Linchuan Zhang (张林川) – Home

Summary: My dissertation, Divided Allegiance: Loyalty and Disloyalty among Authoritarian Military Elites in Civil War, asks two related questions: How do authoritarian rulers exert political control over the military, and why do individual military elites make divergent choices between loyalty and disloyalty during civil war and regime crises? Empirically, I study the Kuomintang (KMT) military in Republican-era China from 1926 to 1950. I have constructed an original dataset of more than 1,000 high-ranking KMT officers that traces their biographical backgrounds, military careers, and eventual choices of allegiance. I combine these individual-level data with additional original data on KMT combat units and key battles. The chapters provide detailed analyses of how KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek made strategic choices to control the military and the channels that shaped officers’ political choices about which party to side with during the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (1946-1950).

Job Market Paper

Summary: Authoritarian rulers rely on their military for survival, especially when confronting major insurgencies. But military officers may choose not to fight on behalf of the regime. To understand these choices, I introduce a perspective that emphasizes officers’ positions within the military and their relationship to the ruler. I theorize that assigning officers to key command positions promotes loyalty because these positions provide them with independent coercive resources, which constitute a substantive benefit for military elites. This effect of position is larger for outsiders, who are less intrinsically tied to the fate of the ruler than insiders—officers within the ruler’s inner circle. Yet empowering outsiders can be a double-edged sword: the same coercive resources that induce compliance can cause greater harm to the regime when outsiders become disloyal and defect rather than desert. Empirically, I analyze Kuomintang (KMT) officers during the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (1946–1950) using an original dataset of high-ranking KMT officers and find evidence consistent with these theoretical propositions. [Paper available upon request]

Revise and Resubmit (R&R)

Summary: Existing studies of bureaucratic information flow focus mainly on why and how leaders gather information from subordinates. This project examines the reverse direction: how leaders’ responses to the information they receive shape subordinates’ subsequent reporting behavior. Using a novel dataset of more than 3,700 internal reports and 590 leaders’ directives from a local government in China over nine years, we find that leaders receive more reports from subordinate agencies they address directly or indirectly in previous directives, and that reports from these agencies account for a higher share of all reports received by leaders. We also distinguish the effects of receiving vague directives from those of receiving clear directives. Qualitative evidence further suggests that leaders’ feedback on reported information may trigger signal-driven reporting cycles, making submitted information more likely to mirror leaders’ attention than to reflect administrative realities in a balanced manner. The project highlights the two-way nature of bureaucratic information exchange and shows how communication between Chinese government leaders and grassroots officials evolves over time. [Paper available upon request]

Summary: At the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, incumbent military officers faced a critical choice of whether to leave the country or remain under the new regime. This project examines how family circumstances shaped these decisions, using an original dataset of all 138 South Vietnamese general-rank officers as of April 1975 and a comprehensive collection of generals’ memoirs and biographies. We find that officers with more children were less likely to leave Vietnam. This relationship is driven particularly by the number of sons, while the number of daughters has no statistically significant effect. The project highlights the role of family considerations, influenced by both rational calculations and context-specific social norms, in the political decision-making of military elites and contributes to the study of conflict-related migration. [Paper available upon request]