Can ideas mobilize people into collective action? Ying Bai of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his co-authors investigate this question by analyzing how exposure to Communist ideology shaped an individual’s decision to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during its formative stage. Their study focuses on cadets at the Whampoa Military Academy, who played crucial roles in China’s major 20th-century conflicts. Their identification strategy leverages the locality-time-content variation in the circulation of the New Youth magazine—the primary platform promoting Communism following the Treaty of Versailles in 1919—and the variation in an individual’s location over time. Comparing Whampoa cadets living in a locality with access to post-1919 New Youth against those who lived in the same locality but missed this channel, they find that the former were significantly more likely to join the CCP, and that this party choice was consequential in subsequent conflicts. They also find that family background did not predict party choice, but that social networks complemented ideology exposure. In this Quantitative History Webinar, Ying Bai will present their analyses of other periodicals and organizations that support post-1919 New Youth’s role as a proxy for Communism penetration in a locality.

Ying's co-authors: Ruixue Jia (UC San Diego) and Runnan Wang (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Discussant: Debin Ma (Oxford)