This paper starts out from James C. Scott's seminal book "Weapons of the Weak" dealing with everyday forms of collective action by private entrepreneurs. It raises the question by what kind of formal and informal mechanisms Chinese entrepreneurs exert political influence in order to protect or...

This paper studies how social media affect protest dynamics in China during 2009-2017. Based on 13.2 billion microblog posts, we use tweets and retweets to measure social media communication across cities and exploit its rapid expansion for identification. We find that despite strict government...

This paper investigates theoretically and empirically the factional arrangements and dynamics within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the governing political party of the People's Republic of China. Our empirical analysis ranges from the end of the Deng Xiaoping era to the current Xi Jinping...

This paper investigates theoretically and empirically the factional arrangements and dynamics within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the governing political party of the People's Republic of China. Our empirical analysis ranges from the end of the Deng Xiaoping era to the current Xi Jinping...

This paper investigates, theoretically and empirically, factional arrangements within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the governing political party of the People's Republic of China. Using detailed biographical information of political elites in the Central Committee and provincial...

This research explores how salt monopoly, a widespread but costly institution in the pre-modern world, induced mafia-type secret societies in Qing China. Constructing a panel dataset comprising 1638 counties and using salt price regulation as a policy shock, I find that the enforcement of salt...