POLITICAL ECONOMY: Mobilized Compliance: When Do Political Parties Facilitate Wartime Fiscal Extraction?; Professor Xiaobo LÜ (University of Texas at Austin)

Abstract

Wartime fiscal mobilization poses a formidable challenge for states with weak bureaucratic capacity. I argue that political parties could facilitate wartime fiscal mobilization, depending on their mobilization infrastructure and the impact of war on economic elites. Using process tracing based on CCP and KMT archives from 1928 to 1945, I demonstrate that the CCP–KMT conflict and the Sino–Japanese War created unique advantages for wartime fiscal mobilization—the CCP benefited from its mass mobilization infrastructure and the KMT from an elite-focused approach. Quantitative evidence drawn from a unique dataset offers strong supporting evidence that CCP members played a pivotal role in grain extraction during the Sino–Japanese War in stark contrast to their KMT counterparts. These findings shed light on the reversal of fortune taking place between the CCP and KMT during this crucial period, offering broader implications about the divergence of wartime fiscal mobilization across states.