Securing the Countryside: Varieties of Rural State Building in Cold War Asia

• In Event: Central-Local and State-Society Relations in China and Vietnam

Abstract

Why do developmentalist-minded states, similarly invested in ideas of state-led rural reform, end up with varying strategies of grassroots political control and cooptation? In this paper, I compare the land redistribution and rural reform projects of four communist and non-communist regimes in Asia (China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and South Korea) during the Cold War to explain how pathways toward rural state building under authoritarianism diverged between durable regime control to autonomous clientelist machines in the countryside. I highlight two key factors that conditioned these divergent pathways: a) coalitional-building incentives at the moment of state formation, and b) initial levels of state infrastructural reach prior to reform. On the one hand, coalitional-building incentives are conditioned by security concerns at the domestic and external levels, thus affecting the willingness for the state to engage in either intervening political control or negotiated clientelistic arrangements. On the other, initial endowments in infrastructural reach set realistic limits for the regime’s ability to coopt rural political forces and traditional society. I thus show how this initial moment of state-led rural reform and rural state building can shape long-term grassroots strategies of authoritarian rule beyond the rural sector.

Author

• Kevin Wei Luo, University of Minnesota