Ma Xiao

This book compiles a broad range of monitoring and early warning technologies focused on high-resolution in-situ water quality parameters at springs and monitoring wells. The surface collapses often cause severe damage to infrastructures, properties, and loss of lives, whereas contaminated groundwater poses risks to human health and the environment. Collapses are critical in karst systems, sparsing a seventh of Earth’s land surface. Karsts are also very relevant for drinking water, yet karst represents a fourth of global drinking water. Mitigating collapses and contaminated groundwater in karst aquifers can be complicated and costly. These parameters detect hydrodynamics, internal soil erosion, and ground deformation changes as karst collapse and pollution proxies. This book represents the most comprehensive overview of decades of research on karst collapse and groundwater contamination. This book is of interest to researchers and policymakers.

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 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.