Research

My research agenda explores themes related to state-society relations, state building, and local governance in the Chinese context specifically and in the setting of the global south more broadly.

Book Project

My book project, Deliberative Bureaucracy and Market Development: The Rise of Competing Local Political-Economic Orders in Maoist China, 1949–1978, based on my dissertation, explores the origins of the widening prosperity gap between northern and southern China that opened up at the onset of the market reform in 1978.

Working Papers

Comparative Study of Aged-Care Service Delivery

One Country, Two Competing Ways of Service Delivery-A Comparative Study on Aged-Care Service Delivery in Shanghai and Tianjin
ABSTRACT: After decades of economic growth, the Chinese population is rapidly aging. Building upon data collected in Shanghai and Tianjin, this paper shows differential communities/neighborhoods aged care service delivery within the same centralized policy setting. I find that local party-states of Shanghai, acting as coordinators and regulators, rely on non-party organizations to deliver services indirectly. By contrast, local party-states in Tianjin directly provide services by expanding the size of existing party-state institutions. Additionally, while local officials in Shanghai welcome and celebrate more in-depth participation of local social organizations in service delivery, officials in Tianjin are resistant toward the involvement of local autonomous social organizations in service delivery. I investigate why institutional divergence rather than institutional convergence occurs using theories of historical institutionalism (i.e. path dependence, institutional complementarity and endogenous institutional change). I argue that distinctive historical informal institutions and underlying cultural beliefs have tenaciously survived decades of formal institutional changes. Distinct cultural beliefs have shaped and restrained current institutional choices, putting local states onto distinctive institutional trajectories. Despite the persistence of the historical path, there are rooms for gradual institutional changes to take place. Particularly, rule ambiguities lead to significant institutional diversity or the formation of multiple equilibria at the sub-national level.

One Country, Two Competing Ways of Service Delivery-A Comparative Study on Aged-Care Service Delivery in Shanghai and Tianjin

ABSTRACT: After decades of economic growth, the Chinese population is rapidly aging. Building upon data collected in Shanghai and Tianjin, this paper shows differential communities/neighborhoods aged care service delivery within the same centralized policy setting. I find that local party-states of Shanghai, acting as coordinators and regulators, rely on non-party organizations to deliver services indirectly. By contrast, local party-states in Tianjin directly provide services by expanding the size of existing party-state institutions. Additionally, while local officials in Shanghai welcome and celebrate more in-depth participation of local social organizations in service delivery, officials in Tianjin are resistant toward the involvement of local autonomous social organizations in service delivery.
I investigate why institutional divergence rather than institutional convergence occurs using theories of historical institutionalism (i.e. path dependence, institutional complementarity and endogenous institutional change). I argue that distinctive historical informal institutions and underlying cultural beliefs have tenaciously survived decades of formal institutional changes. Distinct cultural beliefs have shaped and restrained current institutional choices, putting local states onto distinctive institutional trajectories. Despite the persistence of the historical path, there are rooms for gradual institutional changes to take place. Particularly, rule ambiguities lead to significant institutional diversity or the formation of multiple equilibria at the sub-national level.

Party Logic and State Logic in Civil War

How Party Builds Modern States: Evidence From the Chinese Revolution (1946-1949)
ABSTRACT: Drawing from more than 800 archival documents from a key former Chinese Communist base area between 1945 to 1949, in line with Charles Tilly’s prominent theory, I find that civil war-making directly facilitated the process of state building. However, different from Tilly, I provide a third dimension-the role of political parties in making a modern state in the midst of civil war. I show that Communist party organizations deeply embedded into the local society unexpectedly helped strengthen state autonomy of a hegemonic party-state and facilitated state building in the context of war. Using process tracing analysis from Comparative Historical Studies, the paper studies the Chinese Communist party-state through a dynamic model within which the logic of and the instruments used by a class-based communist party (defined as “party logic” and “party instruments” respectively) and the logic of and the instruments exploited by a modern autonomous state (defined as “state logic” and “state instruments”) continuously checked and supplemented each other. By tracing the dynamic interactions among party logic, state logic, party instruments and state instruments in the context of revolution and war making, this thesis demonstrates how a hegemonic political party restrained but also supported the local state-building experiences in modern China.

How Party Builds Modern States: Evidence From the Chinese Revolution (1946-1949)

ABSTRACT: Drawing from more than 800 archival documents from a key former Chinese Communist base area between 1945 to 1949, in line with Charles Tilly’s prominent theory, I find that civil war-making directly facilitated the process of state building. However, different from Tilly, I provide a third dimension-the role of political parties in making a modern state in the midst of civil war. I show that Communist party organizations deeply embedded into the local society unexpectedly helped strengthen state autonomy of a hegemonic party-state and facilitated state building in the context of war.
Using process tracing analysis from Comparative Historical Studies, the paper studies the Chinese Communist party-state through a dynamic model within which the logic of and the instruments used by a class-based communist party (defined as “party logic” and “party instruments” respectively) and the logic of and the instruments exploited by a modern autonomous state (defined as “state logic” and “state instruments”) continuously checked and supplemented each other. By tracing the dynamic interactions among party logic, state logic, party instruments and state instruments in the context of revolution and war making, this thesis demonstrates how a hegemonic political party restrained but also supported the local state-building experiences in modern China.

Policy Research

Grassroots Reform in the Global South

“Grassroots Reform in the Global South,” [ABSTRACT] September 2017, Grassroots Reform in the Global South (USAID), Patrick Heller, Andrew Schrank, Anindita Adhikari, Benjamin Bradlow, Rehan Jamil, Kristine Li, Chantel Pheiffer and Marcus Walton
ABSTRACT: How and when does grassroots reform scale up? When citizen participation has led to local reforms in a particular sector (e.g., health), what processes lead to these reforms’ influencing the regional or national levels of that sector (e.g., citizen groups monitoring medicine supplies in local clinics leads eventually to pharmaceutical procurement reform in the Ministry of Health)? The report itself is divided into four principal sections: Section 1 outlines the context for the report by discussing the importance of grassroots reform, defining key terms, and describing its methodology; Section 2 documents the experiences of different regions with an eye toward intra-regional comparisons; Section 3 distills two types of lessons from the regional experiences: relatively abstract lessons of broad relevance and relatively precise lessons of less general relevance; Section 4 discusses the translation of the authors’ findings into actionable lessons and concludes by discussing the limits to their knowledge base, pending research questions, and methodological impediments to their resolution.

“Grassroots Reform in the Global South,” [ABSTRACT] September 2017, Grassroots Reform in the Global South (USAID), Patrick Heller, Andrew Schrank, Anindita Adhikari, Benjamin Bradlow, Rehan Jamil, Kristine Li, Chantel Pheiffer and Marcus Walton

ABSTRACT: How and when does grassroots reform scale up? When citizen participation has led to local reforms in a particular sector (e.g., health), what processes lead to these reforms’ influencing the regional or national levels of that sector (e.g., citizen groups monitoring medicine supplies in local clinics leads eventually to pharmaceutical procurement reform in the Ministry of Health)?
The report itself is divided into four principal sections: Section 1 outlines the context for the report by discussing the importance of grassroots reform, defining key terms, and describing its methodology; Section 2 documents the experiences of different regions with an eye toward intra-regional comparisons; Section 3 distills two types of lessons from the regional experiences: relatively abstract lessons of broad relevance and relatively precise lessons of less general relevance; Section 4 discusses the translation of the authors’ findings into actionable lessons and concludes by discussing the limits to their knowledge base, pending research questions, and methodological impediments to their resolution.