Localized Bargaining

Abstract 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. Territorial authorities and their leaders engage in localized bargaining to navigate and forge consensus among the fragmented entities that comprise the central bureaucracy; those who do so effectively gain an advantage for their localities. The book demonstrates in detail how localities of different types invoke institutional and extra-institutional sources of bargaining power in their competition for railway stations. These dynamics have broader implications for our understanding of the institutional arrangements that shape modern-day China and explain such phenomena as its economic miracle and the resilience of the communist government.