Economic growth in China is always a political issue. During the past decades, China’s GDP increased immensely and so did the standard of living of the Chinese people. Mega cities, subway webs, high-tech industries, real estate weaved together a picture of miracle economic development. Explanations of such growth focus mainly on the role of free market, liberalization, privatization and various economic factors. My Ford project with Professor Fubing Su, however, attends to the political mechanism behind China’s economic performance. We hope to discern the role of and the dynamics in China’s unique dual leadership system—collective leadership of the party secretary and the governor, and pay special attention to how do the everyday activities of the provincial leaders affect China’s economic achievement.

Our project is also an effort to challenge and improve the “Tournament Thesis.” The Thesis argues that the Chinese government is a merit-based hierarchical system in which local officials are promoted based on their competence. An official will orient his/hers career accordingly to the central’s expectation which includes economic development. The officials thus enter a tournament where they compete to develop the local economy and thus propel a national-wide economic growth. The Thesis, however, oversimplifies the political mechanism. Other factors, for instance loyalty and personality, will also affect political promotion. If competency is not the only influential factor, how do officials actually react to the central’s requirement? Under the dual leadership system, is the relationship between the two provincial officials competitive, collaborative, or even more complex and how do their relationship affect the local economy?

With these questions in mind, we start from Chongqing, one of China’s municipalities. Chongqing is a mega city with 30,000,000 population and also a striking site of economic development. We browsed the official website of the Chongqing government for reports on events which Chongqing’s party secretary and mayor attended in 2016 and 2017. To review the massive amount of information, we created two sets of codes: Authority and Issue. Authority codes signify power relationship in an event; Issue codes generally categorizes what an event is about.

Example of our raw data: 1st Half of Jan, 2016 for Party Secretary Sun and Mayor Huang

After coding all the reported events during 2016 and 2017, we briefly analyzed the raw materials and created two sets of data. One shows a general time distribution of the officials on each type of events (economic, social, political and comprehensive); while the other one indicates the level of interactions between the officials and different governmental and social sectors.

Example of our raw data analysis

These data and observations have various possible applications. They can support a cross-temporal analysis of Chongqing to help understand how does the focus of the provincial government change over time and what does such shift mean. For instance, we found that the percentage of economic events in 2016 greatly exceed that in 2017, with an shifting concentration on political events in 2017. Events such as meetings with foreign companies, economic corporations with local, national and foreign companies and investments were cut by half in 2017 compared to the previous year. Though the central government still emphasized on developing the national economy, actual economic events in Chongqing decreased. Further explanation for this counter-intuitive situation needs more detailed background and knowledge on governmental policies, but our data provide an entry point to make sense of the current big picture.

This Ford Project is only a part of Professor Su’s research which will gather data from all 34 provinces in China across more than 5 year. With more research on different provinces, we could conduct inter-local analysis and see if the change in Chongqing from 2016 to 2017 a national phenomena or a distinct occasion. Other possible research focus can explore the the leadership dynamics in the Chinese government, changing of leadership pairs, State-business relationship and more.

A photo when we visited CCNU’s Institute of Chinese Rural Studies

After completing our research on Chongqing, Prof. Su and I went back to China and visited Central China Normal University. We met with Professors from the Institute of Chinese Rural Studies and learnt about their programs and achievements. I found it crucial to travel back to China and collaborate with local universities in order to have a sense of the current political environment and what is actually happening at the local. Poverty reduction, for instance, the top emphasized social issue in Chongqing in both 2016 and 2017, is a national-wide effort to support the poor. Latest policies and strategies focus on “Targeted Poverty Alleviation” through which the local government support individuals based on their personal needs. Thus poverty reduction is not only operating on a fiscal level. It could be actual supplies, services or even emotional support. CCNU’s graduate students are required to “go down to the rural,” which means staying in different villages in China for months and living with the villagers. We learnt a lot from the students, as they told their stories and findings, especially on poverty reduction.

Professor Du and I interviewing Qufu residents

This summer Professor Wenwei Du and I travelled to Shandong Province, China, to examine the evolution of Chinese characters and the various phonological presentations of the same characters. Residing mainly in Qingdao, we also travelled to Qufu (Confucius’ hometown) and Tai’an.

Over the course of the eight weeks abroad, we consulted linguists at Qingdao University and Ocean University of China. We also interviewed the local people who spoke various Shandong dialects. I recorded and translated these interactions as well as created a manuscript of the recordings. From these interviews, we hope to track the historical phonological changes of Chinese.

Professor Du and I with one of Confucius’ many descendants

We also explored how character composition impacts sound and meaning. As there are over 50,000 characters in the Chinese language, we chose the 1000 most frequently used characters as the basis of our research. I examined the list for phono-semantic compound characters 形声字. Phono-semantic compound characters are made up of a semantic classifier (形) and phonetic indicator (声). The semantic classifier refers to the meaning of the character while the phonetic indicator contributes to the pronunciation/sound. I analyzed the characters, defining components that influenced sound and meaning. I combed through primary and secondary sources regarding the history of Chinese characters and their evolution to assist with our research. According to our findings, approximately 51% of the 1000 characters are phonograms in the simplified form, traditional form, or both.

Next, I organized the 1000 most frequently used characters into several lists: by simplified form, by traditional form, by radical, by semantic classifier, and by phonetic indicator. I analyzed these lists, looking for a connection between character composition and its sound and meaning. We then invited our interviewees who spoke various Shandong dialects to read aloud the list of characters that were arranged by phonetic indicator in order to pinpoint the evolution of phonological representations of characters as well as the relation between contemporary Mandarin and local dialects.

This research opportunity has allowed me to experience and appreciate the beauty of the Chinese language through its many facets. I plan to continue and further my Chinese studies and I hope to translate the skills and knowledge I’ve learned during this summer to fellow Chinese learners at Vassar and to help shed new light on teaching and learning Chinese characters and their pronunciations.

“History presents unambiguous alternatives only in the rarest of circumstances,” writes Henry Kissinger in his memoir, Ending the Vietnam War. “Most of the time, statesmen must strike a balance between their values and their necessities or, to put it another way, they are obliged to approach their goals not in one leap but in stages, each by definition imperfect by absolute standards.”

Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s National Security Advisor, was the chief negotiator for the United States in its effort to end—or at least, extricate itself from—the Vietnam War. Between 1969 and 1973, Kissinger met several times with North Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Xuan Thuy and Special Advisor Le Duc Tho in Paris in order to negotiate a peace agreement. Kissinger himself, and several scholars since, have portrayed this process as a careful balancing of “values and necessities,” resulting in an agreement that, though “imperfect by absolute standards,” was the best possibly attainable. In 1973, soon after the agreement was signed, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

Yet the agreement was not only imperfect by “absolute standards;” it was imperfect by the only standard that matters: it didn’t work. The only thing it effectively ensured was the United States’ troop withdrawal. The war in Vietnam continued for another two years, and the Government of South Vietnam—after more than a decade of direct U.S. involvement, hundreds of billions of dollars, and over 200,000 U.S. casualties alone—eventually fell.

Working with Professor Robert K. Brigham, the aim of my Ford project this summer was to study the Vietnam peace negotiations (and Kissinger, their leading character) in order to develop a more complete understanding of the defining motives, methods, and mistakes.

I began the summer by reviewing the existing literature: Kissinger’s own memoir (as aforementioned), as well as the Vietnamese account by Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, Le Duc Tho-Kissinger Negotiations in Paris. I also read secondary texts such as Pierre Asselin’s A Bitter Peace; Larry Berman’s No Peace, No Honor; and Jeffrey Kimball’s Nixon’s Vietnam War. Using these sources, I constructed a timeline of the negotiations and discovered several inconsistencies between Kissinger’s account and the others—suggesting that Kissinger has attempted to rewrite and revise the history, thereby casting himself in a more positive light.

At the end of June, Professor Brigham and I travelled to Yorba Linda, California, in order to research at the Nixon Library. In our week there, we found more material than we could’ve imagined—ranging from the State Department’s Vietnam subject files, to National Security Council policy briefs and memoranda, to direct transcripts of the  Kissinger/Tho conversations and years’ worth of transcripts from Kissinger’s telephone calls—much of it recently declassified.

We’re still sorting through all the documents we collected—but sometimes, it is just as important to recognize what isn’t there. My personal favorite research discovery was when I found a group of folders that outlined a plan of military escalation against North Vietnam (with the goal of forcing Hanoi to make concessions at the negotiating table). In between two folders that were overflowing with the details of the bombing campaign was a folder titled “Legality Considerations.” The folder was empty.

As we continue to read and analyze all this evidence, one thing is abundantly clear: Nixon and Kissinger were both more concerned with politics and public opinion than negotiating a rapid, legal, and truly reliable peace. In his memoir, Kissinger predicts future criticisms of his negotiating efforts, writing: “It is always possible to invoke that imperfection as an excuse to recoil before responsibilities or as a pretext to indict one’s own society.” In the wake of the Vietnam war, there exists a “credibility gap” between U.S. policy makers and the public—“That gap,” Kissinger insists, “can be closed only by faith in America’s purposes.”

Kissinger asks us to ignore the result of the peace process, and simply trust that the Nixon Administration’s intentions, at least, were pure. My work this summer has only affirmed that (particularly when examining international relations) one should never be so naive—and, more likely than not, the person making such a suggestion is the one with the most to hide.

One of the projects I worked during the summer with professor Ho was the role of connections and performance in China’s political selection. More specifically, we wanted to understand which of these traits dominates the other under different conditions.

To do this, we had to first develop a formal model to derive specific hypotheses. Our model was a relatively simple two period decision game where a senior official decides to promote from a pool of junior officials. We specified the senior official’s utility as the rent she obtains in both periods. However, we assumed that the rent she obtains in her second period is conditional on her surviving onto the next period. Here, we said that rent is a function of the junior official’s ability and the probability of survival is a function of the junior official’s connection status. Taken from a standard career concerns model in the industrial organization literature, we believed that ability is unobservable, but that the senior official can predict the true value of ability using the junior official’s performance. With this, we were able to derive the senior official’s expected utility given the junior official’s performance and connection status.

From this model, we obtained various propositions. The first was the both performance and connections matter, and an increase in either one would increase the junior official’s probability of promotion. The next propositions suggested that when the senior official has a larger external (exogenous) threat, an inaccurate performance signal, and a shorter time horizon, the value of connections would outweigh the value of performance.

To support the propositions derived from the model, we used a dataset from 1978-2012 that had all of China’s provincial (junior) officials as well as their connection status, performance, and promotion status. The dataset also included other characteristics that we used for controls as well as information on the senior officials. Using the dataset and various econometric strategies, we found that most of our hypotheses were supported. First, we found that connections (sons/son-in-laws) seemed to be positively correlated with the probability of promotion. However, performance (GDP growth rate of the junior official in his province) does not seem to impact the probability of promotion.  Additionally, we found strong evidence that as the senior official becomes younger (and has a longer time horizon) or as the senior official receives an inaccurate measure of ability (high variance in performance) of the junior official, the value of connections for the junior official increases.

This summer I worked with Professor Rebelein in the economics department on his project called “Assessing the Distributional Effects of Alternative Health Insurance Programs”, continuing the work we started this past academic year. The goal of this research is to create a mathematical model of health care choices so that the potential welfare impacts of different health care policies can be analyzed, especially how welfare varies for different income groups. Given the upcoming election, health care policy issues are at the forefront of public consciousness, so I was very excited to be working on this project.

The first thing we did was find income and medical expenditure distributions from Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data to get parameters for the mathematical model. This image shows our beta distribution fitted to the actual distribution of income taken from the data.

Most of the summer was spent reviewing the current literature on health care simulation models. Many other researchers, most notably Jonathan Gruber from MIT, and organizations like the Urban Institute have created their own models of health care and insurance demand, and I spent a lot of time looking at how these models worked and the math behind them. Professor Rebelein wanted to have health status, which is how healthy someone is, included as a factor into consumers’ decision making. Because none of the major models have included health status as a factor, I also spent time reading about utility models that include health status. After reviewing the current research we were able to finalize a model of consumer utility incorporating health state.

I spent the rest of the time writing a function in the R programming language that would solve our model for different parameters like income and insurance premiums. It was a challenge because the model has to predict consumers’ insurance and health care spending choices for a number of different scenarios. Each case has to be written separately into the function. The model is a two period model. Given a certain income in each time period, consumers must choose how much to save or borrow and whether or not to buy health insurance given their expected well being. In the second time period people must choose whether or not to pay their medical bills, which are determined by their health state, based on whether they can afford them or whether they will be better off staying sick but having more money. This image shows what the output of this function looks like in an Excel format.

I’m very thankful for the opportunity to do summer research through the Ford program, and I’ve learned a lot through the process.