Localized Bargaining The Political Economy of China's High-Speed Railway Program

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Synopsis

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 authoritieswhom the central bureaucracies rely on to implement various infrastructure projectsshaped 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.

Book details

Author:
Xiao Ma
ISBN:
9780197638934
Related ISBNs:
9780197648223, 9780197638910, 9780197638927
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Pages:
248
Reading age:
Not specified
Includes images:
Yes
Date of addition:
2022-12-21
Usage restrictions:
Copyright
Copyright date:
2015
Copyright by:
Oxford University Press 
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Categories:
Nonfiction, Politics and Government, Social Studies