In nondemocratic environments, favoritism is a crucial element to understand (mis)allocation of public resources. This paper studies how government officials direct public resources towards their hometowns of patrilineal origin in authoritarian Vietnam. We manually collect an exhaustive panel dataset of political promotions of officials from 2000 to 2010, and estimate their impact on public infrastructure in their rural hometowns. We obtain three main results. First, promotions of officials

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... ove a wide range of infrastructure in their hometowns, including roads, markets, schools, radio station, clean water and irrigation. Favoritism is pervasive across different ranks of officials, even among those without budget authority, suggesting informal channels of influence. Second, contrary to pork barrel politics in democratic parliaments, elected legislators have no power to exercise favoritism. Third, only home communes receive favors while larger and more politically important home districts do not. This suggests that favoritism is likely motivated by officials' social preferences for their hometowns rather than by political consideration.