FEREA 2023

Panel 2: Propaganda and Human Rights

Making Propaganda Sell: The Commercialization of Propagandist Movies in China

Linan Yao

My paper explains the recent revival of the once-marginalized genre of propaganda movies in Chinese theaters to offer an explanation for how dictators can marry creative work with propaganda. While creativity can help the dictator promote propaganda, we often see a monolithic expression in propaganda work in strong dictatorships. I provide a theoretical framework to understand the challenges the dictators face when producing creative propaganda, which is to control the creative process of cultural elites while trying to release their creativity. I further argue that the Chinese state has successfully addressed this challenge by using commercialized propaganda. Instead of just directing cultural elites, the state successfully shapes a market environment that favors the projects with its desired ideology. Propaganda projects then became the highly desired opportunities for profit-making, which incentivized the private-sector cultural elites to channel their creative energy into these projects.

To empirically test my theory, I utilize a key policy shock that increased the use of commercialized propaganda. I draw evidence from novel observational datasets, qualitative fieldwork, and policy analysis. My empirical evidence suggests that, after the policy shock, the private companies, whose participation is critical for the commercial success of propaganda movies, increasingly took up propaganda movies due to the need for certainty in a market full of risks.

Discussants: Daniel Mattingly; Iza Ding.

Malaysia’s Silence on Human Rights in Xinjiang: Countercriticism Coercion by China Deters Third-Party States

Stephanie Char

What explains Malaysia’s silence on the situation in Xinjiang in 2019-22, in comparison to other instances in which Malaysia did criticize other states over their treatment of domestic Muslim minority populations? While many factors contribute to states’ decisions around whether to criticize other states over domestic human rights issues, I argue that China’s reputation for countercriticism coercion is a vital and overlooked explanation for the lack of criticism of China over human rights violations in Xinjiang. China has engaged in countercriticism coercion, or the threat or imposition of sanctions in response to purely rhetorical expressions of disapproval from foreign sources, as early as the 1990s, but most notably since China’s diplomatic and economic sanctions on Norway over the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo.

Discussants: Daniel Mattingly; Phillip Lipscy.

Panel 4: Politics and Economics

Career Incentives, Economic Competition, and Public Land Prices

Qing Chang

Scholars have offered rich theoretical arguments on how institutions shape political incentives and determine economic outcomes. Yet providing supporting evidence has remained challenging. This paper studies two incentive mechanisms—career incentives and economic competition. Different from the previous literature that assumes the two offer similar effects, I show that they are not equivalent by designing a theory of public land allocation— a critical but understudied source of windfall revenues for local governments. I argue that career incentives motivate politicians to reduce land prices to stimulate economic growth, whereas economic competition motivates them to care more about fiscal revenue, thereby increasing land prices. I test my arguments using a regression discontinuity design on 2 million geo-located land transactions in China. Back-of-envelope calculation suggests that the total land price distortions due to the two incentives are 9 trillion RMB (≈ $1.3 trillion).

Discussants: Yuhua Wang; David Stasavage.

Voice, Loyalty, or Exit? Economic Opportunity, Escape Viability, and Political Dissent in North Korea

Yeilim Cheong

Under what conditions are individuals more likely to engage in political activities that challenge authoritarian regimes? This paper suggests that individuals’ propensity to engage in overt forms of political dissent varies sub-nationally depending on its associated opportunity costs, which are expected to be positively related with accessibility to exit routes and alternative sources of income such as informal markets. This argument is tested using an individual-level dataset on North Koreans imprisoned in political prison camps between 1969 and 2013, built from an archive of refugee accounts by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB). Among political prisoners, individuals who were residing further away from the border between China and North Korea—where opportunity costs from political activities are expected to be relatively lower—are more likely to have engaged in overt forms of anti-regime political behavior compared to those living closer to the border. The implication is that a potentially positive impact of external information on political dissent may be offset by the effects from having greater economic opportunity and escape viability.

Discussants: Aram Hur; Sophie Xiangqian Yi.

Panel 6: Security and State-Building

Ruling after Revolution: Security Challenges and Civilian Control over Military in China, 1949–1976

Junyan Jiang, Peng Peng

A monopoly of violence is a key defining feature of modern statehood. In this article, we document how rulers tackle the guardianship dilemma by manipulating the composition of the military organization: Rulers increase group cohesion within the army to conduct effective military operations against security challenges; yet when the military threat subsides, group cohesion becomes a threat, impelling the civilian leadership to diversify military units that are involved in the fighting. Drawing on comprehensive data on personnel and organizational dynamics inside the Chinese military, we illustrate how this tradeoff played out in the post-revolutionary People’s Republic of China (1949–1976). We show that (1) the higher level units were more heterogeneous than the lower level units within the military hierarchy, and (2) military units that were involved in combating external enemies were less heterogeneous. These findings contribute to research on elite politics in China, civil-military relations, and state building.

Discussants: Ning He; Charles Crabtree.

The Written Word and the Development of the State in China and Europe

Cheng Cheng, David Stasavage, Yuhua Wang

State formation depends not only on demand-side factors, such as military competition, but also, fundamentally, on the supply of ideas and techniques in a society.  We argue that these ideas can sometimes come from unexpected quarters before then being adopted by those who rule.  Using prefecture level data for China during the Tang and Song dynasties, we show how woodblock printing techniques first developed by Buddhists in competition with Taoists and Confucians provided for a technology that could give a broad number of people access to the written word.  This was critical for the development and expansion of the Imperial Examination system, which aided in constructing a state bureaucracy.  In Medieval Western Europe, by contrast, the religious monopoly held by the Catholic Church gave it little incentive to develop new techniques to broaden access to the written word.  This then helped contribute to the political divergence between China and Western Europe, as European rulers seeking to construct a bureaucracy had a more limited pool of talent to draw upon.  The broader lesson here is that in order to better understand state formation, we may need to consider the incentives for social actors outside the state itself to develop new techniques.  

Discussants: Junyan Jiang; Iza Ding.