About

David J. Bulman is the Jill McGovern and Steven Muller Assistant Professor of China Studies and International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). His research focuses on economic and political development in China and the implications for US-China relations. He examines how central-local relations influence political incentives and local economic outcomes, analyzing China’s development through a broader comparative lens to provide insights into growth slowdowns and middle income transitions. Additionally, Bulman’s work explores the implications of China’s evolving development model for its foreign economic behavior and U.S. foreign policy. Bulman authored the book Incentivized Development in China: Leaders, Governance, and Growth in China’s Counties, published by Cambridge University Press in 2016, which investigates the political foundations of local economic growth in China, emphasizing the roles of county-level leaders and their career incentives. His background includes positions as an Economist at the World Bank and a China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. He has been a Woodrow Wilson Center China Fellow and a National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Public Intellectual Program fellow. Bulman holds an MA and PhD in China Studies from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a BA in Economics from Columbia University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economics
• Public administration
• Law
• Management
• Social Science
• Political economy
• Public relations

Selected publications

• The outsiders: evolving logics of cadre rotation in China’s counties

  Journal of Chinese Governance · 2025-09-17 · 1 citations

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• Foreign borrowing, sovereignty, and public opinion in the global south: Traditional lenders or China

  The Review of International Organizations · 2025-10-06 · 1 citations

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• Firm’s Source Country or Project Characteristics? Survey Experiments on Preferences for Chinese Investment in the Global South

  The Chinese Journal of International Politics · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

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  Abstract Do individuals favor a particular foreign investment project based mainly on the investing company’s source country or the characteristics of the investment project? We know surprisingly little about this question, particularly in the Global South, an increasingly important destination for foreign investment. Employing conjoint analysis and informational text treatments, our pre-registered study investigates how the public assesses Chinese investment, the extent to which source country and project characteristics shape preferences, and the implications of Chinese investor behavior for preferences for cooperation with China. We find that, against conventional wisdom, Global South publics do not discriminate against Chinese investment projects. We reveal the determinants of preferences toward Chinese investment in 10 middle-income democracies in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia (N = 20 001). This research contributes to the literatures on foreign investment preference formation and global Chinese investment, a phenomenon with profound geopolitical implications.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When fear matters: varied foreign economic cooperation preferences in the face of conflict

  Review of International Political Economy · 2024-12-05 · 5 citations

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  How do perceived security threats shape individual preferences for international economic cooperation? Existing literature on individual trade and investment preferences reaches inconsistent conclusions, with evidence that individuals are alternately motivated by concerns about security externalities and hopes that economic cooperation will thwart future conflict. Using complementary survey experiments conducted in China (N = 1, 140), India (N = 1, 435), and the United States (N = 1, 397), and focusing on security tensions in the US–China and China–India bilateral relationships, the article analyzes public support for bilateral trade and investment in the context of salient security fears. Results suggest that security fears motivate individual preferences for economic cooperation in complex ways: priming security fears increases individual support for broad measures of cooperation and trade, but also leads respondents to become more supportive of narrow measures of economic protectionism, including inward and outward investment restrictions and targeted export controls. These findings have several important implications. First, they add depth to existing theories of individual economic cooperation preferences, identifying the varied ways in which security fears affect economic preferences. Additionally, the results shed light on potential public opinion mechanisms behind the commercial peace phenomenon and suggest that this mechanism has declined in relevance as economic cooperation has become increasingly securitized.

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• Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China's Rise

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2023-06-13 · 3 citations

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  In 1962, Michael Harrington's The Other America described the challenges facing “invisible” American communities, helping inspire the war on poverty. Explicitly referencing Harrington's work in their title (7), Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell's Invisible China presents a shocking picture of China's rural education crisis, a crisis that remains largely unknown and underappreciated even within China itself. In this eye-opening and important book, Rozelle and Hell describe how China's underinvestment in rural health and education will consign China to the “middle income trap,” given the human capital levels required to become a high-income country. With a Chinese translation (186), the authors aim to shock Chinese policy makers into addressing these human capital challenges in “invisible China,” six decades after Harrington's work did the same in the United States.Invisible China is most compelling in three deeply researched empirical chapters documenting rural human capital challenges, focused respectively on vocational education, student health, and early childhood cognitive development. These chapters provide a jarring corrective to narratives of China's unstoppable rise to global economic dominance, based on nontechnical summaries of dozens of large-scale randomized controlled trials conducted by the authors and other members of the Rural Education Action Program (REAP) at Stanford. Scholars of rural China and the Chinese economy will already be well aware of REAP's work—from 2005–16, REAP was responsible for more than half of China-focused impact evaluation studies in international scholarly journals (189)—but the book adds immense value in combining technical findings into a single coherent argument: “invisible” rural China faces a human capital crisis that current policy initiatives and funding do not adequately address. As documented in the book, over half of rural toddlers are cognitively delayed, over half of rural babies are undernourished, 40 percent of rural schoolchildren have intestinal worms, and 30 percent of rural students need but do not have glasses. Since rural China is home to 70 percent of China's children, the resulting cognitive challenges for China's next generation will prevent China from achieving school attainment levels on par with other upper-middle- and high-income economies. Rural human capital underinvestment will consequently stall China's development, with devastating consequences for social stability as well as global economic growth.Although the book includes helpful policy recommendations, its analysis remains pessimistic: not only are China's rural human capital problems entrenched, but underlying institutional dynamics constrain potential solutions. This discussion of underlying institutional determinants of China's rural human capital challenges will resonate with development scholars and practitioners. Already, China has followed much “best practice” international development advice by expanding vocational education, increasing teacher salaries and training, providing free textbooks, improving school infrastructure, and updating curricula. But these interventions have not addressed the deeper institutional challenges that undermine investment in rural human capital, as described in the concluding chapter: the hukou (household registration) system, decentralized fiscal expenditure, and cadre career incentives emphasizing short-term economic growth. Implied by the authors, but not explicitly stated, is that addressing these institutional challenges would require political rather than technical solutions.Compared to the empirical chapters focused on China's rural human capital challenges, the book's comparative analysis of the dynamics of the middle-income trap is somewhat less compelling and may present an overly negative picture of China's prospects. This analysis, the focus of the first three chapters, is based less on existing middle-income-trap literature than on the observed cross-national correlation between high school attainment levels and per capita income. But by comparing China's current education levels to a small set of middle-income “graduates” when they were already much richer than China, the authors misrepresent China's current position; when middle-income “graduates” had China's same relative income levels, they were actually less educated than China today.1 To strengthen the comparative analysis, the authors could have referenced more of the existing middle-income-trap literature and more clearly explained the lessons from successful East Asian cases, rather than focusing the book's comparative cases on “trapped” Latin American countries.2Additionally, the authors argue that fast growth makes China particularly susceptible to the challenges of low education in a middle-income economy (163), yet contrary to this assertion, historically, countries that rose to middle income fastest were those most likely to continue growing to high income.3 To better understand how China's rapid yet uneven growth will affect future rural human capital development, a further temporal and spatial disaggregation of the underlying REAP studies would have helped. The studies presented cover nearly two decades, and many focus only on poorer western or central provinces in China, yet in the book these findings are generally aggregated as if they provide a current snapshot of the entire rural population. Although the book came out in the final year of China's antipoverty campaign, which focused on poor rural areas, this campaign and its effects do not feature in the book. Have recent rural growth and the antipoverty campaign helped alleviate the described challenges? And does regional inequality resulting from uneven growth constrain China or provide a possible path toward convergence, similar to the European Union fiscal subsidies and market integration that the book argues enabled Spain, Greece, and Portugal to transition to high income despite relatively low education levels (66)? These important questions are not addressed.Overall, however, these minor omissions do not undermine the book's strengths, and Invisible China remains essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the Chinese economy. The authors shine an unflattering spotlight on “invisible” rural China and in doing so convincingly show that China must rapidly implement far-reaching policies to address its rural human capital crisis.

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• Financial sustainability of the Belt and Road Initiative before and after COVID-19

  2022-09-15 · 2 citations

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  As COVID-19 paralyzed global economic activity in 2020, developing countries around the world delayed or canceled Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)-associated projects, and concerns grew that low-income countries would be unable to finance their Chinese debt. The pandemic also negatively affected the Chinese economy, limiting funding available for overseas investment. What might these developments indicate about the future of BRI? This chapter argues that although COVID-19 constitutes a short-term setback to BRI, in the medium-term the pandemic will likely lead to a more sustainable and regionally differentiated “BRI 2.0”. The roots of this shift go back to challenges created by the campaign-style approach to BRI from 2013 to 2018. The pandemic changed calculations on both the demand side and the supply side in ways that sharpened these preexisting challenges, motivating continued BRI adjustments. Post-pandemic, China will likely become more cautious about BRI lending and investment and will concentrate on more reputation-enhancing investments in health, digital spaces, and support for local industrial production, particularly in Southeast Asia.

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• Picking Losers: How Career Incentives Undermine Industrial Policy in Chinese Cities

  The Journal of Development Studies · 2022-03-13 · 4 citations

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  Rapid economic growth in China with considerable market intervention has led to renewed interest in the efficacy of industrial policy. Have industrial policies helped Chinese firms overcome market failures and boosted productivity, or have they distorted markets and undermined creative destruction? This paper explores these questions in the specific context of local implementation by studying the targeting of financial favors and the relationship of such targeting to local political incentives. Using unique and largely unexplored quasi-census firm-level data from annual tax surveys in China from 2007 to 2015, this paper demonstrates that financial favors disproportionately target loss-making, larger, older, and less productive firms. It then argues that short-term career incentives facing local officials explain this sub-optimal targeting, showing that promotion likelihood for city leaders increases with higher levels of ‘excess’ financial favors to firms, particularly when these favors are provided to loss-making firms. Finally, the paper estimates costs to the Chinese economy from misallocated financial support by showing that financial favors are associated with lower levels of firm entry and lower productivity growth. The paper contributes to the literature on industrial policy, political incentives, and misallocation, and has important implications for China’s future growth and transition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Instinctive Commercial Peace Theorists? Interpreting American Views of the US–China Trade War

  Business and Politics · 2022-07-11 · 10 citations

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  Abstract Existing theories of individual trade preferences do not satisfactorily explain how security concerns should affect American support for the US–China trade war that began in 2018. Although existing theories of public attitudes toward international trade—economic self-interest, sociotropism, partisanship, reciprocity, and xenophobia—all help to explain initial support for the trade war, these hypotheses do not adequately explain citizen attitudes in the context of an increasingly adversarial and securitized bilateral US–China relationship. In particular, they do not address how rising security tensions affect trade preferences. Using nationally representative original survey data (n = 1,016) and a nonrepresentative survey with an embedded experiment (n = 1,015), this article argues that securitization of the bilateral economic relationship has spurred threat perceptions and given rise to a Cold War narrative that has in turn caused a substantial share of Americans to become less concerned with the economic outcomes of trade and more concerned with trade's effect on security. These Americans demonstrate an instinctive “commercial peace” response, seeing trade liberalization as a potential deterrent to conflict. The results challenge conventional wisdom on political support for the trade war and add depth to existing theories of individual trade preferences regarding the interaction between economic, security, and psychological motivations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Localism in Retreat? Central-Provincial Relations in the Xi Jinping Era

  Journal of Contemporary China · 2021 · 30 citations

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  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Public administration

  Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive, personnel reshuffles, and institutional overhauls seem to mark a turning point in Beijing’s long-running fight against ‘localism’ (difangzhuyi). Yet, key questions remain about the scope and effectiveness of efforts to rein in China’s subnational officials. Has the Xi administration effectively combated localism by appointing more outsiders to provincial leadership teams? Or have strengthened oversight institutions made subnational officials more responsive to the center regardless of their individual backgrounds? To address these questions, this article distinguishes between different types of localism in contemporary China and the varying personnel ‘risk factors’ underlying them. Comparing the makeup of provincial party standing committees under Xi Jinping’s 18th CPC Central Committee (2012–2017) with those from the 15–17th CPC Central Committees under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao (1997–2012), the analysis finds that Xi has accelerated personnel changes to address multiple forms of localism. At the same time, gaps in governance outcomes between local cadres and outsiders have faded since 2012 in several domains, implying that Xi-era institutional reforms have also played a role in curbing localism. Even under Xi, however, important personnel risk factors for localism have persisted and in some domains local-outsider differences in governance outcomes have actually increased.

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• The Economic Security Dilemma in US-China Relations

  Asian perspective · 2021-01-01 · 8 citations

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  China and the United States are caught in an economic security dilemma. In response to perceived economic aggression, both countries now feel impelled to bolster domestic economic security through protectionist and retaliatory measures that the other side perceives as threatening. In game theoretic terms, a mutually beneficial "Stag Hunt" coordination game devolved into an uncooperative "Prisoner's Dilemma" after the global financial crisis. In the economic security dilemma that emerged under Trump and Xi, both sides unsuccessfully attempted to coerce opponent behavior, further harming both economies. Using a game framework—as opposed to a structural or leadership-based account—helps demonstrate that China's recent reform reversal and revisionist approaches to the international economic order were not unavoidable parts of a long-term strategy, but rather developed partially as a response to perceived US aggressions.

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Frequent coauthors

• Walter Kolkma

  Asian Development Bank Institute

  7 shared

• Abla Safir

  5 shared

• Siddharth Sharma

  5 shared

• Sheheryar Banuri

  5 shared

• Kyle A. Jaros

  University of Notre Dame

  5 shared

• Luis F. López-Calva

  5 shared

• Aart Kraay

  5 shared

• Ezequiel Molina

  Piedmont Atlanta Hospital

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• 2021-2022 Woodrow Wilson Center China Fellow
• 2021-2023 National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Public…