist states with high capacity, the Chinese state emerged from a different historical context. Second, the 18th‐ and 19th‐century Chinese state does not fit into the mould of a strong and extractive Oriental despotic state as once commonly believed. By conventional measures, early modern China had a weak state. Third, state building and centre‐local relations are two useful dimensions to understand development and change in China's recent history and political economy. To adapt China to a changing world, Chinese state builders embarked on a long process of state building from the late‐19th century through the Republican and Communist eras. Facilitated partly by regional decentralisation, the process now sees the Chinese state playing a substantially larger role in the economy and everyday life than any previous time in history.

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The misruling elites: the state, local elites, and the social geography of the Chinese Revolution

Xu,

Png,

Chu

et al. 2024

Theor Soc

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The existing scholarship has developed six main explanations to account for the success of the Chinese Revolution, which has been anomalous for major paradigms derived from cross-national comparisons. Methodologically, we use a social geographical approach to test these existing explanations systematically by constructing and analyzing a unique dataset of Communist growth in 93 counties in the three most contested provinces during its most pivotal period of ascendence. Theoretically, we advance and test an alternative perspective, based on the groundwork of Tocqueville and Fei Xiaotong, that integrates the state-centric theory, elite theory, and cultural analysis. Our perspective emphasizes the interplay between state centralization and local elite structure, which leads to intensified state extraction and local elite fracturing, thus creating favorable conditions for revolution. The quantitative analysis strongly supports the importance of the Japanese invasion but provides limited support for many other conventional explanations. The analysis largely confirms the Tocqueville-Fei perspective on state centralization, elite fracturing, cultural change, and revolution. The findings are buttressed by a detailed case study of Lianshui County. The study unveils a common structural challenge that a modernizing state faces in an agrarian status society, to recreate its political legitimacy while disrupting local elite structure. It also sheds historical light on the evolution of state-society relationship through the Chinese Revolution.

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Did the communists contribute to China’s rural growth?

Cited by 6 publications

References 34 publications

Comrades from the town: How did a factory‐commune pairing policy during the Send‐Down Movement propel rural industrialization in China?

Comrades from the town: How did a factory‐commune pairing policy during the Send‐Down Movement propel rural industrialization in China?

The state in Chinese economic history

The misruling elites: the state, local elites, and the social geography of the Chinese Revolution

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