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Despite being “part of China,” Hong Kong has a distinct legal and political system that’s supposed to separate it from the repressiveness of the mainland. While Hong Kong’s distinctiveness has been eroded since the “handover” to the People’s Republic in 1997, events of the past few weeks demonstrate the continued significance of the island’s historical liberties and tradition of accountable government.

Earlier this year, the Beijing-controlled local government proposed allowing the People’s Republic to extradite people from Hong Kong to China for imprisonment and torture. Fearful citizens responded to the proposed Hong Kong law with mass protests. As much as a quarter of the total resident population participated.

As of this writing, Hong Kong’s government has “indefinitely suspended” the proposed legislation. At least for now, the government is still accountable to the desires of the people it is supposed to serve—unlike the mainland. (Still, the existing legal regime could not prevent the Chinese government from kidnapping booksellers and other “dangerous” characters without warrants.)

All of this has economic implications. The average Hong Kong resident spends about $18,000 (U.S.) each year on consumer goods and services. In Beijing and Shanghai—mainland China’s richest cities—consumption per person averages just $6,000 each year.

New research by Hanming Fang of the University of Pennsylvania, Linke Hou of Shandong University, Mingxing Liu and Pengfei Zhang of Peking University, and Lixin Colin Xu of the World Bank suggests at least some of that gap can be attributed to the superiority of Hong Kong’s political institutions.

Their paper compares different counties within mainland China’s Fujian province from 1952 through 1998. (County boundaries changed after 1998.) Despite being part of the same authoritarian regime, some county governments were far more accountable to the people than others. People who lived in those counties were more likely to get a good education and were more likely to survive the 1958-1962 famine than those who lived in other parts of Fujian.

Fujian was among the last areas of the mainland to fall to the Communists during China’s civil war. Two separate army groups invaded the province, supported by local guerrilla forces. After the war was over, these two groups (the Third Field Army and the Yangtze River Detachment) divvied up administrative responsibilities. Veterans of the Third Field Army came to dominate the major cities and the standing committee of the provincial Communist Party Standing Committee, while veterans of the Yangtze River Detachment ended up in charge of Fujian’s other counties.

Fang and his co-authors argue that this political environment created distinct incentives for county administrators depending on their background. Veterans of the Third Field Army focused on being seen to implement the ideological directives coming down from the provincial elites, since they ultimately owed their livelihood to that patronage network.

By contrast, county administrators in the rest of Fujian, who lacked the support of the provincial standing committee because they were veterans of the out-of-favor Yangtze River Detachment, were forced to develop a different political base by trying to improve the lives of their residents. They were particularly sensitive to local concerns in counties populated with substantial numbers of former guerrillas.

The different incentives produced strikingly different results. In the late 1950s, Mao and his colleagues believed collectivized farming would increase agricultural productivity so much that it would allow them to shift hundreds of millions of peasants into heavy industry. Fewer farmers would produce more food that could be sold for export by the government to pay for technology and materials. Collectivization would supposedly enable a “Great Leap Forward” in infrastructure and manufacturing, rapidly transforming China from a poor country of peasants into a global power.

Instead, agricultural output collapsed and tens of millions of Chinese starved to death. Malnutrition also prevented tens of millions of births. (The definitive account is Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1963, by Yang Jisheng. It is not a pleasant read.)

Collectivization discouraged farmers from working the land efficiently, while the massive reduction in the peasant labor force made it impossible to plant and harvest enough food to sustain the population. Farm implements were melted down to provide raw materials for factories. Most layers of the Chinese government refused to acknowledge what was happening and actively made things worse. Instead of adjusting production targets, officials accused starving peasants of “hoarding” and “requisitioned” even more food to sell abroad or hold in storage.

One common way to measure the severity of the famine is to compare the number of living Chinese adults in a given year based on when they were born. Fang and his colleagues use the 1990 population census, which they estimate is relatively free of political bias, and compare the number of living Chinese born in 1954-1957 to the number born in 1959-1961. Had there been no famine, those cohorts would have been about the same size in 1990.

However, the famine cohort was 31% smaller than the prefamine cohort in the Fujian counties run by veterans of the Third Field Army. Counties that were administered by veterans of the Yangtze River Detachment and had substantial populations of former guerrillas did comparatively better: Their famine cohort was “only” 16% smaller than their pre-famine cohort.

Fang and his colleagues find that living in a relatively accountable county reduced the likelihood of “experiencing extreme famine severity” by about half. The numbers don’t look different after controlling for geography or location within the province.

Differences among Fujian counties persisted long after the famine had ended. People who lived in relatively accountable counties received about 40% more years of schooling than those who lived in places where administrators were mostly concerned with appeasing their party bosses in the provincial standing committee. The emphasis on education helps explain why gross domestic product rose so much faster (about 3.2 percentage points each year) in the accountable counties after 1978 than in the unaccountable ones. State-owned enterprises also had much smaller footprints in the counties with substantial populations of former guerrillas run by veterans of the Yangtze River Detachment.

Hong Kong’s government is far more accountable than any government in mainland China, which likely explains its higher prosperity and dynamism. The latest research suggests China would benefit from becoming more like Hong Kong, rather than from making Hong Kong more like the mainland.

Write to Matthew C. Klein at matthew.klein@barrons.com