Revolution, State Building, and the Great Famine in China

In a strong authoritarian state, what mechanisms hold political elites accountable and contain the state’s predatory tendencies? We examine China’s Great Famine of 1958–1961 to understand the variation of predatory behaviors across Chinese provinces. By exploring the Chinese Communist Revolution history and probing into over four hundred biographies of political elites in the newly founded communist state, we first document the revolutionary legacies on state building particularly political power configurations at the provincial level. We then employ a generalized difference-in-differences design and find that local representation—the extent to which local cadres were represented in the provincial authorities—enhanced provincial leaders’ accountability to the general public and thus was associated with lower mortality rates, whereas central connections—the political ties between provincial leaders and powerful political elites in the central state—reinforced the accountability to higher-level political leaders and were associated with higher mortality rates.