Xu Jiang (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

The rapid expansion of China’s railway network has attracted worldwide attention, but it has also posed challenges to the dominance of the national railway management. Once monopolized and regulated by the center, the planning of new railways has evolved into a politics of scale since the 2000s, with actors across multiple levels of government bargaining over railway alignments and station siting. This politics and its spatial impacts are shaped by the uneven bargaining power of the contending state agents. By comparing decision-making about the siting of the 78 stations of the Pearl River Delta Intercity Railway System, I show that, due to the peculiar scalar distribution of costs and benefits of the new railways, municipal governments with greater bargaining power have – surprisingly – bargained for lower accessibility to intercity railway stations. In so doing, the contending state agents have to leverage upon various discourses to defend their preferred station locations.