Xiao Ma Book order

The book presents a novel theory of intergovernmental bargaining through the lens of China's high-speed railway development. It highlights how territorial authorities engage in bottom-up bargaining, influencing investment allocation in the railway system. By examining the competition among localities for railway stations, it reveals the use of both institutional and extra-institutional bargaining power. This analysis offers valuable insights into the functioning of China's vast economy and the role of local governance in infrastructure projects.

Looks at the rollout of one of the largest infrastructure programs in human history to show how local governments play a complex role.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 thenation's massive bureaucracy actually functions.