Kyle Chan is currently a fourth-year PhD student in Princeton University’s Sociology Department and a 2017-18 visiting student at the Center for Social Research. He received his bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on state capacity and the role of the state in development, particularly in the provision of public goods such as infrastructure. Currently, he is conducting fieldwork on China’s high-speed rail system, which is the largest in the world and was built in less than a decade. This dissertation project aims at understanding the organizational and institutional factors that underlie China’s exceptionally high degree of state capacity vis-à-vis infrastructure.