Economies in Fujian,” which covers the period from 1952 to 1998 for all 59 counties in Fujian. We use this data set to construct the average annual real growth rate of gross value of output for agriculture and industries, separately for 1952-1998 (the whole sample period) and for 1978-1998 (the post-reform period).

For outcome measures related to the Great China Famine (1959-1961), we construct two measures. The first measure, which we refer to as _famine control,_ following Meng, Qian and Yared (2015), is defined as the ratio of the number of surviving births (per year) in the county during the period 1959-1961 relative to the number of surviving births (per year) in the same county during the period 1954-1957, as observed in the 1% sample of the 1990 China Population Census [see formula (24)]. The higher this ratio, the more successful the county was at controlling the famine.

We also examine the county-level data rates (deaths per thousand) during the Great China Famine. The county-level number of deaths are mainly collected from the population statistical books published by the provincial Statistics Bureaus in the 1980s.10

**Scope of Study.** Our analysis is restricted to the 59 _counties_ or _county-level cities_ in Fujian province. In the administrative system in China, there are also _prefecture_ level cities (such as Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Zhangzhou). Prefecture-level cities are often treated differently in the statistical yearbooks, with many of the key economic indicators only collected at the prefecture level (instead of the district level within the prefecture, which would be more comparable to counties or county-level cities).

We also restrict our analysis up to 1998 when the Chinese government initiated extensive redrawing of the county boundaries, especially because the housing reform drastically blurred the rural-urban boundaries.

# **4.2 Descriptive Statistics**

Among the 59 counties (shorthand for counties, or county-level cities) in our study, 11 counties were led by cadres affiliated with the FA3, among which 3 had local guerrilla presence; 48 counties were led by cadres affiliated with YRD, among which 22 had local guerrilla presence. In this subsection, we provide some descriptive statistics.

To control for the differences in the _initial conditions_ across counties, we construct the following variables: (1) _The log of the average agricultural and industrial output per capita_ in 1952 (respectively, in 1978), denoted by Ln_GVOPC52 (respectively, Ln_GVOPC78); and (2) _The log of the total population_ in 1952 (respectively, in 1978), denoted by Ln_Pop52 (respectively, Ln_Pop78).

We construct two variables to measure the county’s geography that may be relevant to economic performance:11

> 10The data is compiled by Kasahara and Li (2018), where they provide the details about the data construction and cross-validation with the other provincial level death stastistics.We are grateful to Bingjing Li for generously sharing the data with us.

> 11We have also tried the distance to Fuzhou – the provincial capital – but it is never statistically significant, and we thus opted not to include it to avoid multicollinearity in light of the few observations that we have. Since Fujian is a coastal province, we have also tried

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