China's high-speed railway network is one of the largest infrastructure programs in human history. Despite global media coverage, we know very little about the political process that led the government to invest in the railway program and the reasons for the striking regional and temporal variation in such investments. In Localized Bargaining, Xiao Ma offers a novel theory of intergovernmental bargaining that explains the unfolding of China's unprecedented high-speed railway program. Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews, original data sets, and surveys with local officials, Ma details how the bottom-up bargaining efforts by territorial authorities—whom the central bureaucracies rely on to implement various infrastructure projects—shaped the allocation of investment in the railway system. Demonstrating how localities of different types invoke institutional and extra-institutional sources of bargaining power in their competition for railway stations, Ma sheds new light on how the nation's massive bureaucracy actually functions
Purchase: Press, Amazon, Barnes&Noble
Media Coverage: Foreign Policy, Noema Magazine, Sixth Tone, Phenomenal World, New Security Beat, Sinocism, Pekingnology, U.S.-China Perception Monitor, The Print, Courrier Japon, 一席
Podcast: Pekingology
Book Reviews: Asian Review of Political Economy, China Journal, China Perspectives, China Review, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of East Asian Studies, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Governance, Perspectives on Politics
“Drawing on interviews and a variety of new data sources, Localized Bargaining tells a compelling tale of the politics that drives the allocation of infrastructure in the absence of democracy—those who lobby for projects, it shows, are not citizens, but intermediary recipients such as local governments and functional departments. This is an indispensable book for understanding how bureaucratic bargaining and ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ works in China’s infrastructure-fueled development”
“This empirically rich book uncovers how the non-monolithic political system in China creates opportunities for local authorities to participate in the policy making of the central authority. Xiao Ma convincingly demonstrates that Chinese local governments are able to seek policy benefits because of the fragmented authorities of the decision-making bureaucracy. This insightful book makes an important contribution to understanding distributive politics in authoritarian states”
“Seen from the outside, China’s high-speed rail network epitomizes the centralized power of the party-state. Ma’s pathbreaking study, which takes us inside the politics of railway development, reveals a far more complex picture. With rich quantitative and qualitative evidence, Ma traces the interplay of bottom-up and top-down agency and formal and informal rules, reshaping our understanding of ‘who gets what, when, and how.’”
“Xiao Ma significantly advances our understanding of bureaucracy. His investigation of the massive infrastructure investment in the Chinese high-speed rail system reveals not only the role of bureaucracy in maintaining authoritarian rule but also the mechanisms by which it does so. His rich account reveals that what seems to be top-down authority is actually a complex of bargains in which local actors transform the intentions of the centralized state: the ‘cardinals,’ those with significant institutional power in local territorial politics, try to impose their agenda while the ‘clerics,’ those with less institutional power, try to get their voices heard by mobilizing protests. This extraordinary in-depth study represents a new account of how to think about bureaucracy not only in China and not only in the developing world—but wherever major infrastructure is at issue.”
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