Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Diversity and Distribution: The Success and Failure of Economic Development in China's Poor and Minority Counties

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Why have some areas of China stayed poor while others have moved from poverty to affluence in a few short decades? And why have many of the areas that have benefited from two key affirmative action and poverty alleviation policies--the designation of some counties as "minority autonomous counties" and others as "national poverty counties"--experienced the slowest growth? While these areas are often cursed by geography, located in remote areas of China and subject to harsh natural conditions antithetical to economic growth, the significant variation between their growth rates suggests that this explanation for their underdevelopment is incomplete. This project therefore examines the relatively understudied impact of various political institutions associated with the policies just mentioned--among them fiscal transfers from higher levels of government, and ethnicity-based appointment of local officials in minority autonomous counties--on the nature of economic relationships between county governments, citizens, and local businesses, and on local economic growth as a result. This project explores the hypothesis that these institutions interact with the structure of the local economy to create incentives for local officials to provide high-quality public services and pursue pro-growth strategies in some locations, and to seek personal gains in others. Six months of data collection--in archives in Hong Kong, as well as in a variety of counties in Jilin, Gansu and Guangdong provinces--will enable the use of rare archival materials, in-depth case studies, geospatial data, and nonparametric matching techniques to explain these puzzling patterns. While there is a growing body of work on impediments to economic growth in ethnically diverse areas, this work has not been extended to the Chinese case. This is an important omission for several reasons. First, significant sub-national variation in ethnic diversity makes China an ideal laboratory for testing existing theories about the relationship between ethnic diversity, local governance and economic growth. Second, since the riots in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009, China's minority areas have received significant media attention but are still understudied by scholars in fields other than anthropology. This project will fill in this notable gap, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques to produce more generalizable conclusions about these poorly understood areas. Finally, while much attention has been paid to China's remarkable record of economic growth in the reform era, it is clear that this transformation has not "raised all boats." We know little about the counties that have been the beneficiaries of poverty-alleviation policies; by uncovering the mechanisms by which these policies may encourage growth in some areas and hinder it in others, this project will help to explain why some of the areas at the bottom of China?s economic hierarchy have benefited only minimally from economic liberalization. This project will generate useful information for both policymakers and scholars. Under-provision or unequal provision of public goods, especially in ethnically diverse areas, has been a key concern of development scholars for nearly a decade, and has also become a priority issue for aid-granting organizations such as USAID. This project will aid policymakers' understanding of the political institutions and economic conditions that ameliorate or exacerbate these problems. Furthermore, this project will generate two original datasets that will become publicly available after completion of the project: a geospatial dataset mapping the distribution of new public service projects in all counties in three provinces over the past fifteen years; and a database based on archival materials on historical conditions in a variety of poor and minority counties based on Communist Party work team reports from the 1950s.