Book Project

In the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong launched a series of mass-scale political campaigns to eradicate power contenders and transform China’s socioeconomic structure. However, local officials sometimes lacked enthusiasm and were reluctant to fully comply with Mao’s demands to meet campaign targets. How did the Chinese regime under Mao motivate subordinate bureaucrats and improve their compliance and responsiveness to Beijing’s political agenda?

My book project addresses this question by examining three political campaigns during Maoist China: the Land Reform (1949-1954), the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957-1959), and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Through my research, I identify three mechanisms used by the Chinese regime to foster loyalty and compliance among subordinates. First, the regime leveraged the incentives of less trusted outgroup factions to signal loyalty and dispel suspicion surrounding their backgrounds. Officials from these factions, driven by the desire to demonstrate their trustworthiness to the leader, would exhibit greater enthusiasm in carrying out coercive tasks during the campaigns. Second, the regime strategically appointed officials from rival backgrounds to the same locality, deliberately creating factional tensions and divisions within the local authority. The mutual distrust and competition among local elites provided an incentive for them to diligently execute their assigned tasks in order to secure their positions. Lastly, the regime bolstered bureaucratic compliance by selectively mobilizing the masses. By allowing citizens to engage in collective actions against local bureaucrats, Beijing could mitigate the problem of information asymmetry and exert greater oversight and pressure on the local authorities. Overall, my book project sheds light on how Mao leveraged inter-group conflicts among subordinates to achieve bureaucratic compliance and maintain political control.