The price of persecution: The long-term effects of the Anti-Rightist Campaign on economic performance in post-Mao China

Zhaojin Zeng and Joshua Eisenman

World Development, 2018, vol. 109, issue C, 249-260

Abstract: What are the long-run effects of mass political repression on economic performance? Using an original county-level dataset from Maoist China, we demonstrate a strong and robust negative relationship exists between the scale of repression of intellectuals in the Anti-Rightist Campaign (ARC) in 1957–58 and economic productivity decades later. This fall in economic output is caused by the loss of already scarce human capital resulting from the violent political campaign. Until at least 2000, significant and robust negative correlations exist between the percentage of victims in a county and its populations’ level of educational achievement and economic performance. By demonstrating the negative relationship between the state’s purposeful destruction of human capital for political reasons and long-run economic growth, we are able to add China to a growing body of research on the long-run deleterious effects of state-sponsored political repression against intellectuals. Using China’s ARC as an example, this study is the first to use quantitative methods to demonstrate the often-overlooked long-term negative economic effects of political repression under authoritarian regimes.

Keywords: Political repression; Maoist China; Anti-intellectualism; Long-term effects; Human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X18301323
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:wdevel:v:109:y:2018:i:c:p:249-260

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.04.013

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().