Looks at the rollout 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 rich description and a novel theory of intergovernmental bargaining that explains the unfolding of the railway. Drawing on in-depth interviews, original data sets, and surveys with local officials, Ma shows that 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.
