Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Collective Action in State and Society: 19th and 20th Century China

Collective action can, in some cases, foment revolutions and precipitate institutional change and new state formations. This project will investigate two instances of collective action. The Co-PI will first investigate whether differences in the historical capacity for collective action helps to explain the effectiveness of a specific land reform campaign. The second project explores the role of labor management and labor strikes. This project looks at the development of labor strikes during a period when firm management methods and union membership varied widely from firm to firm. Motivating questions concern the role of foreign management and the role of capital adoption in organized labor strikes, as well as the roles of industrialization, globalization, and their interaction with organized labor. The two projects will be of interest to a wide audience, and the lessons learned could be used to understanding how collective action and collective organizations arise and achieve cohesion in different times and places. The projects will also create new datasets from the historical documentation of local histories, which is a rich source of information about cultures and belief systems, and make them accessible to other researchers.

In this research, the co-PI will collect historical data on major episodes of collective action in recent economic history in order to obtain a better understanding of the role of collectivist organization and its historical determinants. The first project will result in the digitization of millions of death records from the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) and statistics at the county level from local historical gazetteers. These data will be used to assess (1) the impact of land redistribution to farmers at a regional level (2) the influence of different factors, such as opportunity cost, free-rider problems, and coercion on land reform; (3) the impact of regional collective organization on the effectiveness of land reform and war mobilization. This project contributes to the economic literature by examining how land reform played a role in civil conflicts in China. In the second project, the co-PI will digitize detailed records of labor strikes in the 19th century when the historical context allows us to observe a diversity of foreign-owned and Chinese firms, communist versus non-communist union sponsorship, and strike outcomes. These data will be used to assess the factors that contributed to the probability of success in a strike. Using a simple framework that hypothesizes strikes are most likely to succeed where the workers have the largest potential gain over collective action, the project exploits the rich historical data to factors that may have contributed to the explanation of employers' or employees' bargaining power at the firm or industry level. The results will contribute to our understanding of how China’s early experience with labor management fits in with the global history that has so far tended to focus almost exclusively on Europe and the United States.