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While students of Chinese politics have long been interested in the impact of fiscal and administrative decentralization on patterns of governance in China, few have examined the impact of decentralization on political dynamics within the local state. Focusing on the county-the level of government primarily responsible for delivering public services, managing local state-owned enterprises, and coordinating the economy-this article explains how the pressures and incentives associated with decentralization have changed the "rules of the game" at the local level. It argues, in an in-depth study of a rural county, that local politics is driven largely by a competition over spoils and that competition over spoils is organized around a relatively stable system of factionalism. The first part of the article examines the emergence of local factions in County X and their relationship to the formal institutions of Party and government. The second part examines the resilience of local state factionalism and its implications for central government control and one-Party rule. Studying the Local State in China From the late 1970s, decentralization has heralded a fundamental shift in the way China is governed. Local governments were made directly responsible for governing the local economy, delivering public services and for raising revenues. By the 1990s China had become one of the most decentralized states in the world as measured by sub-national governments' share of public expenditure. 1 Case studies from different regions taught us that China's "local states" responded to the challenges of decentralization in different ways. 2 In the more industrialized regions, some local states were able to capitalize on 1 Sub-national governments' share of public expenditure in China was 78.

In recent years, governments across Asia and the Pacific have adopted gender quotas to increase women's representation in parliament. In 2003, Indonesia introduced a 30% gender quota that, over two election cycles, contributed to an increase in women's share of seats in the national parliament from 9 per cent to 18 per cent. In the most recent (2014) elections, despite stronger enforcement of the quota provisions, expansive civil society‐led efforts to support women candidates and favourable press coverage, the percentage of women elected to the national parliament declined. This article examines the evolving political context in which the gender quota operates to argue that common support programs designed to maximize the gender quota's impact on women's representation are insufficiently targeted at major obstacles. Findings will be of interest to lawmakers and public sector professionals working to advance gender equity and to students of democratization, representation and gender politics.

We study the effects of diffusion on a -gradient echo memory, which is a coherent optical quantum memory, using thermal gases. The efficiency of this memory is high for short storage time, but decreases exponentially due to decoherence as the storage time is increased. We study the effects of both longitudinal and transverse diffusion in this memory system, and give both analytical and numerical results that are in good agreement. Our results show that diffusion has a significant effect on the efficiency. Further, we suggest ways to reduce these effects to improve storage efficiency. We also report on a mechanism by which the rate of expansion of the transverse width of the beam is reduced compared to the naive expectation of diffusive effects, as observed in recent experiments.