The Countervailing Effect of Rebel Governance

• In Event: Advances in the Study of Rebel Governance

Abstract

How rebel groups interact with civilians has significant implications for the dynamics of civil war, yet most research has focused on the origins of rebel governance rather than its consequences. We argue that coercive rebel actions to control the population can negatively affect civilian compliance with rebel rule, undermining the military resources available to the rebels. We provide evidence for this claim with archival data from the Chinese Civil War (1946-1949), when the Chinese Communist Party carried out violent land reform in occupied areas that killed hundreds of thousands of people. We digitize a new dataset of 260,000 Communist soldiers to estimate how land reform affected the Communist Party's soldier recruitment during the Civil War. Comparing county-level soldier recruitment before and after land reform with a difference-in-differences estimation, we document a substantively large and negative effect of land reform on the number of new soldiers joining the Communist army. Our estimation shows land reform led to a remarkable 45% decrease in new soldiers. This effect was primarily driven by the violence in land reform, which outweighed any potential positive effects associated with land redistribution. These findings highlight the military cost of coercive rebel governance.

Authors

• Wenbing Wu, The University of Melbourne

• Ning He, New York University