My dissertation, Learning to Reform: The Politics of Land Market Reform in China, is supervised by Avery Goldstein (co-chair), Rudra Sil (co-chair), Devesh Kapur, and Yuhua Wang. This project asks why do politicians build efficiency-enhancing institutions that threaten to eliminate their own rent-seeking opportunities? This question is important not only to developing countries under economic transformation, but also to developed countries with rising income inequality and declining social mobility. Although many scholars have associated civil society with desirable political and economic changes, I argue that persistent social unrest is a functional substitute for civil society, motivating autonomous rulers to learn from the mass threat and to undertake inclusive economic reforms, reforms that incorporate mechanisms to benefit the poor, in pursuance of reputations for effective governance.

I test this theory using a multilevel mixed methods research design. First, I trace the origin of land ownership and the process of land commodification in a macro-historical analysis based on archives and memoirs. I find that fear of rural instability stimulated Chinese leaders to reduce state monopoly on land ownership and sales when they had the capacity to exercise autonomous power. But without a threatening, organized opposition, autonomous leaders opened rent-seeking opportunities for bureaucratic and business elites. Second, based on my 19-month field research, over a hundred interviews, I conduct several case studies and a quantitative analysis of land market liberalization across Chinese cities. The central finding is that, in cities with political leaders independent of local landed interests, land conflict intensity is positively correlated with the probability of land market liberalization. Finally, to test the learning mechanism, I use data from an original survey of 346 county-level party secretaries, providing a rare large-scale opinion study of Chinese local leaders. A broader implication of my dissertation is that, despite institutional differences between democracies and autocracies, there are common mechanisms (i.e., rulers’ fear of social unrest and subsequent learning) that open pathways to efficiency-enhancing reforms, even if these reforms, which benefit the citizenry at large, are not in the obvious interest of ruling elites.

My work has been supported by a Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, a Teece Fellowship, three research grants from the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, and several travel grants from Penn.

Land market reform in action (Guangdong Land Resources Yearbook, 2004)