The Social Consequence of Bureaucratic Oversight: Evidence From the Great Chinese Famine

ABSTRACT Existing literature shows that increasing political oversight of bureaucrats can improve the quality of government service delivery. Yet when the state is mainly concerned with maximizing revenue extraction from society, increasing bureaucratic oversight may result in social loss. I illustrate this argument with evidence from the Great Chinese Famine, drawing on panel data covering over 2000 counties. I show that weather shocks, which increased central‐local information asymmetry on local grain production, reduced the central state's capability to effectively monitor local bureaucrats' effort in grain extraction. This informational barrier to oversight led to greater local autonomy in setting grain extraction quotas. During the famine, this autonomy allowed county officials to relax the execution of excessive grain extraction targets from above, thereby reducing the mortality costs of the state's grain extraction policy. This finding highlights the perils of bureaucratic control in authoritarian states.