Dissertation
"Go West, Young Han: Innovative State-building through Internal Migration"
How do low-income states overcome the challenges of state-building in restive borders? I contend that they may do so by making institutional innovations to existing state-building strategies, such as delegating multiple complementary functions to the same agency instead of to multiple specialized agencies. I show that China was able to stabilize its historically restive border province, Xinjiang, during the Maoist period (1949-76) using an innovative scheme of Han Chinese migration, where the migrants performed both pillar functions of targeted counterinsurgency–-the military operations and public goods provision to the noncombatants-–through militia operations and land reclamation. The decline of the strategy after the 1978 market reform has permitted the re-emergence and persistence of Muslim rebellion. Evidence comes from archival data in 550 hitherto untapped historical gazetteers and my 12-month-long ethnographic fieldwork, which are analyzed through correlational, quasi-experimental, and process-tracing research designs. The project theorizes how financially constrained states may still consolidate power in challenging territories and empirically uncovers a counterintuitive, violence-reducing effect of internal migration. It also provides an alternative view of China's current policies in Xinjiang, which considers them an aberration from the communist period due to changes in the conditions for using an innovative state-building strategy.
How do low-income states overcome the challenges of state-building in restive borders? I contend that they may do so by making institutional innovations to existing state-building strategies, such as delegating multiple complementary functions to the same agency instead of to multiple specialized agencies. I show that China was able to stabilize its historically restive border province, Xinjiang, during the Maoist period (1949-76) using an innovative scheme of Han Chinese migration, where the migrants performed both pillar functions of targeted counterinsurgency–-the military operations and public goods provision to the noncombatants-–through militia operations and land reclamation. The decline of the strategy after the 1978 market reform has permitted the re-emergence and persistence of Muslim rebellion. Evidence comes from archival data in 550 hitherto untapped historical gazetteers and my 12-month-long ethnographic fieldwork, which are analyzed through correlational, quasi-experimental, and process-tracing research designs. The project theorizes how financially constrained states may still consolidate power in challenging territories and empirically uncovers a counterintuitive, violence-reducing effect of internal migration. It also provides an alternative view of China's current policies in Xinjiang, which considers them an aberration from the communist period due to changes in the conditions for using an innovative state-building strategy.
