📄 Ongoing Projects

• The Art of Purging: Intra-rebellion Purge and Insurgent Cohesion (Co-author: Xingchen Lan)
  • Abstract: Rebel leaders often purge military leaders even when confronting a formidable regime. Why do rebels purge? Who is more likely to be purged? Can purging promote insurgency survival? The article provides a fine-grained micro-level analysis of the fratricidal puzzle, arguing that while the purge may undermine military effectiveness in the short term, it could deter fragmentation and facilitate power-sharing with loyalists, forging a more ideological-cohesive insurgent group in the long run. We illustrate this transforming leap in the context of the incipient stage of the Chinese Communist Revolution (1927--1936), leveraging original archival data on military personnel appointments, biographies, and battlefield performance during the Red Army's formative years. The study finds that party leaders strategically purge officers from competing factions and promote allies, consolidating their grip on the military apparatus. Triple-difference analysis reveals that soldiers with kinship ties to the purged officers exhibit a decreased willingness to fight until death, whereas those linked to promoted officers who replaced the purged are more committed to the cause. These findings enhance our understanding of the insurgent purges in civil wars, and the power-shaping process within rebellion organizations, offering insights into the broader dynamics of insurgency survival and coherence.