This portrait of social change in the North China plain depicts how the world of the Chinese peasant evolved during an era of war and how it in turn shaped the revolutionary process. The book is based on evidence gathered from archives and interviews with villagers and rural officials.

This is a study of peasant-state relations and village politics as they have evolved in response to the state's attempts to control the division of the harvest and extract the state-defined surplus. To provide the reader with a clearer sense of the evolution of peasant-state relations over almost a forty-year period and to highlight the dramatic changes that have taken place since 1978,1 have divided my analysis into two parts: Chapters 2 through 7 are on Maoist China, and chapters 8 and 9 are on post-Mao China. The first part examines the state's grain policies and patterns of local politics that emerged during the highly collectivized Maoist period, when the state closed free grain markets and established the system of unified purchase and sales (tonggou tongxiao). The second part describes the new methods for the production and division of the harvest after 1978, when the government decollectivized agriculture and abolished its unified procurement program.

In fact, this is the first book-length study on the farm tenancy conciliation procedure and analysis of the Japanese government's wish to maintain tradition at al cost in the farmer community.

Ten years ago one of America's most important public figures, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, chronicled her quest both deeply personal and, in the truest sense, public to help make our society into the kind of village that enables children to become able, caring resilient adults. IT TAKES A VILLAGE is a textbook for caring, filled with truths that are worth a read, and a reread. In her substantial new introduction, Senator Clinton reflects on how our village has changed over the last decade, from the internet to education, and on how her own understanding of children has deepened as she has watched Chelsea grow up and take on challenges new to her generation, from a first job to living through a terrorist attack. She discusses how the work she is doing in the Senate is helping children and looks at where America has been successful, improvements in the foster care system and support for adoption, and where there is still work to be done, providing pre-school programmes and universal health care to all our children. This new edition elucidates how the choices we make about how we raise our children, and how we support families, will determine how all nations will face the challenges of this century.

This study offers detailed analysis of the manipulative strategies of local rivals active over several decades in the competition for local status and power.

Despite almost four decades and billions of dollars in development activities, we are barely in a position to track the changing dynamics of poverty or to define with conviction the processes that entrap the poor in their misery. Accounting for about 90% of global poverty, rural poverty, through transmigration, is also a main contributor to urban poverty. It is in the rural areas of the world where poverty is most severe in human terms, where the hunger, hopelessness, hardship, and despair commonly associated with entrenched poverty are most pronounced, where basic health services, sanitation, educational opportunities, and other common amenities are most lacking. The alleviation of rural poverty is therefore tantamount to the alleviation of global poverty in its entirety. The State of World Rural Poverty offers the first comprehensive look at the economic conditions and prospects of the world's rural poor.

Examines the role of village notables in nineteenth-century France.