Securing the Countryside: Varieties of Rural State Building in China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and South Korea during the Cold War

Kevin Luo, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Why do developmentalist-minded states, similarly invested in projects of state-led rural transformations, produce varying levels of domination over rural society? In this paper, I compare the land redistribution and rural reform campaigns of four Asian states - China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and South Korea - in the early years of the Cold War to explain how pathways toward rural state building diverged under reformist authoritarian regimes. I highlight two key Cold War era factors that conditioned these divergent pathways, and left long-term imprints on political control over rural societies: a) mobilizational models for rural pacification and b) initial levels of state infrastructural reach. I further contend that initial endowments in the spatial dimension of infrastructural power do not automatically generate incentives for the state to invest in the ‘weight’ of infrastructural power (Soifer 2008) in the countryside. Instead, ideological commitments for rural pacification conjointly shape the ability for states to engage in transformative processes of rural state building.

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 Presented in Session 49. Comparative and Historical State Formation