Peer-Reviewed Publications
2027. Hydraulic State: Hydropower Construction and Extension of State Capacity in Contemporary China (single author). Comparative Politics, 59 (2), forthcoming.
This study explores how government-invested infrastructure projects, particularly hydropower construction, increase state capacity at the subnational level. Inspired by the theory of the “hydraulic state,” it argues that the organizational and fiscal demands of hydropower construction become a mechanism through which a strong central government transmits and institutionalizes its capacity in localities. Using a county-level dataset that contains over 3,400 hydropower stations constructed between 1953 and 2020 in contemporary China, the findings indicate that government-led hydropower construction likely strengthens the state’s penetrative and extractive capacity at the county level. This pattern remains robust through several tests and an instrumental variable approach leveraging geographic slope and river density. A further within-case study suggests that infrastructure projects require the establishment of a series of ad hoc grassroots administrative institutions to comprehend local society, resettle citizens, and support construction logistics; these institutions are retained after completion and become permanent local authorities. These findings advance the state-building and state capacity literature by empirically showing the uneven subnational reach of the state can emerge as a durable byproduct of top-down infrastructure projects.
Earlier versions are presented on 2025 APSA Annual Meeting Chinese Politics Mini-Conference and 2025 MPSA Annual Conference.
2026. The Long March of Rural Electrification (single author). Studies in Comparative International Development, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-026-09509-2.
This study explores how revolutionary legacies strengthened regime legitimacy through government-invested infrastructure projects like rural electrification. Using GIS technology and historical archives, this study builds an original dataset on counties passed through by the Long March, an arduous strategic retreat by the remnants of Chinese Communist Red Army during the First Chinese Civil War. Findings indicate that counties traversed by four major Red Army forces during 1934–1936 (Long March Counties) were more likely to receive the central government’s prioritized support for rural electrification during the 1980s and 1990s. This relationship is likely causal after accounting for a quasi-experimental design exploiting neighbors of Long March Counties as placebos. Further analyses reveal that such preferential electrification operates through a region-based revolutionary legacy: revolutionary history attached to particular counties endowed them with enduring political recognition and symbolic significance, making them more likely to be prioritized for visible development support as a manifestation of the central government’s remembrance of revolutionary sacrifices and fidelity to revolutionary principles. These findings contribute to research on distributive politics and the long-term legacies of revolution by showing how revolutionary history continues to shape strategic policy resource allocation and post-revolutionary legitimacy.
2026. Electrifying Rural Industrialization: Centralized Infrastructure Governance and Non-State Growth in China (single author).
This study examines how different principal-agent relationships within state-owned infrastructure sectors affect local non-state economic performance. China’s county-level electricity enterprises can be categorised into three types depending on whether electricity is: directly supplied by the central department, dispatched by provincial electricity enterprises, or county self-supplied. Using an original dataset on county-level electricity supply patterns, this study finds that in central direct supply counties (as agents of the centre), the total industrial output of township and village enterprises (TVEs) or non-state sectors is significantly higher than that in provincial dispatch or self-supply counties (as agents of local authorities). Under centralised state-owned enterprise (SOE) management, local electricity enterprises function more as branches of the central public utility department rather than local economic firms, enabling more credible public goods provision and constraining local opportunism. These findings suggest that centralised governance in state-owned infrastructure can operate as a developmental institution for non-state growth: by insulating networked public utilities from local fiscal extraction and patronage politics, vertically integrated state-owned systems can create more credible and predictable conditions for non-state economic expansion.
Current versions are presented on 2026 APSA Annual Meeting and 2026 ACPS (Association of Chinese Political Studies) Anniversary Conference.
Conference Papers and Working Papers
2026. Roving Bureaucrats: Rotation, Discretion, and Revenue Performance in Philippine (with Nico Ravanilla).
How do individual bureaucrats shape state capacity when they rotate across local offices? This article asks whether revenue officers carry portable administrative quality across assignments. We study Revenue District Officers (RDOs) in the Philippine Bureau of Internal Revenue, combining archival assignment orders with district-year fiscal records from 1999 to 2007. Following the value-added tradition, we construct a leave-one-out measure of officer quality from prior out-of-district performance and estimate stacked-horizon models with district and year fixed effects. Portable RDO quality does not raise collections immediately upon arrival, but predicts higher revenue once the officer has spent time in the district. The effect operates through voluntary collections rather than assessment-based or delinquent collections, suggesting strengthened routine compliance rather than coercive enforcement, and is concentrated among officers who remain beyond the statutory three-year limit. Event study and difference-in-differences estimates, together with persistency and alternative explanation tests, indicate that these revenue patterns reflect the effect of officer arrival rather than favorable bureaucratic assignment or local family dynastic politics. These findings contribute to research on state capacity, bureaucratic discretion, and personnel rotation by showing that fiscal capacity can have portable micro-foundations in individual officials.
2026. How the Party Controls Cadres: Party Affairs Experience and SOE Cadre Appointments in China (single author).
Studies of authoritarian elite selection have largely asked how forms of capital such as performance and faction help elites advance and survival. This study instead argues that prior career experience can serve as a distinct political credential, whose value is itself priced by what the regime rewards at a given moment, and can reverse as priorities shift. Full-time party affairs experience (dangwu), including service in cadre management, discipline inspection, propaganda, and ideological work can operate as an occupation-based credential of political reliability in the CCP’s nomenklatura, costly because those who acquire it forgo the professional capital that drives technocratic advancement. Drawing on an original official-year dataset of 2,374 leaders across 601 Chinese provincial state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from 2012 to 2025, the study shows that party affairs experience raises the chance of direct appointment to top SOE leadership (secretary / board chairman) by roughly 35 percent. Using a triple-difference design (DDD) around the 2019 ideological education campaign, it further shows that the promotion return to this credential reverses from a discount before the campaign to a premium afterward among the secretaries who exercise Party leadership inside enterprises. These findings highlight that as costly signals of political reliability and loyalty to the regime rather than merely to a personal patron, the price of such occupational credentials is set by the regime rather than invariant. The study also offers a way to study cadre selection within China's functional systems with candidates arrive from various professional backgrounds.
2026. When the State is Built: Hydropower Project and Human Capital in China (with Yihan Chen). 2026 MPSA Annual Conference.
This study examines the long-term effects of state-led infrastructure projects on local residents’ human capital accumulation. We compile data on the completion year, geographic coordinates, and installed capacity of medium- and large-scale hydropower stations in China from 1978 to 2015 and match these data with the 2015 China1% Population Sample Survey. Based on this matched dataset, the results show that exposure to hydropower station construction before adulthood significantly increases individuals’ educational attainment. Among counties with hydropower construction, a one-standard-deviation increase in the number of construction projects is associated with an average increase of approximately 0.170 years of schooling and a significant rise in the probability of entering senior high school. The effect on higher education is positive but not statistically significant. An age-cohort difference-in-differences estimate using the completion of the main structure of the Three Gorges Project in 2006 as a shock shows that individuals in the treatment group experienced an average increase of 0.409 years of schooling. The educational effects of hydropower station construction are more pronounced among women, urban residents, and samples exposed to large-scale hydropower stations, and are mainly concentrated in upstream counties. Mechanism analysis suggests that hydropower station construction is associated with the expansion of employment in state-owned work units (danwei), a decline in the share of the agricultural population, and an increase in the share of local fiscal expenditure devoted to education. This study provides granular empirical evidence on the unexpected impact of the realization of state’s productive and infrastructural capacity on human capital accumulation and shows that large-scale infrastructure may generate long-term social effects through changes in employment structure and public investment in education.
2025. How Natural Disasters Affect Governance in China? Typhoon, Responsiveness, and Historical Consequences (with Xinyang Gao and Yifan Zhang). 2025 APSA Annual Meeting / 2026 MPSA Annual Conference.
This study explores the short-term and long-term influence of natural disasters on government responsiveness in China. Specifically, it examines how typhoons influence response capability of local governments and how the effect varies with geographic distribution of typhoon shocks in the history. We argue that typhoons act as external shocks that increase the responsiveness of governments and the effect is more pronounced when typhoons occurred frequently in the history. Using panel data from 371 cities (2012–2018), we find support for the responsive impact of disasters, which may prompt more fiscal expenditure, higher economic ambition, and more contracted debt scale. Results also reveal variations in the effects across disaster-prone areas in history, which indicates historical disasters shaping local response capabilities in a long run.
2025. How Natural Disaster Reshape Economic Acquisition and Confidence (with Xinyang Gao). 2025 MPSA Annual Conference.
2024. Man-Made Natural Disaster: Evidence from National Detention Area in China (with Xinyang Gao and Xinyao Wang). 2024 APSA Annual Meeting. https://doi.org/10.33774/apsa-2024-j5fm4-v2.
2023. Typhoon Shock and State Capacity: Evidence from East Coastal Counties in China (with Xingyu Zhou and Jiaqi Chen). The 5th Chinese Political Science Knowledge System Forum / The 16th CCPSIS (Chinese Community of Political Science and International Studies) Annual Meeting Future Scholar Academic Poster Exhibition.