Three essays on the topics of China

Ding, Chen

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Description

Title

Three essays on the topics of China

Author(s)

Ding, Chen

Issue Date

2021-07-15

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Esfahani, Hadi S.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Esfahani, Hadi S.

Committee Member(s)

• Liao, Tim F.
• Gahvari, Firouz
• Osman, Adam M.

Department of Study

Economics

Discipline

Economics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Great Leap Famine
• Corruption
• Inequality

Abstract

This thesis consists of three essays. The first essay investigates the causes of China's Great Leap Famine. The Great Chinese Famine from 1958 to 1961 was among the worst throughout human history. The estimates of the death toll vary between 20 and 43 million. Existing literature has shown a debate between two competing theories of the potential causes of the Great Famine: “Compulsory Grain Procurement (GP)” versus “Communal Dining (CD)”. This paper, using a difference-in-differences method, identifies the long-term effects of CD and GP policies on the survivors who were born or conceived during this famine. My results show that, the CD policy exerted significant adverse long-term effects on the famine survivors' heights, and females were more vulnerable than males to the CD policy. The results also show that male survivors' heights were sensitive to the GP policy variation, and one possible explanation is that boys were entitled to consume most of food during the famine due to boy-preference culture. This reduced form evidence verifies some of existing studies on the causes of the Great Leap Famine. That is, consumption irrationality was the triggering and primary cause of this man-made disaster. The second essay studies the patron-client connections in China's “Anti-Corruption Campaign”. Plenty of literature shows robust evidence that personal ties between patron and client play a strong role in Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s promotion pattern. Few of them focuses on the role they play in CCP's political purge. The unprecedented “Anti-Corruption Campaign” waged by Xi Jinping and his allies since 2012 provides a precious opportunity to look into it. This paper adopts an innovative continuous variable “co-work duration in same places” to measure the magnitude of a patron-client connection, divides the patron group into several subgroups based on whether the patron's age would exceed the retirement requirement in the turnover year, and analyzes the influence each patron subgroup exerts on their clients during this political crackdown. The results show that arrested patrons would “implicate” their clients during the Campaign. The longer a client had worked with the arrested patrons in same places, the more likely she would be arrested during the Campaign. Connecting with an incumbent patron is not always helpful for a client. In particular, having a tie with incumbent Politburo members younger than retirement cut-off age is a “curse” instead of a “blessing” for a client, for that will increase her probability of being arrested. Having a tie with Central Committee members not in Politburo causes no danger to a client, although only the young alternate Central Committee members can “protect” their clients. These results reveal that the Anti-Corruption Campaign is at least partially driven by the desire to weaken influential leading cadres who are able to pose a threat to the current regime, and removing their clients is a feasible way to consolidate the paramount leader's power, without leaving the Party's ruling foundations vulnerable. The third essay studies corruption, inequality and population distributions in Chinese provinces. This paper shows that isolated provincial capitals are not associated with greater corruption levels across provinces of China, either before or after the far-reaching “Anti-Corruption Campaign” from the end of 2012, contradicting findings of existing literature on the US politics. This result shows that scrutiny by citizens or media plays no part in reducing corruption in a top-down bureaucratic system, and the “Anti-Corruption Campaign” is a top-down movement without participation of the whole society. This study also shows that a provincial capital with a smaller share of population within the province causes a greater economic inequality between the capital city and non-capital cities within the province, suggesting that smaller capitals have stronger incentive to widen these inequalities.

Graduation Semester

2021-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

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Copyright 2021 Chen Ding

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