Tuan-Hwee Sng

Unified China and Divided Europe

This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that the severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered political centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of moderate external threats and remained politically fragmented. Our model allows us to explore the economic consequences of political centralization and fragmentation. Political centralization in China led to lower taxation and hence faster population growth during peacetime than in Europe. But it also meant that China was relatively fragile in the event of an external invasion. Our results are consistent with historical evidence of violent conflicts, tax levels, and population growth in both China and Europe.

Regional dependence and political centralization in imperial China

We apply the concept of externalities to explain China’s long history of political centralization and its placement of the national capital. We argue that Eurasian geography created significant and persistent defense externalities between the Chinese regions. Opportunities to free ride imply that voluntary cooperation could not provide a long-term solution to the problem. A natural solution was to create a centralized state that would use coercion to enforce cooperation. Our model suggests that when an externality is strong, building the national capital in the region where the externality originates could be optimal. This provides a potential explanation as to why China’s capital was usually located in the strategically important north and west instead of the economically productive south and east.

UNIFIED CHINA AND DIVIDED EUROPE: UNIFIED CHINA AND DIVIDED EUROPE

This article studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that a severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered centralization in China, whereas Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and remained fragmented. Political centralization in China led to lower taxation and hence faster population growth during peacetime compared to Europe. But it also meant that China was more vulnerable to occasional negative population shocks. Our results are consistent with historical evidence of warfare, capital city location, tax levels, and population growth in both China and Europe.

The Effect of State Capacity Under Different Economic Systems

The communist revolution brought unprecedented changes to China. Yet there is no consensus on its role in the history of China’s modern economic growth. We investigate whether local communist party membership affected developmental outcomes from 1957–78 (the Maoist period) and 1978–85 (the reform period). Focusing on Sichuan, China’s most populous province, we use the Long March as an instrument to tease out causal effects. We find that counties with more communist members made larger strides in educational attainment, road construction, and agricultural mechanization during the Maoist period. However, these counties recorded faster output growth only after 1978. Our findings provide empirical support to field studies conducted by sociologists and historians who argue that the communists improved the organizational infrastructure in China’s countryside. Furthermore, we highlight the futility of solving collective action problems without heeding private incentives.

Geopolitics and Asia's Little Divergence: A Comparative Analysis of State Building in China and Japan after 1850

We provide a new framework to account for the diverging paths of political development and state building in China and Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century. The arrival of Western powers not only brought opportunities to adopt new technologies, but also fundamentally threatened the national sovereignty of both Qing China and Tokugawa Japan. We argue that these threats produce an unambiguous tendency toward centralization and modernization for small states, but place conflicting demands on geographically larger states. We use our theory to study why China, which had been centralized for much of its history, experienced gradual disintegration upon the Western arrival, and how Japan, which had been politically fragmented for centuries, rapidly unified and modernized during the same period. To further demonstrate its validity, we also apply our model to other historical episodes of state building, such as the unification of Anglo-Saxon England in the tenth century and the rise of Muscovy during the fifteenth century.