State Building and Civil Servant Fever in Contemporary China
This paper identifies a new consequence of state power expansion—attracting talent from society to the regime. We examine the impacts of China’s recent value-added tax (VAT) reform—an effort of state building—on citizens’ preferences for state employment through participating in the National Civil Servant Exam (NCSE). Using a novel dataset, we show that the VAT reform attracted more and higher-quality talent to tax-related state agencies.