In his 2018 New Year Address, President Xi Jinping proudly said that the “Fuxing high-speed trains now travel across China's vast landscape.” Proud indeed, over the past decade, China has built a high-speed rail (HSR) system capable of solving domestic transportation bottlenecks and competing at the international level. This very system became the hallmark of China's railway modernization, technological prowess and diplomatic missions. Against this backdrop, Lampton, Ho and Kuik's timely book, Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia, provides us with a detailed and panoramic account of Chinese power and Southeast Asian responses in the pursuit of regional connectivity via high-speed and conventional rail systems. The breadth of the work is applaudable, considering all the difficulties in conducting cross-country fieldwork and data collection. The authors evidently drew from a rich set of primary and secondary Chinese and English-language sources and hundreds of interviews with officials, experts, academics and members of various business communities.

The book's main argument is that while China can forge a national consensus on the “going global” of its railway systems, its southern neighbours also have the power to shape, negotiate and affect the implementation of China's ambitions. The construction of the Pan-Asia Railway, linking Kunming, Yunnan and Singapore, must confront three challenges. First, as an ostensibly coherent and orchestrated project, the first step is for China to bring various domestic actors onto the same page concerning regional connectivity. Second, responding to China's ambitions, Southeast Asian states also have considerable leverage to determine their fate. Getting these countries to “jump in” to China's grand vision is as important as building domestic consensus. Third, the transition from single-system to cross-system implementation remains one of the most difficult challenges to realizing regional connectivity. Therefore, the task for China is to adapt to various socioeconomic and cultural settings, and this, according to the authors, is “a sui generis exercise” (p. 180).

Chapter one provides the salient questions setting the context and questions relevant to the study of social science. Chapters two and three focus on Chinese power and discussions within China with regards to building a transnational railway network. Chapters four to six offer a detailed account of responses from Southeast Asian countries. Laos, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia provide the crucial case studies – helping explore how each responded, negotiated and implemented Chinese-led railway projects. The first key takeaway is that within a state the interaction of degree of power pluralization and power concentration, on the one hand, and the relative degree of development-based legitimation versus identity-based legitimation, on the other, ultimately shaped its responses. Second, implementation was shaped by challenges from subnational actors, the problem of “the complexity of joint action” and state capacity. Chapter seven discusses the effects of geopolitics and geoeconomics on the behaviour of smaller states – giving rise to some degree of balance of power with regards to selecting infrastructure partnerships. Chapter eight concludes the book with discussions on the pitfalls and promises of the Pan-Asia Railway.

While the book offers an in-depth discussion of the going global of China's high-speed and conventional railways and Southeast Asian responses, there are two important omissions. First, China's domestic actors that shaped the internal story concerning the internationalization of China's HSR system were largely missing. The roles of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the then China Railway Corporation (CRC) and other centrally owned state enterprises warrant further exploration. The absence of the domestic story then leads to the second point about project origins. The Jakarta-Bandung project was considered a top-down one. By way of contrast, the East Coast Rail Link was initiated in a bottom-up fashion by the China Communications Construction Company. One notable difference between the two projects is that the NDRC and the CRC were extensively involved in the Indonesian case and coordinated action among other national champions, hence the top-down nature. However, the NDRC and CRC's involvement in the Malaysian case was largely absent. This intricate difference thus calls for closer scrutiny of the export of Chinese high-speed and conventional rails, namely whether the export structure associated with a particular project also impacts negotiation and implementation.

These omissions, however, serve as the perfect foil for future research on the relationships, actors and factors behind China's domestic development and the internationalization of its HSR system. The domestic organization of China's railway sector represents both the strengths and weaknesses concerning its “going global.”

Despite the omissions mentioned above, Rivers of Iron makes an important contribution to the study of China's exercise of its power and interaction with its southern neighbours. More abstractly, this study directly engages with the existing literature on how smaller states deal with great power economic statecraft, and it sheds light on the role of domestic politics and the agency of smaller states. In addition, core concerns such as “what makes development go” (p. 213) and the effects of geopolitics and geoeconomics on states’ behaviours and development should be of interest to scholars from multiple disciplines. Finally, this is an important book for academics and policymakers interested in Chinese power and its implications.