The Shadow Cost of State Violence: Evidence from Bureaucratic Purges in China

55 Pages Posted: 28 Apr 2023 Last revised: 25 Jan 2024

See all articles by Ning He

Ning He

Department of Politics, New York University

Wenbing Wu

Department of Economics, The University of Melbourne

Date Written: April 25, 2023

Abstract

State violence inflicts obvious direct costs on its victims, but many of its significant consequences may be indirect. Building on the literature on agency problems in authoritarian regimes, we argue that coercion against bureaucrats motivates them to pursue over-zealous goals at the expense of wider social costs. We test this argument by studying how bureaucratic purges in China under Mao impacted the behavior of local bureaucrats during the Great Leap Forward, a campaign that caused over 30 million deaths from mass starvation. Exploiting variations in purge intensity across about 1,400 counties, we find the purge intimidated local bureaucrats into inflating agricultural production and extracting excessive amounts of grain from farmers, which resulted in significantly higher famine mortality. The results highlight the perils of "accountability by violence" in authoritarian regimes.

Keywords: purges, state violence, bureaucracy, famine, China

Suggested Citation

He, Ning and Wu, Wenbing, The Shadow Cost of State Violence: Evidence from Bureaucratic Purges in China (April 25, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4429613 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4429613

Ning He (Contact Author)

Department of Politics, New York University ( email )

19 West 4th Street
New York, NY 10012
United States

Wenbing Wu

Department of Economics, The University of Melbourne ( email )

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