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Political Governance and Urban System

With a self-constructed, unique historical data set for 240 counties that spans over centuries, this paper uses the ‘quasi-natural experiment’ of capital relocation in 1421, during China’s Ming Dynasty, as an exogenous shock to study the relationship between political governance and urban systems. We found that after the Chinese Empire’s capital was relocated from Nanjing to Beijing, the effects of the distance to Beijing on county-level population turns from positive to negative persistently till modern China. We also provide evidence to show that the impact of the capital relocation on population distribution is through three major channels of political governance, such as delivery, material support and national security. The causal relationship from capital relocation to population distribution is robust based on evidences from a variety of identification strategies, and robustness checks.