The Tragedy of the Nomenklatura: Career Incentives and Political Radicalism during China's Great Leap Famine

By James Kai Sing Kung, Shuo Chen. American Political Science Review, 2010

260 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A salient feature of China's Great Leap Famine is that political radicalism varied enormously across provinces. Using excessive grain procurement as a pertinent measure, we find that such variations were patterned systematically on the political career incentives of Communist Party officials rather than the conventionally assumed ideology or personal idiosyncrasies. Political rank alone can explain 16.83% of the excess death rate: the excess procurement ratio of provinces governed by alternate members of the Central Committee was about 3% higher than in provinces governed by full members, or there was an approximate 1.11‰ increase in the excess death rate. The stronger career incentives of alternate members can be explained by the distinctly greater privileges, status, and power conferred only on the rank of full members of the Central Committee and the “entry barriers” to the Politburo that full members faced.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c50395c5abffca990a6adb23595da300cf4783a

Citations in the corpus

• The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959–1961 (2015, unknown): “, Kung and Lin, 2003; Li and Yang, 2005; Kung and Chen, 2011). These earlier works do not consider the additional roles of the inflexibility, the progressiveness of the procurement policy, the proportional fall in output or the importance of explaining the rural inequality in food consumption. In pr”
• Performance Management, High-Powered Incentives, and Environmental Policies in China (2015, unknown): “Kung and Chen (2011) demonstrated that differences in cadres’ position of authority led to distinct estimates of political career prospects and thus influenced their enthusiasm for pursuing the central policy agenda.”
• Juking the Stats? Authoritarian Information Problems in China (2014, unknown): “41 Bachman 1991; Kung and Chen 2011.”
• Long Live Keju! The Persistent Effects of China’s Civil Examination System (2020, unknown): “[55] Kung, James Kai-sing, and Shuo Chen.”
• How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression (2013, unknown): “Studies of China today rely on government statistics, public opinion surveys, interviews with local officials, as well as measures of the visible actions of government officials and the government as a whole (Guo 2009; Kung and Chen 2011; Shih 2008; Tsai 2007a, b).”