“The development potential of prime sites, aided by the expedient push for “civilised” urban environments, has put city governments across the country on a collision course with rural China. Nowhere is the face-off more evident than in the conflicts over urban village land, which rankle at the core of all the stories in this book. But these conflicts are ultimately about far more central issues nagging at China’s urban future: corrupt institutions and weak civil society. These may sound like separate concerns, but the following stories show how inseparable they are” Continue reading Dragons In Diamond Village-Tales of resistance from urbanizing China (David Bandurski)
Perestroiking like Pinkham! it’s so easy to get hooked on every-day Russo/far Eastern European related reportage & literature. why? well, as Pinkham herself puts it – “My family and friends had trouble understanding why I had fallen in love with Ukraine, a country that most Americans could hardly find on a map, famous only for Chicken Kiev and mail-order brides. 
“there are now very few significant interludes of human existence (with the colossal exception of sleep) that have not been penetrated and taken over as work time, consumption time or market time.”
“whatever the technological advances of modern society – and they’re nearly miraculous – the individualized life styles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit”
A seminal clarion to the obliteration of Syria. This is a very powerful, distressing & extreme account of an unbearable conflict from ground-zero. This awful internecine catastrophe churns on without abatement to the tune of external entities and their ongoing intervention & incursion… with the Syrian people suffering at the centre of this multi-faceted proxy tussling and the Assad regimes barely discriminating (if at all) butchery & besiegement of the Syrian people.