Notifications
27
Apr
Building State Capacity: A Quantification of Pre-Qin China
Speaker: DONG Baomin, School of Economics, Henan University
Moderator: LIU Ruiming, NADS, RUC
Time: May 8th, 2019 (Wednesday), 14:00-15:30
Venue: 815 Meeting Room, Chongde Building West Wing, RUC
Abstract:
The pre-Qin period, particularly the Spring and Autumn period (770BC-481BC) and the Warring States period (480BC-221BC) witnessed the great transformation of the Chinese society from a classical feudal system to a two millennium long centralized empire. The scale and ferocity of the war increased tremendously from Spring and Autumn to Warring States time. Aggression wars are used as a proxy for state capacity since the fiscal capacity, the governance capacity, and public goods provision capacity as three main dimensions of state capacity, are all incorporated in the capacity to wage wars. Using panel data on Great Wall construction in related states; time spans that one or more prime ministers were installed; counties established chronically by the states; natural disasters; disaster or famine relief; flights of high rank nobility or officials; time and nature of the “self-strengthening reform”; etc., we regress the offensive wars against institutional and control variables. Our panel limited dependent variable models indicate that institutional factors such as county establishment, installment of prime ministers, and self-strengthening reforms, had substantial effect on a state’s capacity to wage offensive wars, and the statistical significance of the coefficient is surprisingly high. Furthermore, a pro-Legalist reform outperformed the pro-Confucian reforms in cultivating state capacity.