For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Political Legacy of China’s Cultural Revolution

Does the use of repression undermine authoritarian rulers’ legitimacy? I argue that state repression can make individuals internalize a strategy (trust or distrust) as a heuristic in situations where information acquisition is either costly or imperfect, so repression has a long-lasting negative effect on people’s trust of authoritarian rulers. I test this proposition by studying one of the most tragic episodes of authoritarian repression in the modern era–state terror during China’s Cultural Revolution. I show that individuals who were exposed to more state-sponsored violence in the late 1960s are less trusting of their political leaders at all levels today. Leveraging a variety of identification strategies, including an instrumental variable approach, I am able to make a stronger causal claim. I also explicitly test the norm-based mechanism and rule out an institutional mechanism. My findings contribute to our understanding of how repression affects the long-term legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. ∗Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University ([email protected]). I want to thank Andy Walder for sharing his dataset on Cultural Revolution violence and James Kung and Shuo Chen for sharing their dataset on the Great Famine. Iza Ding, Xiaobo Lü, Jean Oi, Liz Perry, Andy Walder, Yiqing Xu, Fei Yan, and Boliang Zhu have provided helpful comments. All errors remain my own.