Research

Working Paper

Political Repression and Nation-building, Revise and Resubmit

The Best Paper Award, Annual International Symposium on Quantitative History 2021

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Nations are products of modernity, but often rooted in deep history. This paper examines how Manchu conquest-era repression shaped 20th-century nation-building in China. Applying machine learning to 300,000 article titles, I show that regions with deeper repression histories produced more nationalist revolutionaries, particularly where newspapers reactivated collective memories as ethnic conflict. Using pre-conquest Jinshi density as an instrumental variable, I confirm causality. The transmission mechanism operated through local cultural institutions that preserved historical memory across generations despite sustained state suppression. These findings illuminate how political repression persists as latent collective memory and ultimately becomes a foundation for national identity.

Land Reform and War Mobilization: Evidence from the Chinese Civil War 1945-1949

NSF Dissertation Grant # 2214884

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Redistribution can facilitate military mobilization, but it may also intensify free-riding. During the Chinese Civil War, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a radical land reform that transferred land from landlords to peasants. Drawing on death records of over 566,162 CCP soldiers, I find that land reform increased military participation on the extensive margin. However, the intensive margin declined when redistribution was larger, indicating heightened free-riding. Importantly, both margins were positive only in counties near Kuomintang (KMT) forces, where the threat of landlord reprisals was high. These findings suggest that violent class struggle strategically reshaped the costs of non-participation to mobilize peasants for war.

Nixon's Visit to China: Technology Transfer, Fertilizer Plants, and Development in Pre-Reform China, Kang Zhou

Nixon's visit to China laid the foundation for China's rapprochement with the West. As a direct outcome, China gained access to Western technology, which led to the construction of modern ammonia-urea fertilizer plants. We estimate the effect of access to the high-quality fertilizer on local development in China. We show that counties located closer to fertilizer plants experienced greater increases in grain output per capita and total output. These productivity gains were amplified in counties with improved land property rights, a central element of China's 1978 reform. We further document a demographic transition toward lower fertility and higher educational attainment. The arrival of this technology also expanded the provision of public goods and spurred firm entry. These findings highlight the big developmental effect of lifting politically motivated technology blockades through cross-country technology diffusion.

Selected Work in Progress

Property over Loyalty, with Ke Rong, Zhihao Xu, Sicheng Zhao. (Draft Coming Soon)

Political Selection After Regime Change: Elite Recruitment in Early Qing China (Draft Coming Soon)

Publication

2024 Wrongful Convictions with Chinese Characteristics. Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, 32(1), 143–163. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/ecot.12384 . with Li, Wei .

2023 The Sin of Words: Censorship and self-censorship in China during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Asia-Pacific Economic History Review, 63 (2), 145–165. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.12268.

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