Political Elites and Hometown Favoritism in Famine-stricken China

Abstract

China's Great Leap Famine has remained to this day the severest in human history, and yet few studies have invoked the human factor in explaining its outcome. In sharp contrast to Mao's aggressive extractive policy against the peasantry, the 181 Central Committee (CC) members—the political elite of the Chinese Communist Party—may have alleviated the casualty of this most devastating famine, by arranging more “resale grain” to be shipped to their hometowns. Specifically, having an additional native CC member in a prefecture reduces the excess death of that prefecture by 46,500, accounting for 2.3 percentage points in the death rate when evaluated at the mean. The effect is more pronounced if a CC member worked in the central planning apparatus in charge of grain transfer. Moreover, evidence suggests that the counties with more CC members tended to receive more resale grain, while grain procurement remained affected.