Incentive Compatibility and Its Betrayal: A Mathematical History of Political Campaigns in Communist China

Heng-Fu Zou ()

No 769, CEMA Working Papers from China Economics and Management Academy, Central University of Finance and Economics

Abstract: This paper develops a unified theoretical and historical framework to explain the cyclical structure of political purging and institutional collapse in totalitarian regimes, with a focus on the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) from 1942 to the present. We introduce three formal models: a dynamic signaling game with time-inconsistent punishment, a modified epidemic model of political participation and removal, and a quota driven reinterpretation game that captures the regime's shifting definition of guilt. These models reveal a structural logic in which early-stage partic ipation is incentive-compatible but later becomes retroactively incriminating as political needs evolve. Simulations demonstrate how participation spreads rapidly, trust deteriorates, and long-run strategy space collapses under coercive reinterpretation. By mapping these models onto major Chinese political campaigns-from the Yan'an Rectification and the Anti Rightist purge to the Cultural Revolution and Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drive -- we show that totalitarian governance operates through sequential betrayal of compliance. The regime manufactures loyalty, rewards it in the short term, then redefines it as disloyalty to fulfill ideological or factional quotas. This dynamic creates a system where no strategy ensures safety and all signals become vulnerable to reinterpretation. We conclude that this self-consuming logic of incentive collapse is not an aberration but a mathematically demonstrable feature of totalitarianism itself.

Keywords: Chinese Communist Party; totalitarianism; political purges; game theory; incentive compatibility; signaling games; reinterpretation of guilt; quota systems; Cultural Revolution; authoritarian collapse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2025-05-22
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://down.aefweb.net/WorkingPapers/w769.pdf (application/pdf)

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:cuf:wpaper:769

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEMA Working Papers from China Economics and Management Academy, Central University of Finance and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Qiang Gao ().