However, another issue really is crucial.We don't think the revision has successfully addressed one central point in myprevious letter. While the paper now seems to two of our three expert reviewersto make a significant contribution to understanding of Chinese political history, it does not clearly establish what is new and important here for comparative politics scholars and for political science readers more generally. Unless it can do so, the paper belongs in a good China-focused journal rather than in the APSR.
坦率的说，为什么针对中国的研究能够为增加对政治学的理解？这样的问题非常难回答。困难在于这是一个没有边界的问题：写少了可能没法让审稿人满意，但是写多了又犯了学术写作中over claim的大忌。这类问题也不像针对计量分析部分的挑战，只要掌握的数据和计量工具够多够猛，基本上我们都能找到相关实证对策；更要命的是，导师和我都是经济学背景，并不十分拿得准政治学中那些重要的概念，我们非常担心会犯一些常识性错误而被一票否决。我们用了整整两个多月的时间阅读文献，反复讨论饭否斟酌反复修改。在10月18号完成了整个修改及回应工作。下面两段是针对文章内容的修改。对我来说，这两段话是这篇文章付出时间最多、最难写当然也是附加值最高的内容：
Even though this study focused on one historical period in only one country, the results contribute something of general importance to the understanding of politics. Relative to the study of democracies since the seminal work by Downs (1957), little progress has been made toward understanding the institutional structure and dynamics of non-democracies regimes (Debs 2010; Gandhi and Przeworski 2007), despite the fact that non-democracies still rule almost half of the world’s population (Egorov and Sonin n.d.). By showing that at least part of the radicalism practiced during the Great Leap can be accounted for by officials’self-interested attempts atcareer advancement, our empirical discovery substantially moderates the assumption that ideology is the main source of radicalism.Our study of the possible consequences of the incentive properties embedded in the nomenklatura thus makes a fresh contribution toward understanding the institutional dynamics of China and the rational foundations ofthe human misery these regimes promote.
In addition, our study should also interest those concerned with comparing the economic efficiency between non-democracy with democracy (e.g., Barro 1996; Becker 1983; Olson 1982; Peltzman1976; Stigler 1971; Wintrobe 1990, 1998a, 1998b). Our evidence, based on the Great Leap Famine, suggests that...
以下是针对该审稿意见的回应：
Thank you for your letter of August 21, which offers us another valuable opportunity to revise and resubmit thecaptioned paper to APSR. In what follows we outline briefly the changes that wehave made in this revision (respectively in the abstract, pretty much theentire introduction and conclusion, and pp. 13, 17, and 23-24).
Introduction
According to your advice, we need to establish for our paper “what is new and important for comparative politics scholars and for political science readers more generally…. even though we are focusing on one historical period in one country”. On that basis you provide an example of how we might go about reorganizing our introduction—an advice to which we decided to adhere in our revision. So here is how our new introduction looks like.
We begin by introducing the Great Leap Famine, followed by a very brief discussion of what may have caused the excess mortality rate. Premised on an earlier finding that excess deaths and grain procurements are positively correlated, we then lay outthe competing hypothesis that “political radicalism” (of which excessive grain procurement is a major proxy) could be the result of career incentives rather than ideology or personal idiosyncrasies—the latter often assumed to be the conventional source of radicalism. We further explain how career incentives could possibly account for political radicalism by appealing to the vast differences that existed in political power and status between the two classes (or ranks) of membership in the Central Committee. The succeeding paragraph then summarizes our findings.
At this point we put in two new paragraphs to establish the general importance of our paper for political science. First, the career incentives argument is empirically borneout by the counter-intuitive finding that radicalism declined once bureaucrats reached the highest levels of their career ladders, and that there were significant “entry barriers” to the Politburo. Based on these findings, we establish a case for the general importance of our one country-one period study by showing that both using and misusing career incentives under essentially the same economic and political conditions (i.e., a decentralized economy and centralized personnel control), but with radically different outcomes. By showing that career incentives matter, our study substantially moderates the received wisdom that ideology is the main source of radicalism, and makes a fresh contribution towards understanding the institutional dynamics and the rationality of the economic behavior to which they give rise.
接下来APSR主编更换，新的主编是斯坦福大学政治系大名鼎鼎的James Fearon教授。他在11月份的邮件中对我们以上修改表示满意，同时也提出了一些小问题。在这些问题都被很快妥善解决之后，这篇论文在12月份就被正式接受并作为封面第二篇论文发表在2011年第一期上。这是我的硕士论文，也是第一篇英文论文，能够发表在American Political Science Review上，还是相当高兴的。
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