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Is Lying Contagious? Spatial Diffusion of High-Yield 'Satellites' during China’s Great Leap Forward

Situated in China’s Great Leap Forward (GLF) campaign in 1958, this study examines the spatial diffusion of “launching high-yield satellites” – exaggerating grain yields, which contributed to the 1959-1961 GLF famine that claimed millions of human lives. We conceptualize exaggerating grain yields as a political innovation adopted by local cadres to endorse the GLF and signal political loyalty to their superiors. Drawing on the social diffusion literature, we focus on two contextual factors, geographic proximity and structural equivalence in the form of political proximity. We geocoded county-level event history data from historical newspaper archives. Results from exploratory spatial data analyses show strong spatial-temporal correlations of exaggerating grain yields across the country that could not be attributed to two independent processes in space and time. The spatial-temporal correlation peaked at relatively small scales–roughly 40 kilometers in terms of geographic radius and two days in terms of time window. Results from event history models indicate both geographic proximity and political proximity at work, although the main effect of the latter was slightly stronger than that of the former. More importantly, the diffusion process was primarily driven by the interaction between geographic proximity and political proximity.