The first is the _share of plain (%)_ in the county’s total land areas where flat land is defined as land with less than 15 degrees of incline. This captures the amount of land that can be used as science/industrial parks or for agriculture production; it also captures the amount of land that is suitable for development. The second is The distance to key FDI source – Taiwan – as proxied by the _distance to Xiamen_ , the city right across the Taiwan Strait from Taiwan. The distance is calculated based on the Global Position System (GPS) position of the center of each county to the center of Xiamen City. This variable may also capture the access to the commercial hubs of Fujian province, and investment from Taiwan, as well as other potential benefits such as better access to business personnel and technology.

Table 2 provides summary statistics of the variables used in our analysis. It shows that there are huge variations in the annual growth rates across counties. During the whole study period of 1952-1998, the annual real growth rate ranged from -0.03% to 7.94%, with a mean of 2.91% and a standard deviation of 1.47%; and during the post-reform period of 1978-98, the annual growth rate ranged from 1.47% to 22.49%, with a mean of 7.11% and a standard deviation of 3.89%. Similarly, the Famine Control variable we created in formula (24) also shows large variations across counties, with a mean of 0.78 and a standard deviation of 0.14. That is, during the famine period of 1959-1961, the drop in live births averaged to an astounding 22%. Similarly, the death rates during the Great Chinese Famine ranged from 5.8‰ to 33.8‰ with a mean death rate of 13.4‰ and a standard deviation of 5.8‰.

# **4.3 Factions, Local Accountability and Annual Growth**

We first compare the annual growth rates of real agriculture and industrial output per capita (also referred to as Gross Value of Output per Capita, or GVO per capita, henceforth) in counties led by YRD-affiliated cadres and those led by FA3-affiliated cadres. We also compare the annual growth rates in counties with local guerrilla presence prior to 1948 and those without guerrilla presence. We use the GDP deflator to compute the real growth rates. We have comprehensive data for all counties covered by our study from 1952 to 1998. To take into account important structural changes after the reform starting in 1978, we present the above comparisons both for the whole study period of 1952-1998 and only the post-reform period of 1978-1998.

Figure 2 plots the estimated kernel density distributions of the annual growth rates of real agriculture and industrial real output per capita by factions (FA3 vs. YRD, the top panel) or by local accountability as proxied by guerrilla presence (GuerrillaYes vs. GuerrillaNo, the bottom panel). The growth rates for the whole period of 1952-1998 were plotted in the left panel and those for the post-reform period of 1978-1998 were plotted in the right panel. The two graphs in the top panel show that the distribution of the growth rates among counties led by YRD-affiliated cadres is more heavily weighted on higher values than those in the counties led by FA3-affiliated controlling the length of seashore within the county. Again, it is never significant; thus we exclude it.

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