James Kai-sing Kung

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

A salient feature of Chinas 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.

Climate Shocks and Sino-nomadic Conflict

Employing droughts and floods to proxy for changes in precipitation, this paper shows nomadic incursions into settled Han Chinese regions over a period of more than two thousand years—the most enduring clash of civilizations in history—to be positively correlated with less rainfall and negatively correlated with more rainfall. Consistent with findings that economic shocks are positively correlated with conflicts in modern sub-Saharan Africa when instrumented by rainfall, our reduced-form results extend this relationship to a very different temporal and geographical context, the Asian continent, and long historical period.

The Causes of China’s Great Leap Famine, 1959–1961*

With a population of roughly 660 million in 1958, the year marking the origin of this famine, 30 million amounted to a loss of close to 5% of the country’s population. 4 Moreover, the loss of lives of this magnitude occurred within an incredibly short period of time; within 2 years the country’s death rate was doubled from slightly below 12 per thousand in 1958 to 25 per thousand in 1960, making it “the worst famine in human history.” 5

Egalitarianism, subsistence provision, and work incentives in China's agricultural collectives

Abstract Collective agriculture in China failed because its reward system was too egalitarian to provide sufficient work incentives to the peasants. A popular view attributes egalitarianism to the difficulties of monitoring work effort in a team. An alternative view, presented here, argues that: (a) the egalitarian provision of “basic” foodgrains to peasant households reflected more generally the consumption problem of the peasantry who were impoverished by the states policy of extracting agriculture; and (b) as a remuneration system time rates better served the work-and-income-sharing purpose than piece-rates and therefore better protected households with high dependency ratios. Egalitarianism survives under the household farming system.

Induced Institutional Change or Transaction Costs? The Economic Logic of Land Reallocations in Chinese Agriculture

Abstract The communal land rights system in China, which combines individualised farming with periodic land reallocations, provides a good case for testing the economic logic of land reallocations. Analysis of the results of a unique village survey reveals that a villages choice of land reallocation type – partial or large in scale – is significantly affected by transaction cost considerations, which vary according to village topography and size, rather than concerns for economic efficiency (tenure security), the latter of which is a proxy for the theory of induced institutional change. More specifically, villages with complex topographies tend to favour partial land reallocation, whereas larger settlements tend to reallocate land more thoroughly.

Property rights and fertilizing practices in rural China - Evidence from northern Jiangsu

Economists have long assigned property rights a central role in economic development. In particular, secure property rights, which allegedly exist only under a regime of private ownership, are believed crucial for inducing wealth-maximizing behavior because rational individuals will not invest if the fruits of their investment are not adequately protected (Alchian and Demsetz, 1972; Demsetz, 1967). Applying this premise to agriculture, one would expect that without secure property rights, farmers would not effectively use land in a manner compatible with long-term societal interest (Feder and Feeny, 1993; Johnson, 1972). The nature of property rights associated with the land tenure system in postreform China arguably offers an example of how an incomplete regime of private ownership can undermine economic efficiency. China’s break with collective farming has been credited with driving increased agricultural productivity and output during the initial reform period (circa 1979-1984). Ironically, the subsequent slowdown in

Do Secure Land Use Rights Reduce Fertility? The Case of Meitan County in China

Based on the belief that collective landownership is pro-natalist, the Chinese government experimented in a remote southwestern county (Meitan) in 1987 with the practice of freezing land reallocations in response to demographic change for twenty years. Premising on the norm of a two-children family in rural China, evidence suggests that demand for the third child is attributable to strong son preference. Neither secured land rights nor family planning policy can curb such a proclivity. The experiment has, however, stimulated an active land rental market, which may have long-term profound implications for the development of private land rights and fertility behavior. (JEL J13, Q15, P48)

Of maize and men: the effect of a New World crop on population and economic growth in China

We examine the effect of the introduction of maize—a New World crop—on population density and economic development in China, an important part of the Old World, in the 1550–1910 period. By exploiting the regional variation in maize diffusion and using an interaction term that accounts for distance to the point of adoption and climate across prefectures over time as instrument, one decade of maize planting resulted in a 3.3% increase in population, or an overall 7.9% for the period 1776–1910. For the longer 1550–1910 period, extrapolation based on the above estimate gives an increase that ranges from 11.2% to 20.5%. This result is robust to the inclusion of a number of controls and exclusion restriction tests. Unlike the introduction of the potato in Europe, however, the relationship between maize planting and economic growth is found to be negative. These findings corroborate narratives of a stagnating Chinese economy and China’s failure to industrialize at a time when Europe was experiencing sustained growth in per capita income, thereby enabling its people to escape from the Malthusian trap.By applying a difference-in-differences (DID) analysis to the adoption of maize in China from around the mid-18th century onwards, we find that, like the potato in the Old World, maize accounted for 18% of the population increase in China during 1776-1910. Unlike the potato, however, this crop had no significant effect on economic growth. These findings corroborate narratives of China’s failure to industrialize at a time when Europe was experiencing sustained growth, and lend empirical support to the theoretical claim that under the Malthusian regime a new technology could only bring about population but not economic growth.

Friends with Benefits: How Political Connections Help to Sustain Private Enterprise Growth in China

By analysing data from a survey of 511 Chinese private enterprises, we find that their owners respond to government discrimination by developing political connections with government officials. A one-standard-deviation increase in the insecurity of property rights has the effect of increasing the number of ‘friends’ in the government by a substantial 22%. These ‘friends’ significantly help to mitigate by half the negative effect arising from the difficulties of obtaining land and excessive regulations on enterprise growth. This explains why an institutional environment of weak property rights has not stopped private enterprises in China from developing rapidly.

Autarky and the Rise and Fall of Piracy in Ming China

We examine the impact of rigorous trade suppression during 1550–1567 on the sharp rise of piracy in this period of Ming China. By analyzing a uniquely constructed historical data set, we find that the enforcement of a “sea (trade) ban†policy led to a rise in pirate attacks that was 1.3 times greater among the coastal prefectures more suitable for silk manufactures—our proxy for greater trade potential. Our study illuminates the conflicts in which China subsequently engaged with the Western powers, conflicts that eventually resulted in the forced abandonment of its long upheld autarkic principle.