million (Coale, 1981) to 45 million (Dikotter, 2010) individuals, mostly rural residents, died or failed to be born in the three year period.

We examine two measures of famine severity at the county level. The first measure follows Meng, Qian and Yared (2015) and proxies the famine severity as proxied by the birth cohort size of survivors observed in 1990 census. The logic for this measure, as Meng, Qian and Yared (2015) argued, is that “famine increases infant and early childhood mortality rates and lowers fertility rates such that a more severe famine results in smaller cohort sizes for those born shortly before or during the famine.” Specifically, we define our variable “ _famine control_ ,” the opposite of “famine severity,” in a county 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: The _higher_ the measure, the _less severe_ the famine was in county _C_ . Meng, Qian and Yared (2015) point out that birth cohort size measure of famine severity is not vulnerable to the misreporting because it is less influenced by the government’s desire to understate famine severity. However, it potentially suffers from the measurement error caused by differential death rates after the famine period across counties.

The second measure is the newly compiled county-level death rates, number of deaths per thousand (see Section 4).

Figure 3 plots the kernel density estimation of the distribution of the famine control proxied by birth cohorts (top panel) and death rates (bottom panel) among counties with FA3- and YRD-affiliated cadres (left), and counties with or without guerilla presence (right). The top panel of Figure 3 demonstrates that counties led by FA3-affiliated cadres had more severe famine as measured by birth cohort size than counties led by YRD-affiliated cadres; and it also shows that counties with guerrilla presence had lower famine severity. The bottom panel of Figure 3 shows that the death rates during the Great Chinese Famine is lower in counties led by YRD-affiliated cadres than in counties led by FA3-affiliated cadres; and similarly, they are lower in counties with guerrilla presence than those without.

In Table 4, we compare the two famine severity measures, famine control and death rates in 1959-1961, between the counties led by FA3- and YRD-affiliated counties, and the counties with and without guerrilla presence (Panel A), as well as the interaction effects between FA3 v.s YRD factions and guerrilla presence on famine severity (Panel B). In the left side of Panel A, we find that YRD counties had significantly higher level of famine control by 0.11 (or 0.8 SDs), a large effect. We also find that counties led by YRD-affiliated cadres had a significantly lower death rate by 7.6 per thousand people, or 1.3 SDs, than counties led by FA3-affiliated cadres. In the right side of Panel A, we find that the counties with guerilla presence as of May 1948 also had a higher levels of famine control measure than counties without guerrilla presence, though the difference is not statistically significant. The death rates in counties with guerrillas is significantly lower by 2.65 per thousand people, or 0.46 22