Ideas Mobilize People: The Diffusion of Communist Ideology in China

Ying Bai, Ruixue Jia and Runnan Wang

No 30947, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Can ideas mobilize people into collective action? We provide a positive answer to this question by studying how exposure to the Communist ideology shaped an individual’s choice to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the party’s formative stage. The individuals we focus on are cadets at the Whampoa Military Academy, who subsequently fought in 20th-century China’s most important wars. Our identification strategy exploits the locality-time-content variation in the circulation of the New Youth magazine—the major platform to promote Communism after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919—as well as the variation in an individual’s location over time. By comparing the Whampoa cadets living in a locality with post-1919 New Youth available against those who had lived in the same locality but missed this channel, we demonstrate that the former were significantly more likely to join the CCP. In future political struggles, those whose party choice was more influenced by this ideology channel were less likely to quit the CCP and more likely to sacrifice their lives. Additionally, we document that family background cannot predict the party choice of these political pioneers but social networks can complement ideology exposure.

JEL-codes: D70 D71 D83 N45 O12 P30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-his and nep-ure
Note: POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30947.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Ideas Mobilize People: The Diffusion of Communist Ideology in China (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30947

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30947

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().