This book explores rural political change in China from 1850 to 1949 to help us understand China's transformation from a weak, decaying agrarian empire to a unified, strong nation-state during this period.

Based on local gazetteers, contemporary field studies, government archives, personal memoirs and other primary sources, it systematically compares two key macro-regions of rural China - the North China plain and the Yangzi delta - to demonstrate the ways in which the forces of political change, shaped by different local conditions, operated to transform the country. It shows that...

This book is motivated by mitigating the impact of the penetration of Electric vehicle on the power supplier. It sequentially proposes three distributed frameworks for demand dispatch in smart grid networks. The overall goal is to properly shift plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) demand to fill the grid demand valley and at the same time minimise the user inconvenience. The final design does not require any price negotiation, thus instead, the aggregator sets the optimal price directly, leading to very fast response and accurate demand dispatch for flat valley-filling. And the price is...