Yue Hou and Rory Truex
This paper presents the first analysis of ethnic discrimination in sentencing patterns in the People’s Republic of China, focusing on drug cases in Yunnan province. We posit the “problem minority” hypothesis, which holds that discrimination in an authoritarian system emerges when an ethnic group becomes associated with behavior that generates social instability. On average, minority defendants in Yunnan receive sentences that are about 1.4 to 7.5 months longer than Han defendants that have committed similar drug crimes. Further analysis of data from all provinces reveals that this bias is largest for groups heavily involved in the drug trade, and in provinces with significant minority populations and drugs.
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About the Speaker
Yue Hou, Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor, Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania
Yue Hou’s substantive research interests include authoritarian institutions, business-state relations, the political economy of development, and ethnic politics, with a regional focus on China.
Her book “The Private Sector in Public Office: Selective Property Rights in China” (October 2019, Cambridge University Press) examines strategies Chinese private entrepreneurs use to protect property from expropriation.
In 2015–16, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Penn's Center for the Study of Contemporary China. I received my PhD in Political Science from MIT and my BA in Economics and Mathematics from Grinnell College.
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