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How did the Chinese state establish its authority following the 1949 revolution? In this talk, Dr. Javed examines the Chinese Communist Party’s mass mobilization of violence during its land reform campaign in the early 1950s, one of the most violent and successful state-building efforts in history. Using an array of novel archival, documentary, and quantitative historical data, he will illustrate that China’s land reform campaign was not just about economic redistribution but rather part of a larger, brutally violent state-building effort to delegitimize the new party-state’s internal rivals and establish its normative authority.

Jeffrey Javed is a former postdoctoral fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies and the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. He currently works in the tech industry (former Senior Staff Researcher at Shopify and Staff Researcher at Meta), where he researches data privacy and the benefits and risks of AI-powered products. He received his PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard in 2017.