Book Project

Grassroots Origins of Regime Power: Rural Reform, State Building, and Political Orders in Cold War Asia

Why do political regimes undertake socially costly feats of rural reform during insecure moments of state formation? And how do these reforms shape the structure of political orders in the long run? In my dissertation-turned book project, I argue that despite rural reforms’ socially disruptive potential, regimes engage in rural reform during moments of political insecurity because they perceive this as an opportunity to deeply extend the reach of their authority to the grassroots level. However, the strategies through which regimes employ rural state building – whether coercive or coopting – also leave enduring institutional imprints on the regime’s apparatus for social control, producing new sources of social threats to the regime long after the initial reforms.

I use the key illustrative cases of rural reform in China under Chinese Communist Party and Taiwan under the Kuomintang regime during the 1950s to address these issues. My mixed-methods approach includes the analysis of rare archival materials (internal party communications, personal memoirs, and state investigative reports) and the coding of original historical datasets, collected over 12 months of archival fieldwork in China and Taiwan. I further extend these lessons to other examples of rural state building, including a shadow case comparison of Vietnam and South Korea, and an ongoing cross-national data collection effort. Overall, I seek to contextualize how global rural reforms beginning in the mid-20th century catalyzed a series of state building processes for autocratic leaders with developmentalist ambitions, and facilitated the construction of state infrastructural power beyond the rural sector. I further argue how these state building origins can help us better understand the roots of authoritarian resilience or prospects for democratic openings, through the case of China and Taiwan.

See a prior version of this project: 

Luo, Kevin Wei. "Land Reform and Local Agents: The Grassroots Origins of State Capacity in Communist China and Beyond." PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada), 2022. [link]