IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/pscirm/v2y2014i02p179-211_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Kung, James Kai-sing

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Kung, James Kai-sing, 2014. "The Emperor Strikes Back: Political Status, Career Incentives and Grain Procurement during China's Great Leap Famine," Political Science Research and Methods, Cambridge University Press, vol. 2(2), pages 179-211, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:pscirm:v:2:y:2014:i:02:p:179-211_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2049847014000065/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cormac Ó Gráda, 2016. "“The Last, the Most Dreadful Resource of Nature”: Economic-Historical Reflections on Famine," Atlantic Economic Journal, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 44(2), pages 225-241, June.
    2. Che, Jiahua & Chung, Kim-Sau & Lu, Yang K., 2017. "Decentralization and political career concerns," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 201-210.
    3. Kung, James Kai-sing & Zhou, Titi, 2021. "Political elites and hometown favoritism in famine-stricken China," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 22-37.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:pscirm:v:2:y:2014:i:02:p:179-211_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/ram .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.