Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: There was widespread peasant protest in grain-producing provinces in central China in the 1990s. Why did this happen? What characterized these protests? Based on 2 years of fieldwork in Hunan, I argue that the emergence of peasants’ leaders and the central government’s policies on lowering peasants’ burdens were the two necessary conditions that turned peasants’ common yet individual grievances about predatory local state into large-scale peasant movements. In this paper, I will study in detail an influential peasant movement in central Hunan and compare it with another large-scale peasant movement in northern Hunan. I will also compare the two protests with the inaction of peasants in a southern Hunan county. Peasant movements in different areas had identical goals, identical structural reasons, and similar way of movement expansion. Yet they differed in their leadership type and movement organizations.
The relentless extraction of resources from the peasants by local state in the 1990s, the poor services it provided, the crumbling public projects in rural areas, and the corruption of local state were the common structural causes of both movements. The goal of both movements was to lower excessive taxes and fees that towns/xiangs collected from peasants and to fight against village corruption. The two protests erupted only when peasant leaders emerged who successfully utilized the cleavages between higher authorities and local government (the central government’s policies on lowering peasants’ burdens and the failure of local government to put them into practice) and mobilized peasants against local government. However, if the local state was so brutal that no peasant dared to be a leader, then peasants remained silent and unorganized even if they were more heavily taxed. This was what happened in the southern Hunan county. In the northern protest, almost all the leaders were communist party members, whereas in the central one, no leader was a party member. However, in both cases, peasant leaders were more educated, more eloquent, more public-spirited, and more connected with the bureaucratic world than most peasants. The northern protest had a rather loose organization with no formal structure. The central one had a quasi-independent organization that had a hierarchical structure. However, both protests spread in a similar way. Once a peasant leader started a burden-relief movement in one village, it quickly spread to neighboring villages and sometimes neighboring towns, both through the linkages among movement leaders and through the thick daily interactions among peasants who lived close to one another. However, both were suppressed once they tried to organize large-scale mass demonstrations in front of government compounds. Nonetheless, these peasant movements seriously challenged the legitimacy of local state.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper, we revisit two important questions: Does the public employ retrospective or prospective evaluations of the economy when it is asked whether it approves or disapproves of the president? And are these economic evaluations myopic or sociotropic in nature? We argue that by examining the entire public as one homogenous group, significant and distinctive behavioral patterns among different groups are overlooked. In our analysis of quarterly presidential approval across heterogeneous education cohorts for the period extending from 1978 to 1988, we find that more educated cohorts are more prospective and sophisticated in their evaluations of the president, while the least educated are more likely to focus on personal retrospective evaluations of the economy when making their judgments.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Many specialists of Southeast Asian politics have favored an approach to political culture that emphasizes the ways in which states have had to adapt to existing cultural notions and expectations of political authority. These studies of dialogic interactions between states and the largely rural societies of the region seek to illuminate the degree to which cultural ideals have shaped the organizing principles of the state. A common conclusion that emerges from these individual country studies is that state success in establishing legitimacy and achieving policy objectives is based on its ability communicate its authority and goals through the established discourse of ethics and values. In this way, the gap between the modern political elite and rural populations can be bridged, often compelling the former to adjust its ideological commitments while drawing the latter in to the nation-building process and other state goals. Vietnam will be presented as an example to illustrate this understanding of political culture.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Since the mid-1980s, peasant burden has emerged as one of the most intractable predicament in rural China. To a considerable extent livelihood in the countryside has suffered from increasing payment of grain sale, taxes, informal levies, and apportionments. While there are a variety of explanations for the rising burden, most attentions have been paid to the role of the local state, either because local governments are fiscally insufficient in providing public services or completing state assignments, or because local officials seek rents at the expense of peasant income, or because the over-staffed local administrations extract resources from farmers for their own salary. In this paper we argue that the local-state approach is largely misleading, for it ignores underlying factors that lead the local state to predatory behavior. The central government regulations, such as grain procurement, family planning, rural direct taxes, etc., are in-depth reasons for the growing peasant burden. Based on agency theory, we assume that there are enforcement costs and information asymmetry in a centralized bureaucratic system. In the post-Mao era, the Chinese central government requires local officials to accomplish a set of regulations. However, the center has not provided sufficient funds for the implementation; furthermore, because of information asymmetry, the center has no way to monitor how local agents behavior in enforcing the regulations. As a result, local governments have faced serious fiscal shortage in financing policy tasks and had to extract more from villagers, on the one hand; rising regulation tasks also provide a legal excuse for local governments to expand their size and impose additional fees for their wages, on the other. Even worse, rent seeking goes side by side with the implementation of regulations. All these have added burden to peasants. To test these arguments, we are going to employ an unusual data set from the Ministry of Agriculture of P. R. China, which contains socio-economic indicators in sample villages in ten provinces from 1987 to 2002. Through a Ford Foundation Project on local governance in China (Grant# 1035-1122), the authors have been conducting interviews with local officials from September 2003 to May 2004 in rural China and got in-depth information that will contribute much to this paper.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In light of the recent victories
of left-wing parties in Brazil (2002), Ecuador (2002), Chile (2000),
Uruguay (first round of the 1999 national election) and Venezuela
(1999), a lot of confusion has arisen around the explanation of the
shift toward left parties in Latin America. Are voters just voting
against the incumbents’ parties that have produced bad economic
results, are they voting against market-oriented reforms, or is the
electorate becoming leftist in ideology? This paper analyzes one of
these cases: the electoral change in Uruguay. By looking at public
opinion data collected right before the four post-authoritarian
democratic elections (1984, 1989, 1994 and 1999), it explains the
changes in the determinants of the vote through time. Economic
evaluations in their four forms (retrospective pocketbook,
retrospective sociotropic, prospective pocketbook, and prospective
sociotropic), ideological preference, and the social bases of voting
are incorporated in a model to account for the change in Uruguayans
voters’ behavior. On one side, the paper contributes to make sense of
the recent increase of leftist vote in Latin America; on the other
side, it tests the economic voting theory that has been noticeably
proved in the stable economic and political contexts of the U.S. and
Western Europe, on one developing country.