Explaining Railway Reform in China ─ A Train of Property Rights Re-arrangements

Western literature always prescribes that the best model for railway reform is privatization. China’s leadership has also enunciated the state’s determination to re-arrange property rights and rejuvenate corporate governance. But is China’s railway reform really a story of convergence? Will the property rights of railway assets be clearly demarcated, if not privatized, eventually? To answer the questions precisely, this book bridges the socialist reform and transport policy literature, and studies the empirical changes of the property rights arrangements in China’s railway system. Refuting the convergence theory, this book concludes that the cyclical reform policies of decentralization and re-centralization were actually an exploratory and interactive mechanism of "assets discovery" and "assets recovery."