“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)
So my friend is being forced to move house (flat)! It’s one of those now ubiquitous “unscrupulous” but probably legal ejections that’s tearing sane minds & lives apart all over London as the residual vestiges of interesting people are expelled from the crapital due to extortionate rents & government solicited land-lord tyranny as part of the Cancervatives undeclared social purging initiative. 
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”
“Throughout the world inequality is soaring to new heights. And the wealth of nations that once provided prosperity for the majority has gone missing. This is the story of powerful forces deepening the divide between the few and the many”. So begins one of the most urgent & informing documentaries you have never heard of (& if you have, congratulations is required). Director Harold Crooks brings his attention to the malady of The City Of London, tax havens, British Common Wealth satellites, offshoring & tax evasion, if not more accurately “tax negation” or some 99.99% equivalent. It’s an 
