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
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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, Pacific Affairs, Perspectives on Politics
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