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In 1782 acting Shaanxi Governor Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730–97) submitted an exemplary memorial to the throne that concisely outlined the provincial administrative view of the proper order of relations between people, cultivars, livestock, climate, and water in northwestern China. He began with ostensibly human relations. His premise was that imperial official identity was ultimately formed through its connection to the food security of the general populace: “The root purpose of appointing officials is to prioritize the devotion of effort to civil affairs, and its main end is to put food sufficiency first.” Bi Yuan, like most of his contemporaries, unquestionably valued agriculture as the general and “main source” of food. By virtue of his posting to a China-proper province whose northern reaches lay along an ecotone with the Mongolian steppe, however, Bi Yuan was also distinctively aware of pastoralism as what he called the “second” source. While he made it clear that agriculture was certainly preferable, he was equally plain that human agency's range of choice was quite constrained in large parts of his jurisdiction, primarily by scarce water and cold climate. “Places in the northern provincial prefectures of Yan'an 延安 and Yulin 榆林, like Suide 綏德 and Fuzhou 鄜州, have land full of sand and gravel. Each is a high, cold frontier area where rainfall and ponds are scarce and inhibited, so that at harvest there is concern about shortfall.”

In the broader social science literature, most studies of social protection investigate welfare in democracies, and at the national level, and typically assume that welfare is given in order to influence voting. This paper, to the contrary, considers social assistance in authoritarian China at the urban level. Its findings are compatible with an explanation that there are two dissimilar logics influencing the distributional decisions of lower-level administrators. That is, there appear to be two modes of social policy implementation, which vary with the fiscal capacity of a given city, as indicated by its average wage: Wealthier cities seem to prefer to push off the streets those viewed as unsuited to a modern city, therefore allocating a substantial proportion of their social assistance funds to them, in order to entice them to stay at home. On the other hand, poorer places seem to permit such people to work outside, in the hope that they will thus be better able to support themselves, thereby saving the city money. A data set from China's Ministry of Civil Affairs was used.

They sat in the Cubberley Education Lecture Hall to hear visiting experts. More often they could be found meeting in reduced-size classes, or working on small-group activities. They usually took notes; sometimes they took field trips. They memorized lists and sat for exams, but they also watched films and acted out scenarios. Rather than take regular courses in the disciplines, they studied an integrated curriculum referred to as “Area Relationships.” Some faculty collaborated, team taught, and drew on students' prior knowledge. Even some administrators joined in the role-playing for the big culminating activity. The head of the program explained the reason for such a break from the traditional Stanford experience: “Special effort must be made to supply the student with points of view and methods of procedure which will enable him most quickly and most surely to survey a situation, analyze a problem, and formulate a solution.”

Attempt is made to trace the work and role of the parish clerk from menial monastic beginnings to its emergence in the thirteenth century as a canonically recognised office–probably the oldest unordained office at the parochial level in the English church and the last vestigial survival of Minor Orders. In parallel is developed the story of the coming together of London parish clerks as a guild or fraternity, radically distinguished from the merchant, craft and service guilds, and of the grant to that fraternity of‘clerici et literati’–with its unique livery and ethos–of the first of its six Royal Charters. The duties and activities of mediaeval parish clerks and the constitution of their Company are considered along with its possessions, especially its Bede Roll. Attention is paid to the understanding of Purgatory and the devastating effects of the Chantries Act 1548. The parish clerk's changing role following the Reformation is examined within the prevailing continuities and discontinuities. New duties in relation to Registration and Bills of Mortality are marked in addition to the parish clerk's increasing social involvement in the civil affairs of the parish. The decline in the parish clerk's duties from the nineteenth century is studied and its effect on the office, the London Company and the ancient parishes of old London, from which the Company is exclusively recruited.

Democracy in rural China has attracted much attention in recent years. During President Bill Clinton's visit to China in 1998, he made a public stop at a village outside Xian to chat with a few Chinese villagers about village elections in China. In fact, village democracy has become one of the rare subject matters that the Chinese government is eager to publicize and the Western academia and media are interested to investigate. The Chinese government, often through the Ministry of Civil Affairs, has organized and allowed foreign journalists, social scientists, dignitaries, diplomats, and political, academic, and social organizations (such as the U.S. International Republican Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Carter Center, and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations) to go to Chinese rural areas to observe village selfgovernment and elections. There is no doubt that the Chinese government intends to showcase its village selfgovernment to the outside world, hoping to improve its tarnished image from the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Western media and governments are interested in this new development in China in the hope that this will be the beginning of the long-delayed democratic transition in the most populous country in the world.

On December 23, 1991, the Federal Republic of Germany announced its intention to proceed with unilateral diplomatic recognition of the secessionist Yugoslav states of Croatia and Slovenia, unquestionably one of the most precipitous acts in post-Cold War Europe. With it the Bonn government in effect renounced the legitimacy of the existing Yugoslav state and pressured other European governments to do the same. Within weeks the Yugoslav federation came apart at every seam, while its civil affairs degenerated into an anarchy of armed violence as convoluted in many respects as the Thirty Years' War.In Germany's defense, it should be conceded at the outset that an alternative approach to recognition would not necessarily have produced a fundamentally more peaceful transformation of Yugoslavia. In light of the deepening political and economic cleavages with which the multinational state had been wrestling since the 1970s, the reasonable question is not whether the serial wars of the Yugoslav succession could have been avoided altogether, but whether Germany's action offered Yugoslavia and its populace the best chance for a more peaceful course of change given the circumstances. Did Bonn apply the best of its diplomatic and political brains to the issues of sovereignty, self-determination, and human rights? Were its actions morally responsible with regard to Balkan, German, and European history?

The Malagasy proverb “You can't catch a locust if your armpit is not close to the ground” (Ny valala tsy azo raha tsy andrian'elika) perhaps characterizes archival research in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. There are at least eight research facilities with archival materials in town: the National Archives (Foiben'ny Arisivam-Pirenena Malagasy); the Academie Malgache; CIDST (Centre d'Information et de Documentation Scientifique et Technique); the National Library (Tranomboky-Pirenena); the University Library; and three church archives (American Lutheran, Norwegian Lutheran, and Catholic). In this paper I give some background information on the collections in the National Archives, outline how to use the facilities, provide an annotated bibliography of the finding aids there, and give some tips for one's stay in Antananarivo.Madagascar's National Archives inherited many documents from the monarchical period. At the beginning of the colonial administration, the French deposited royal documents at the Queen's Palace (Rova) in Antananarivo. During their occupation they added documents from the territorial and central administrations. The whole collection was transferred to French headquarters before the Malagasy direction of Civil Affairs was created. On 1 March 1958 the Service des Archives de Madagascar was instituted. From then on, the archives have been under the jurisdiction of the head of government.The National Archives are remarkable for their materials on the following topics: the history of the Malagasy people; their customs and practices; and their way of thinking that distinguishes them from the majority of other people. Moreover, the National Archives have collections that do not exist in other libraries, such as the Academie Malagasy and CIDST.

Civil-military relations in China demonstrate a unique fusion of military and political leadership within the Communist Party. Variously described as a “symbiosis,” “dual-role elite” or “the Party in uniform,” this feature rooted in the guerrilla experience of the Chinese Communist Party was sustained over six decades by the political longevity of the Long March generation. The civil war experience formed political leaders skilled in both civil affairs and military command. Analysts of civil-military relations in China must therefore define the scope of “civil” in relation to the Chinese Communist Party.

Nicephorus Gregoras was a fourteenth-century man of letters living in Constantinople who wrote a history of his own times. This work is an example of the traditional school of Byzantine historial writing in that it consists of an introductory summary of earlier history and a much fuller account of events contemporary with the author. But it departs from tradition in that it deals as much, or more, with ecclesiastical as with civil affairs. Gregoras was deeply implicated in the hesychast controversy, which began simply as a dispute among monks, but developed into a crisis of state, and his concern with it, in his life as well as his history, serves to illustrate its scope and importance. He was aware that his history lacked balance and needed some excuse. But the literary deficiencies of the work may be offset by its value as historical evidence. Since it was the hesychast doctrine, opposed by Gregoras, which became officially accepted, it is interesting to read the account of a defeated partisan. One must not, however, expect dispassionate reporting from Gregoras, although his account has sometimes been taken as such by western theologians.

The United States Army officially defines military government as “that form of government which is established and maintained by a belligerent by force of arms over occupied territory of the enemy and over the inhabitants thereof.” “It is a government imposed by force and the legality of its acts is determined by the laws of war.” An application of this definition in the formulation of an adequate and enlightened civil affairs policy brings many difficult problems in its train, and particularly is this true in the modern, complex organization of society and warfare.Thrown into prominence by the war, such problems of military government at present occupy the attention not only of American political and military authorities, but also of numerous scholars and publicists. That the latter should display so keen an interest in what is apparently a strictly military matter is a sign of the growing realization that solution of the problems of military government is vital for the successful prosecution of the war and for establishing the conditions which will make possible an equitable peace settlement. American public opinion, to some extent led and moulded by scholars and publicists, is unmistakably concerned with civil affairs administration of allied occupied territories across the sea and with plans for those yet to be occupied.

As the first working agency of the United Nations, already almost two years old, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration is of special interest to students of international organization. Despite its unique features it has already grappled with many of the problems that will confront all future international organizations. Its financial experience is particularly interesting because all such organizations, whether dealing with political, judicial, or economic subject matter, have very early in their history to go through the difficult process of collecting funds from resolutely sovereign-minded member governments. The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, in view of its co6rdinating authority over all international specialized agencies, cannot fail to be guided by the results of the financial experience of UNRRA. The International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development can be expected to be especially attentive to UNRRA's experience because, like it, they require the collection of vast funds for more than administrative purposes. The basic facts about UNRRA are fairly well known. It was established on November 9, 1943, just about a year after the Allied invasion of French North Africa, when representatives of the forty-four United and Associated Nations signed the Agreement at the White House. This Agreement provided for a legislative and policy-making Council made up of all members, a Central Committee of limited executive powers containing China, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, and a chief executive or Director-General. The purpose of UNRRA is simply to aid in the relief and rehabilitation of the "victims of war" of the member countries at their request and after termination of the civil affairs responsibility of liberating military officials. The basic policies of UNRRA have been set up at three meetings thus far held by the Council, the first held at Atlantic City from November 10 to December 1, 1943, the second at Montreal from September 16 to 26, 1944, the third in London from August 7 to 24, 1945. There has been a considerable whittling down in the scope of UNRRA since the days of its planning by American and British officials in 1942 and 1943. This narrowing of UNRRA's field of authority has been carried out by specific policies formulated by the Council as well as by the bias of developing events. UNRRA was first conceived of as an agency of more or less supreme authority, empowered to assist in large-scale industrial and agricultural rehabilitation projects, that would have ultimate co6rdination

A wartime training program of interest to political scientists and of possible significance for postwar educational policy is the Army's Civil Affairs Training Program. This training program prepares officers for military government service in occupied territory, and is an extension of the training instituted at Charlottesville, Virginia, in the spring of 1942. The School of Military Government is an Army post located on the campus of the University of Virginia. It was originally expected to train a limited number of officers for positions in civil affairs headquarters staff, but the capacity of the School was later expanded and its graduates actually serve in either staff or field positions.It soon became apparent that the demand for officers trained for civil affairs work would run far beyond the capacity of the School of Military Government. As a consequence, it was decided to utilize a number of universities in the training, and the Civil Affairs Training Program (CATP) was established. Like the School of Military Government, already in existence, this program was placed under the control of the Provost Marshal General.