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From the Taiping Rebellion to the Chinese Communist movement, no province in China gave rise to as many reformers, military officers, and revolutionaries as did Hunan. Platt offers the first comprehensive study of why this province wielded such disproportionate influence.
Mexico and the United States each have a constitution and a federal system of government. This fact has led many historians to assume that the Mexican system of government, established in the 1820s, is an imitation of the U.S. model. But it is not. First published in Spanish in 1955 and now translated by the author and amplified with new material, this interpretation of the independence movement tells the true story of Mexico's transition from colonial status to federal state. Benson traces the Mexican government's beginning to events in Spain in 1808–1810, when provincial juntas, or deputations, were established to oppose Napoleon's French rule and govern the provinces of Spain and its New World dominions during the Spanish monarch's imprisonment. It was the provincial deputation, not the United States federal system, that provided the model for the state legislative bodies that were eventually formed after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. This finding—the result of years of painstaking archival research—strongly confirms the independence of Mexico's political development from U.S. influence. Its importance to a study of Mexican history cannot be overstated.
Booksellers and Printers in Provincial France presents short biographies for over 2700 booksellers, printers and bookbinders active outside Paris and Lyon in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Assessments of the United States–led effort to create a democratically governed Iraq following the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003 have generally been negative. However, these criticisms have, for the most part, ignored the progress Iraq made on putting in place basic public administration practices and political processes that better serve its citizens, particularly at the subnational level. This paper reviews the experience of the Local Governance Program in strengthening the capacities of subnational councils and provincial offices to develop legislation and to plan and budget for capital investments. The discussion reveals how contestation over the legal interpretations of decentralization constrained the autonomy of provincial actors, and how mastery of administrative tools and methods enabled them to maneuver more effectively within evolving provincial governance structures. This experience offers several lessons for international stabilization and reconstruction operations: constitution-making in divided societies paves over differences with ambiguities in order to reach agreement, which pushes the unresolved conflicts into political, legislative, and administrative arenas; decentralization debates are ultimately about the distribution of political power and control and cannot be addressed solely as technical and administrative governance questions; and basic public administration capacity is critical to meeting citizens’ expectations for services, security, and economic opportunity. A final observation is that international governance improvement templates can only be effective if they recognize that technical interventions must account for politics and the incentives facing local actors.
The Falungong movement originated in 1992 as a system of breathing exercises designed to promote health and well-being. Riding on the coattails of the qigong fever that swept through China, it attracted an extensive following until 1994, when the Chinese government suppressed the qigong movement. A series of protest rallies by Falungong organizations against local government repression set in motion an upward conflict spiral that culminated in the siege of the Party headquarters in Beijing on April 25, 1999, by more than 20,000 Falungong practitioners. Revenge of the Forbidden City begins with the shock of the Politburo against such insolent defiance, resolving to retaliate against the Falungong, a retaliation that represented "the most serious political incident" since the Tiananmen upheaval in 1989. James W. Tong reveals how the Chinese government's relentless, sustained repression of the Falungong movement typifies its response towards perceived internal threats. Though many claim that the Democratic reforms in China have eroded the government's ability to monitor and control its citizens, the success of the campaign to eradicate Falungong indicates otherwise: the government effectively implemented a multifaceted offensive involving unsparing suppression, pervasive propaganda, and coercive conversion. The successful execution of this complex campaign reveals the resilience of China's authoritarian institutions. Using empirical evidence and thorough analysis, Tong reveals the Chinese state's formidable ability to crush dissent and provides a cogent rebuttal to those who claim that the Communist government is on the verge of collapse. The definitive account of China's response to Falungong, Revenge of the Forbidden City is essential for any scholar interested in how the Chinese state actually operates.