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There has been an outpouring of political research in recent years on the Great Leap famine; in the future, we will be blogging about some important new work coming out of China itself. At the American Political Science Association meetings in Seattle, I commented on a paper by Victor Shih (Northwestern), Mingxing Liu (Peking University) and Dong Zhang (Northwestern); the paper draws on Shih’s massive dataset on the Chinese political leadership. The findings shed light on the type of processes that might have operated in the North Korean famine and that could play a role in future reform processes as well.
A central puzzle is why some areas of China did so much worse than others during the Great Leap famine, controlling for underlying constraints such as crop yields. The answer is that cadres in some provinces and counties toed the line from Beijing more assiduously than others, for example in meeting grain procurement targets and mobilizing overworked laborers for state projects.
But why? Shih and his colleagues argue that the composition of the provincial level leadership may have mattered. Commanders in the four main field armies, which ultimately defeated the KMT, seized power in many provinces and ultimately wielded supreme power in Beijing. In some provinces, however, local guerilla commanders played a more important role in overthrowing KMT rule and subsequently had greater representation in their respective provincial standing committees. Preliminary results suggest that provinces with greater local representation may have fared better than those dominated by the center. Even in authoritarian regimes, there may be partial accountability depending on the nature of the local leadership.
Shih and his colleagues are also investigating the extent to which provinces had representation on the Central Committee; ironically, such representation may have hurt rather than helped. Central Committee members were more intent on showing their loyalty to Mao than in defending their citizens from the madness of the Great Leap policies. This result conforms more closely with Amartya Sen’s expectations that authoritarian regimes are lacking in accountability and thus more famine-prone.
Whether these findings hold is yet to be seen, but they provide interesting insight into the political economy of authoritarian regimes. We do not yet know enough about how the provinces and counties in North Korea are governed, but North Korea appears much more hierarchical and centrally-controlled than China, which might explain why the famine’s effects were more wide-spread.
Nonetheless, there is variance in North Korea as well. Hazel Smith shows in a 2009 article (cited below) that proximity to Pyongyang was a minus; South Hwanghae was self-sufficient in food, but showed bad nutritional outcomes as a result of Pyongyang’s ability to extract food and limit market opportunities.
But it is also possible that local leadership may have shielded—and continue to shield—some provinces and counties from Pyongyang’s extremism, including its efforts to roll back the market. This promising line of analysis may help account for regional variations in North Korea’s marketization process that still remain somewhat difficult to detect. For example, could the areas most hard hit by the famine—particularly the Hamgyong provinces—ultimately move more rapidly to the market because of distance from Pyongyang and/or local leadership?
Further reading:
Hazel Smith (2009). “North Korea: Market Opportunity, Poverty and the Provinces,” New Political Economy, 14:2,231-256.
