Contemporary Authors

• Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China Melville House (Brooklyn, NY), 2016

1. Dragons in diamond village : tales of resistance from urbanizing China LCCN 2016024419 Type of material Book Personal name Bandurski, David, author. Main title Dragons in diamond village : tales of resistance from urbanizing China / David Bandurski. Edition 1st Edition. Published/Produced Brooklyn : Melville House, [2016] Description xvi, 299 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9781612195711 (hardback) CALL NUMBER HT169.C6 B36 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbandurski/?ppe=1 -
• Los Angeles Review of Books - http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/chinablog/diamond-village-wukan-qa-china-media-projects-david-bandurski/

  Interviews, The China Blog
  From Diamond Village to Wukan: An Interview with the China Media Project’s David Bandurski
  December 14, 2016 LARB Blog Leave a comment

  By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

  In last week’s post, three regular contributors to the China Blog gave suggestions for books dealing with Chinese themes that would make good holiday gifts. Next week’s post will take the form of a sequel, offering recommendations for last minute present shopping. So, it seems fitting that this post, which falls between, is an interview with the author of a very appealing book on China that would also be good to give to someone on your to-buy-for list. Published in other markets by Penguin last year but only recently available in the U.S., it is titled Dragons in Diamond Village: And Other Tales from the Back Alleys of Urbanising China, and it is by the versatile David Bandurski, an independent journalist, documentary filmmaker, and now book author as well. Bandurski joins me here to discuss recent developments in rural-urban unrest and the state of the Chinese media.

  JEFFREY WASSERSTROM: I just saw this great Lucy Hornby review of your book in the Financial Times. Congratulations on that. Since the FT is paywalled (though probably accessible via a Google search), can you tell readers some things you particularly liked in it and explain why?

  DAVID BANDURSKI: Well, all of the stories in my book take place in urban villages — rural villages, often with deep histories, caught up in the fabric of urban development. In our news coverage of China we don’t hear much about urban villages, but in fact they are ubiquitous. The FT review appreciates this. Hornby writes: “One Chinese researcher who specializes in analyzing local unrest on Beijing’s behalf has told the Financial Times he has a secret formula for starting his investigations: look for the unfinished construction site and ask the neighbors why it has been held up. The answer will almost always unlock an explanation for local grievances, as it does in Xian Village.”

  That is so true. In fact, my habit when I was researching the book was to spread out a city map and circle the names of villages within the city limits, visiting as many as I could. Almost without fail I would find troubled semi-rural enclaves, tucked behind modern developments, facing exactly the kinds of problems I write about in the book. I also enjoyed the quote from Chinese novelist Yan Lianke, whose latest book, The Explosion Chronicles (just out in English translated by Carlos Rojas) is about urbanization. Talking about “an internal truth that’s been paved over,” he says: “You need to see how many people have been torn apart to create today’s cities.” That really resonates with me, as it no doubt would with the urban villagers I write about.

  Having reviewed for newspapers myself, including the FT, I know how hard it can be to cover a complex book, as yours is, in a very short format. So, is there any aspect of the book that the reviewer didn’t get a chance to discuss that you’d like to mention?

  The review focuses on the central narrative of the book, which is the story of Xian Village, a community right in the center of modern Guangzhou that has earned the nickname “Diamond Village” because of the value of its land. But I also try to weave this story together with other stories of what the review aptly calls “rural resistance in urban China.” So, for example, I also explore the story of a villager from the remote outskirts of the city whose native village is consumed by urbanization because local leaders want to cash in on land deals. They say, look, you have to move on, you can’t rely on the land anymore. His land is taken while he doing jail time for trying to lead opposition to a development planned in secret without community input. This act of theft sets him on a permanent path of resistance until he’s an unrepentant rights defender. He connects with other villagers and activists around the city, including, quite serendipitously, others I write about.

  As I hope my book makes clear, this process has brought villagers and activists together in interesting ways, as part of a very harassed and fragmented rights movement.

  Wukan was back in the news earlier this fall. Can you very briefly bring readers of this blog up to date on that story — and say a bit about how it relates to themes in Dragons in Diamond Village?

  Sure. Wukan is a village in Guangdong Province, on the outskirts of the city of Lufeng, that broke into protests in 2011, with villagers calling for real democratic elections. They wanted action on corrupt land deals in which the government sold their land to developers without proper compensation — a frightfully common story, I’m afraid. To make the long story short, the villagers won the right to elect a new village leadership.

  Protests broke out again in Wukan a couple of months ago after the democratically elected leader of the village, Lin Zulian, was jailed for corruption. He made a public confession on Chinese state television. When the villagers staged more protests in response to what all signs point to as a spurious prosecution and a forced public confession, riot police moved in, arresting villagers. Anxious to avoid a repeat of events in 2011, the authorities were also far more aggressive in dealing with foreign journalists trying to cover the story. I think this was retribution, four years delayed, against the village of Wukan for an experiment many Communist Party leaders surely saw as a dangerous precedent.

  This experiment was, in my view, doomed from the start. How could the elected leaders possibly hope to resolve these land issues when leaders at every level over their heads had been complicit, and not only hoped their experiment would fail but had a clear interest in seeing land deals of this kind continue? The Financial Times reported in 2011 that 40 percent of local government revenue in this part of Guangdong came from land financing, basically the sale of cheap village land to property developers. In many cities, the percentage is even higher, and the incentive to take village land for profit is a huge driver of the kinds of cases of abuse and resistance I document.

  How does all this fit in with Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive?

  In spite of all of Xi’s talk about the need to strike tigers, or senior officials, as well as flies, I sense that local officials are more empowered than ever to take their own course. I worry that at the local level there is even less oversight than before. We saw this in the recent Wukan crackdown, when all of the information coming out was from the local government and police — something I also wrote about. So I think we could see more, not less, abuse of this kind under Xi.

  As I suggested earlier, cases of abuse in urban villages are actually far more common than coverage, particularly in English, would lead you to believe. The execution of villager Jia Jinglong was recently in the international headlines about China. Jia’s crime was to murder the man responsible for the forced demolition of his home. That demolition was part of an urban village regeneration project started back in 2009, and very similar to the one underway in “Diamond Village.” Another recent headline in the New York Times read: “A Chinese Farmer’s Execution Shows the Pitfalls of Rapid Urbanization.” But it’s about more than just urbanization. It’s about lack of real rule of law, and lack of mechanisms of consultation like those hoped for in Wukan.

  Can you fill in readers a bit more on Jia and what you think he stands for in the minds of many Chinese familiar with his case?

  Jia Jinglong became a symbol of injustice for many Chinese, and his execution provoked fierce debate over unfairnesses in the system, and the impossibility of seeking recourse through legal channels. This is something I think you can see clearly in my book, the way villagers find it virtually impossible to be heard. Again, we see stories like this happening all the time. Back in May, a man named Fan Huapei was gunned down by police in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province. When I saw that the case stemmed from a forced property demolition, I did a quick search and found that, yes, the village in question was another urban village facing regeneration. It was home to about 500 local village families and more than 50,000 migrant workers. A chatroom post by a local resident pre-dating the tragedy said district leaders “regard laws as so much dung, and the ordinary peoples’ lives and property as so much livestock.” Fan had stabbed three men to death in a conflict over the forced demolition of his tenement property, a source of rental income from migrants. His case was eerily like that of Guangzhou villager Li Qizhong, whose story I tell in my book. I remember Li telling me on one of my visits to his “nail house” — the term in Chinese for a property holding out against demolition — that violence was the only language government leaders understood, and so he would speak to them in their language.

  Last but by no means least, the last year has been an incredibly eventful and often worrisome period for two issues that you track very closely: control of media on the mainland and freedom of speech in Hong Kong. Two places I go to in order to keep up with developments relating to these topics are the China Media Project and the Hong Kong Free Press. What other sources would you recommend as worth checking out? Is there someone who is consistently doing good work on them that readers of this blog might want to follow?

  Media and publishing in Hong Kong are certainly under greater and greater pressure. The case of the missing booksellers has gotten a lot of international attention this year, highlighting interference by Chinese authorities but problems have been going on a lot longer than that. The great thing about Hong Kong is that this is a place where we can still stand up and push back. This is why a number of us recently got together to relaunch the Hong Kong chapter of PEN, the international writers’ group. We want to promote and defend freedom of expression in Hong Kong, and to promote literary creation of all kinds, in both Chinese and English. So I encourage anyone interested to follow us or become involved. We have plenty of interesting events in store.

  Hong Kong is also seeing a burst of start-up activity in the media. You mentioned Hong Kong Free Press, which publishes in English, and they are a great source. One of my favorite Chinese-language outlets is Initium, launched last year by veteran journalist Zhang Jieping. I think they manage quite well to cover affairs in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan in ways that others don’t. Some of their reporters are escapees, in fact, from mainland media.

  In retrospect, I think we could say that ten years ago we were spoilt for choice if we wanted rational, intelligent commentaries, or even in-depth reporting, from mainland Chinese media. A lot of those voices have disappeared, or at least gone underground for the time being to private WeChat forums, or old-fashioned e-mail networks. Just this year, for example, we saw the demise of Consensus Net, which had been a leading platform for writing from Chinese intellectuals. I still turn almost daily to Caixin Media, which has maintained its professional standards, even if there is less it can cover.

  Increasingly, I find I am turning to more classic readings of Communist Party discourse. And that means, unfortunately, daily digs into the official People’s Daily to read the tea leaves as best I can. Chinese President Xi Jinping has recently pushed himself as “the core,” which suggests he is positioning himself for the next major Party meeting a year from now. What happens in the next year will tell us a lot about what direction China and China’s media are heading. I am anxiously watching those signs, and readers are of course welcome to follow my writings at the China Media Project.

• China Media Project - http://cmp.hku.hk/~/staff/david-bandurski/

  David is the editor of the China Media Project website and a frequent commentator on Chinese media. His writings have appeared in Far Eastern Economic Review, the Wall Street Journal, Index on Censorship, the South China Morning Post and other publications. He received a Human Rights Press Award in 2007 for an investigative piece for the Far Eastern Economic Review on China’s use of professional associations to enforce Internet censorship guidelines. David was also co-recipient of a Merit Prize in Commentary in 2006.

• New York Times - https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/china-bandurski-guangzhou-urban-village/

  Q. and A.: David Bandurski on the Villages Within China’s Cities
  By Patrick Boehler November 3, 2015 1:09 am November 3, 2015 1:09 am
  Photo
  A man on the remains of a demolished house in Xian village in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou this year.
  A man on the remains of a demolished house in Xian village in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou this year.Credit David Bandurski

  Read in Chinese | 点击查看本文中文版

  By the end of 2011, for the first time in China’s history, more Chinese lived in cities than in the countryside, according to official figures, as millions of people migrated to urban areas in search of better lives.
  Photo
  David Bandurski
  David BandurskiCredit Sara Yurich

  In his new book, “Dragons in Diamond Village,” David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, writes about “urban villages,” formerly rural spaces engulfed by expanding cities. In an interview, he discussed the important role these enclaves have played in supporting China’s economic boom by offering cheap housing to millions of migrant workers.
  Q.

  What are urban villages?
  A.

  Basically, they are bizarre pockets of rural China right inside the city. These villages were overtaken by cities as they expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, swallowing up their farmland. Once this happened, the villagers built tenements on top of their old village housing plots, their own homes. They rented these apartments to migrant workers coming into the city, who couldn’t afford to live in residential blocks. Eventually, urban villages that might have been home to 2,000 or 3,000 villagers became home to migrant populations of 40,000 or even 70,000 people.
  Photo
  Credit

  You can be in the center of Guangzhou, walk down an alley and find yourself inside a cramped village space where the streets have the same pattern they might have had a century ago. The buildings are often so close that they nearly touch, and sometimes even shut out the sunlight. In Guangzhou, in the main urban development area, there are 138 urban villages. But they can be found in just about every city in China, so there are thousands and thousands of them. They are the secret ingredient not just of urbanization in China, but also of the country’s overall economic growth. Without the cheap housing they provide, populations of cheap migrant labor couldn’t be sustained in major manufacturing centers.
  Q.

  You looked at one village in particular, Xian — the “Diamond Village” of your title, for the high value of its land to developers — and its leader, the Communist Party secretary Lu Suigeng. What does his story tell us?
  A.

  His story is very common. Lu and his family dominated village politics and business, including land deals, going back to the 1980s. Xian’s land and property assets were extremely valuable, given the village’s position in the middle of Guangzhou’s new central business district, Pearl River New Town. So when the time came to demolish the village and build a new development in its place, the villagers were afraid they would lose everything, and they staged a protest movement that lasted for years.

  Corruption is endemic at the village level in China. [President] Xi Jinping is talking about the need to address corruption happening right beside the people. And there’s no better example of this kind of low-level corruption than what we see happening in village land grabs and forced demolitions, which are leading causes of unrest in China. Many city governments across China rely heavily on revenue from land sales, so there’s a lot of incentive to grab land, which can then be sold to developers. We tend to think these villages are in the countryside, but most in fact are in the cities.
  Photo
  A government poster reading “I Love Xian Village. I Have a Dream” advocating the village’s demolition in 2012.
  A government poster reading “I Love Xian Village. I Have a Dream” advocating the village’s demolition in 2012.Credit David Bandurski
  Q.

  Your book describes local villagers as a community of rights defenders.
  A.

  Like other rights defenders in China, they just want a fair deal. But they find, as I document in my book, that the system shuts door after door. The petitioning system, which allows Chinese to seek audiences with officials, doesn’t work. It’s an endless wheel. The courts usually get them nowhere. Security police harass them. In some cases, the villagers become more and more radicalized, and they find support and advice in others like them.

  The more I watched the rights defense actions taken by various villagers, the more I realized that there was also a cultural component. For hundreds of years, these villages intermarried and shared community celebrations like the Dragon Boat Festival — the annual festival around which the rights defense movement in Xian eventually took shape. There are already strong links between the villages, and when they share a common threat in demolition, it’s only natural for them to come together.
  Q.

  Have you seen any improvement in governance as a result of the rights defense movements you followed?
  A.

  Unfortunately, no. This is a revealing point, I think, about Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign. We have a lot of focus in the news on senior leaders who have fallen, and about the many thousands of leaders who have been disciplined. But for ordinary villagers facing unfair land seizure or forced demolition of their property, there are still no good avenues for justice.

  In the beginning, when I went to Xian, it had a wall around it, basically quarantining it. The wall was built by the local subsidiary of one of China’s most powerful real estate companies, Poly Group, which is connected to senior leadership figures. Until 2010, the chairman of Poly was He Ping, the son-in-law of Deng Xiaoping. So you can see how the fate of a tiny urban village like Xian is tied up with bigger questions of power.
  Photo
  Tenement buildings crowded around the Xian village pond in 2013.
  Tenement buildings crowded around the Xian village pond in 2013.Credit David Bandurski
  Q.

  What about the argument that developing the village is just part of economic modernization, and people’s lives will actually improve as a result?
  A.

  That’s the argument you hear. Urban villages are cramped and dirty places, and if they are redeveloped into clean, modern neighborhoods, everyone will benefit. The problem is that corruption means there is no transparency about the process for the local villagers. They get low or no compensation and are left out of the decision about what kind of community to rebuild. This is why the villagers in Xian felt that they had no choice but to agitate for the removal of their party leader.

  Then there’s the question of the tens of thousands of migrants who live in urban villages like Xian. Once they are kicked out, where do they go? They have to move on to other urban villages, just as cramped and probably farther on the outskirts of the city.

  So the process of redevelopment usually displaces two types of rural people all at once, leaving behind luxury property developments for the minority super-rich. Party officials want clean and modern city landscapes that make a strong political statement about their competence as planners. But no planning is done for the migrant workers themselves.

  In this sense, urban villages are absolutely essential. Without them, it would be virtually impossible to house the millions of migrant workers floating in China’s cities.

  Follow Patrick Boehler on Twitter @mrbaopanrui.

• ChinaFile - https://www.chinafile.com/contributors/david-bandurski

  David Bandurski
  Affiliations:

  China Media Project
  Lantern Films

  David Bandurski is a researcher at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project and editor of the project’s website. He is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village, a book of reportage about urbanization in China (Penguin Random House, 2015), and co-author of Investigative Journalism in China, a book of eight cases on Chinese watchdog journalism. In addition to his work with the China Media Project, David is a producer of Chinese independent films through his Hong Kong production company, Lantern Films. His latest feature production, Nailhouse, is currently in post-production.

• Amazon -

  David Bandurski is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Far Eastern Economic Review, The South China Morning Post and other publications. He received a Human Rights Press Award in 2008 for his investigation into internet censorship in China. Currently an analyst and editor at the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, he also produces Chinese independent films and documentaries through his production company, Lantern Films. He lives in Hong Kong.

• Hong Kong Free Press Web site - https://www.hongkongfp.com/2015/11/03/hkfp-interview-veteran-china-watcher-david-bandurski-on-the-back-alleys-of-urbanising-china/

  HKFP Interview: Veteran China watcher David Bandurski on the ‘back alleys of urbanising China’
  3 November 2015 12:20
  Vivienne Zeng
  9 min read

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  Award-winning journalist and China media analyst David Bandurski will launch his new book, Dragons in Diamond Village, at the Fringe Club in Central, Hong Kong on Tuesday afternoon. After a decade of research and investigative reporting, Bandurski takes us into the world of Chinese villagers who were forced to give away their land as cities expanded. In an interview ahead of the book launch, Bandurski told HKFP about the challenges he faced in writing Dragons in Diamond Village and his views of the latest developments on China’s media scene.
  dragons in diamond village

  David Bandurski and his new book. Photo: David Bandurski.

  HKFP: Tell us a little bit about your experience writing Dragons in Diamond Village. How did you come up with the idea? How did you find and interview the characters in your book?

  Bandurski: The book was a long process. It began more than 10 years ago, shortly after I arrived at the University of Hong Kong, where I specialise in Chinese media research. One of our earliest fellows at the Journalism & Media Studies Centre was a professor from Shanghai’s Fudan University, Lu Xinyu. She had written extensively about independent documentaries in China, and the treasure trove she brought along included a documentary called “Sanyuanli” by Ou Ning — a wonderful black-and-white film about an urban village in northwest Guangzhou.

  Quite typical of urban villages in south China, Sanyuanli was a dense tenement community enclosed by the newer city, built by the local Sanyuanli villagers themselves on top of their housing plots. The village had its own rich history, going back centuries. But by that point the farmland was gone, and the tenements were now home to tens of thousands of migrant workers from the countryside. This rental income sustained the village’s original inhabitants, who numbered just a few thousand. In Chinese, this process is called “farming property.” I’d never seen anything like it. These were pockets of rural China right in the middle of the city.
  dragons in diamond village

  The Xian Village ruins in Guangzhou, still home to thousands of migrant workers today, with skyscrapers of the central business district behind. Photo: David Bandurski.

  Within weeks, I had made my first visit through the alleys of Sanyuanli — and I was totally enchanted. Sure, the village was dark and cramped, the buildings sometimes so close they shut out the sunlight (“handshake buildings,” they have been called). But it was clear that they played an absolutely essential role too, offering a foothold in the city to rural migrant workers. We always hear about China’s property boom, but in fact the bulk of new residential building is vastly out of reach for the new urban majority, by which I mean migrant workers.

  So I knew immediately that I wanted to write about these places. Getting at the stories in the book, though, took a lot more time and effort. There are 138 urban villages inside Guangzhou’s main urban area. I explored dozens of them over the years, each time I made it to the city. Eventually, I decided to focus the main story on Xian Village, an ancient community in the middle of Guangzhou’s central business district that has faced the prospect of demolition and redevelopment since 2009. The book’s title refers to the tradition of parading dragon boats during the annual Duanwu festival, an important part of village identity and tradition in Xian that ultimately gave shape in 2009 to a campaign by villagers to fight local corruption that threatened the community’s future. Xian has been called “Diamond Village” owing to the immense value of its land and property holdings.

  HKFP: Did you run into any difficulties reporting in Guangzhou?

  Bandurski: I did have one close call with local security thugs in Xian Village in August 2012, after I slipped into the village at dusk. The village was walled off from the rest of the city at the time and the situation inside was dire. That episode is in the book, so I won’t say more than that.

  Reporting on the ground is not a difficulty so much as a challenge. It just takes time and endurance. What proves nearly impossible, when as in my case you’re also trying to investigate various land deals and village businesses, is getting companies or government agencies to respond to questions you have. You hit a wall almost every time. So I spent a lot of time sifting through whatever documents I could track down — company reports, court cases, news archives.

  HKFP: What was your most memorable experience writing the book?

  Bandurski: I can think of a lot of experiences. But there’s one in particular that actually, looking back, should have made it into the book but didn’t. And unfortunately it’s one of the funniest. It happened one morning after I had tried to sit in on a court case in Guangzhou in which one of my characters, Ah Peng, was contesting his detention by police. I won’t get into the details, more of which are in the book, but that whole morning at the court building, as things went sour, the officer routinely assigned to Ah Peng as a kind of security minder, the agent of what in China is called “stability preservation,” had been slouching in one of the chairs in the lobby. He was a big guy with this glowering look. You could say he was the face of repression.
  dragons in diamond village

  Xian Village tenements viewed over the ancient village pond. Photo: David Bandurski.

  OK, but later on that morning, after the case was postponed, Ah Peng and I were taking a taxi back to the centre of town, where I was staying. There was this cop show playing on the little television screen on the back of the taxi seat right in front of me, a news show of some sort. And all of a sudden, there was Ah Peng’s security minder, all dressed up in his police uniform. “Hey, look!” I said to Ah Peng, “There’s the guy from the court.” He was so excited he pulled out his mobile and called the officer. “We just saw you on TV!” he told him. It was an interesting look at the dynamics of stability preservation, and it made me think about how the officer himself might see his relationship with this villager turned rights defender, this man who just wanted fairness.

  HKFP: What does the Xian Village story say about China’s land ownership system and land reform?

  Bandurski: Well, all of the stories in my book deal with this question, in fact. Land is still so fundamental to both local and national economics and politics. The cities need rural land, not just for urban development, but to generate growth and revenue. Many cities rely heavily, if not chiefly, on land financing — which means usually that they take land cheaply from villagers, which creates the kind of pain you see in my book, and then sell it on to property developers. The government stands right in the middle of this lucrative process, and it’s unfortunately a recipe for unfairness and corruption.

  One of the biggest tragedies is that the focus in planning has not really been on the new urban population. You hear all the time about how many tens of millions of rural Chinese will be entering the cities, or already have. And we assume that this generates demand for residential property, which should be the case. But there is a serious disconnect. The new properties being built are not for these populations. They are mostly for property investment and speculation. The “rural” migrants entering China’s cities still need to land in “rural” spaces there — which is why urban villages play such an important role.

  HKFP: Can you put on your media analyst hat and tell us how the media scene and media practices in China have changed since President Xi Jinping came into power in 2012?

  Bandurski: That’s not a pretty story, unfortunately. Things have gotten much, much worse for Chinese journalists since 2012, and I suspect that things will get worse still before we see any sort of improvement. This is part of an overall tightening of ideology under Xi, which reflects the Party’s sense of difficult times. Whole topics that were once possible to talk about in the media, like civil society or judicial independence, have now become taboos.
  Tianjin blast aftermath. Photo: EPA

  Ruins of the Tianjin chemical explosion. Photo: EPA.

  We used to see, in past years, quite a lively professional media scene in China, despite strong controls on the media. So for stories like the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, or the high-speed rail tragedy in 2011, we would see newspapers, magazines, websites and social media all pushing in their own way. This year the silence was eerie. There was very little exciting activity happening at all until we had the explosions in Tianjin. Tianjin was a rare bright spot, and it showed us how new changes to media technology might be assisting journalists who still have a hunger to get the story. For example, news apps and platforms like WeChat have become very important. But I’m not holding my breath.

  HKFP: Alibaba said last week it is teaming up with Sichuan Daily Group to build a new media platform in China. This is not the first time a traditional media company has joined hands with technology giants for new media experiments. What do you think of this trend?

  Bandurski: This is part of an inevitable trend we’re seeing in media markets around the world — the integration of digital and traditional platforms. The new giants on the block in China are the tech companies like Alibaba and Tencent. They are becoming powerful drivers not just of media, but of economic activity more broadly. Just think of the immense power of e-commerce in China, and services like Alipay. It’s hard to say what trends like this will mean. But the increasing influence of companies like this is a two-way street, so expect the unexpected.

• China Digital Times - http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/03/192026/

  David Bandurski on “Dragons in Diamond Village”

  Award-winning writer and independent film producer David Bandurski is the editor of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong where he researches and writes about Chinese journalism. His book, “Dragons in Diamond Village” (Penguin Australia 2015), will come out in the United States on October 25 from Melville House. Vividly narrated, Bandurski’s non-fiction book breathes life into the “tales from the back alleys of urbanizing China” through powerful portraits of villagers he meets. I corresponded with Bandurski about the book.

  China Digital Times: In “Dragons in Diamond Village” (Penguin Australia 2015), you say that you shared stories of your boyhood in Oklahoma and how you found yourself in China with your interviewees. How did you find yourself in China?

  David Bandurski: Well, that story actually does begin in Oklahoma. It so happens that I attended what is still one of the very few public schools in the state to offer Asian languages. I studied Japanese beginning in seventh grade. My twin brother studied Chinese and was one of the first (if not the first) American high school students to live and study in Shenzhen in 1988. His year in China was cut short by the political events of the following Spring. Anxiously, we watched the live coverage of Tiananmen unfold on the still-young CNN network. That’s still one of my earliest and deepest impressions of China.

  I started learning Chinese myself in high school, but it wasn’t until graduate school years later that I uprooted myself and decided to start over with Chinese at Nanjing University. The changes happening in China—and especially, I thought, in nearby Shanghai—were a lot more interesting than the literary theory in which I was then immersing myself. I was hooked. I’m still hooked.

  CDT: What sparked your interest in writing about “urban village regeneration” projects? How did you shift your focus from migrant workers to urban villagers in Guangzhou?

  DB: After arriving in Hong Kong 12 years ago, I made regular trips across to the cities of the Pearl River Delta. Hong Kong was a great base of operations, but I was still interested primarily in China stories. In the course of my media research at the University of Hong Kong, I became acquainted with the emerging movement of independent filmmaking in China, and I saw Ou Ning’s documentary “Sanyuanli,” about the urban village of the same name on the northwestern fringes of Guangzhou. I plugged the term “urban village” into my news database before I’d even finished watching the film. There was a great sub-current of coverage of urban villages in the Guangzhou press, in tabloids like the Southern Metropolis Daily. I devoured it all, much of it about the gloomy conditions in these “islands in the city,” these strange slums built on rural land in the midst of the city. But after making several trips, I glimpsed another story behind these gloomy headlines. These places were sanctuaries for migrant workers in cities that were often hostile to them, even as the booming economy relied heavily on their labor. So I started writing stories about the “rural” migrant workers who carved out new lives in these strangely “rural” urban enclaves. It was only years later, when the drive to demolish many of these villages intensified, that I turned my focus to the lives of the local villagers.

  CDT: How did the urban regeneration projects impact relationships between migrant workers and urban villagers?

  DB: Well, when it comes to urban village regeneration, the lives of migrant workers are really considered by no one. They can’t hope to benefit in any way. No one offers them compensation, lowballed or otherwise. They are simply expected to move on. Which they do—usually to other urban villages further out on the margins of the city. Generally, there is a strong sense of local identity among urban villagers in Guangzhou. They are rooted in the land and culture, and see themselves as entitled relative to the migrant workers who occupy their rental properties. Economically, though, the local villagers rely on migrant workers for their income through rental housing, a process that is sometimes called “farming property,” or zhongfang. I love that term, because it offers a clue to just how rural the mentality remains, even as villagers are becoming landlords in these places.

  CDT: In the current era of CCP stability maintenance you describe the petitioning system as a trap. The leaders see the petitioners as a threat to their power and stability. Were villagers encouraged to submit petitions? How did you find out that only two out every thousand of petitions were ever resolved? If the petitioning system is broken, what other means do villagers have to protest as they are uprooted?

  DB: First off, I have not systematically researched petitioning in China. In this respect I rely on the studies of scholars like Yu Jianrong, who have conducted systematic studies. Yu’s well-known study, “Investigation Into the Letters and Calls System and Thoughts on Reform,” published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, found that only two out of every thousand petitioners even receive reply slips for their petitions (Chinese report). But this study was released in 2004, predating the regime of stability maintenance that took shape in the Hu Jintao era, when the focus really shifted to intercepting petitioners. The only other avenue for villagers and other rights defenders should be the courts. But lack of judicial independence means that this avenue is closed. In fact, another Yu Jianrong study found that 60 percent of petitioners had first attempted resolution through the courts. Now, in Xi Jinping’s China, even the phrase “judicial independence” is off limits. So things have hardly improved.

  My interest in the book is to narrow the focus and document the petitioning process as a piece of the stories I tell. There is the case of Huang Minpeng, who in fact receives two reply slips when he petitions over the seizure of his ancestral land. But these reply slips simply refer him back down through the bureaucracy, until he is returned to the very same township government that took his land in the first place.

  CDT: “Dragons in Diamond Village” pits the alleged perpetrators like Lu Suigeng against the villagers who are portrayed as victims. Did you meet any villagers whose lives improved after the demolition process? Were any villagers paid off to help in the demolition process in exchange for profit?

  DB: I’m not sure I entirely accept the premise that the villagers are simply victims. All of the stories I tell are about villagers who decide to stand up. And they stand up not against regeneration or demolition per se, but against the corrupt way that these projects are handled. That’s a point I think I make quite explicitly in the book. My sources in Xian Village make it clear themselves. They are not opposed to development; they are opposed to corrupt and speculative projects that are rationalized as “development” but gamble with their legacies and livelihoods.

  Unfortunately, I did not meet villagers whose lives improved as a result of the demolition process. This is true even of Li Qizhong, whose story of resistance has a kind of happy ending. As for Xian Village, whose nickname is “Diamond Village,” the future remains to be seen.

  CDT: Did you worry about your safety as you were tracking down Lu Suigeng’s money trail? Who was most helpful to you in figuring out his connections and what was the process like unraveling his networks?

  DB: To some extent, yes. I was reporting the Xian Village story at a time when things there were frankly quite scary. The environment changed toward the end—though I don’t want to give away too much. At one point, a veteran Chinese journalist who knew what I was up to urged me to tread carefully. Every time I phoned up this or that company, I was afraid word might get back to Lu Suigeng or those with whom he was involved.

  I only wish I could say that I “unraveled” a network. At best, I think, I picked around the edges, and even that was a herculean labor. Investigation is a time-consuming, dispiriting and expensive process—particularly if you are not working with institutional support. All of my phone calls and e-mails to village companies and developers were essentially for naught. If a phone number did reach a human being—and very often, they didn’t—no one saw an upside in speaking. At one point, I hired a Hong Kong firm to pull the registration and shareholding records for a laundry list of associated businesses in Guangzhou. They also made inquiries by phone and generally came up empty-handed.

  In the end, the strands I was able to pick free relied largely on documents. For example, I was able to track down company registration documents in Hong Kong related to Lu Suigeng’s family. These led me, through property records, to another company that was ultimately connected to the local Poly Group subsidiary involved in the village regeneration. One of the village’s hotel properties also had a Hong Kong connection. And court records in Guangdong could also provide pieces of the puzzle of these companies and their deals with the village.

  CDT: You write, “I quickly found, however, that even the simplest of questions led me down blind alleys as murky as those between the tenements themselves.” What were the murkiest moments in your research for this book?

  DB: Well, I’ve already talked about the frustrations of trying to get even the most basic information about the village’s business deals, or about the family controlling it. But one of my biggest frustrations was a period of many months in 2012 when it was almost impossible for me to get into the village at all. I was stopped several times trying in various ways to get inside. At one point, I waited for almost two hours in an alleyway back behind the McDonald’s on Huangpu Road West. There’s a place there with an iron door leading into the wall outside the village, which I knew led into the dark northwestern corner of the tenements. Finally, a migrant worker came down the alley and unlocked the door with his own key, and was kind enough to let me in. After I had a close call that I describe in the book, I decided—and other villagers suggested—it just wasn’t worth it to keep sneaking in. So from that point on until the end of the year, when things started to shift politically, I stayed clear and met people on the outside.

  CDT: Has the crackdown on corruption in the Xi Jinping era and the long-awaited arrest of Lu Suigeng’s partner Cao Jianliao set higher standards for the way urban regeneration projects are carried out in China? Do you think the capture and prosecution of Lu Suigeng would provide some justice to the villagers?

  DB: In most, if not all, of the cases I’ve seen of village demolition, it’s quite a stretch to talk about “urban regeneration” at all. In the sense, I mean, of projects that have any broader benefit for urban society in China. While the public interest is often used as a justification, these are quite uniformly private development projects involving upscale residential, office and retail. Urban villagers have little or no say in the process of redevelopment.

  I was back in Xian Village this past August for the sixth anniversary of the resistance movement, a huge banquet held on the old school sports ground. I spoke to a number of people attending from other urban villages in Guangzhou, and their struggles with corruption were very much ongoing. The Xian Village case was an inspiration to them, but so far it has had no impact on governance at the local level. That shouldn’t surprise us, actually. The crackdown on corruption has been a crackdown on individuals, but the system that feeds corruption is unchanged. Petitioning is still largely hopeless. The courts are still dead-ends. The capture of Lu Suigeng might have symbolic value for Xian Village, but justice might still remain elusive.

  CDT: Will it be more difficult with the publication of this book to revisit the villages you described?

  DB: I certainly hope not. I remain very interested in the villages, their histories and their futures. For a thorny combination of issues I won’t get into, I haven’t been back in Guangzhou since August. But I have every confidence I’ll be back before long. It’s really a wonderful city, and its urban villages are among its most astonishing surprises. I encourage anyone who finds themselves there to try visiting one of the classic villages, like Shipai, located not far from the “Diamond Village” of Xian.

  CDT: What do you see as the future of collectively held land in China’s villages?

  DB: It’s difficult to say, but I think China will have to move in the direction of giving rural villagers a greater say over the sale and development of their land. This is of course a massive political issue. First of all, there is the extremely sensitive issue of whether or not to privatize land in China — obviously quite a radical departure for a country ruled by a nominally communist political party. Many scholars in China have advised this course, saying it would protect the rights of villagers and encourage large-scale technology-intensive agriculture. It’s worth pointing out that many, many Chinese who retain shares in collective land back home in the countryside are more or less permanently residing in cities already, and haven’t farmed their land for sometimes two or three generations. Others say that the goals of rights protection and modernizing agriculture can be reached even under the current system of collective land ownership, in which villagers have rights to the use of their land but don’t own the land. There are already pilot programs underway in places like Sichuan to reform the rights to residential land held by villagers. So there is certainly a recognition that things need to change.

  But setting aside for a moment the issues of land privatization or land-use reform, there are a few looming issues that I hope come out clearly through the stories in my book. The first is that the current system of land financing in China’s cities, by which local governments profit immensely from the sale of cheap land taken from villages, needs to change. Right now, the land system in China is a huge honeypot for political and business elites. Until this changes, there will be a huge appetite for cheap village land—and keeping land cheap means depriving villagers of their rights, just as keeping labor cheap means keeping rural migrants in a constant state of urban uncertainty. A related issue is rule of law. More independent courts would allow villagers to seek real restitution. But right now, China is stepping backward on rule of law. Even the phrase “judicial independence” has become taboo in the media. That doesn’t bode well for land-related cases, or any other cases where citizens seek basic fairness. The courts are in the background in all of the stories I tell in the book, and they never offer relief in cases of land seizure and forced demolition.

  Looming behind all of this is the question of political reform. Ultimately, China will need better mechanisms allowing political participation by China’s new urbanites in the planning and policies that impact their welfare. These might be urban villagers. They might be migrant workers, who are now in a kind of permanent orbit around the city. Or they might be homeowners or tenants. Which is why I suggest that the over-arching question facing all of the characters in my book—and several are very aware of it—is the question of citizenship, of rights and engagement. China’s urban future isn’t about steel and concrete.

  CDT: How does this research relate to your work analyzing the Chinese media?

  DB: The work is quite separate in obvious ways. But through the course of this book, my background in media research has been quite helpful actually. In some cases, what was covered (or not covered) in the local press could provide another piece of the story. This project was really a chance, though, to get back out and look for stories in the world—as opposed to stories glimpsed through the lens of the Chinese media. In fact, I don’t see myself as either a journalist or an academic, or confined by these roles. Ultimately, I’m interested in the stories and the context, whether the issue is China’s media, urbanization and social activism, or the next area of interest. Research-based essays can be one way to tell the story—for example, about changes in China’s media or political scene. Creative non-fiction is another. And then there is filmmaking . . . But that’s a topic for another time.

  CDT: What’s next for you?

  DB: Well, I have a project in the works on forced confessions, an issue I’ve been obsessed with for a couple of years now. As it happens, the topic is now quite current—given Xi Jinping’s active use of this mechanism of political control. But time is getting the best of me. We’ll just have to see.

  Bandurski will discuss “Dragons in Diamond Village” at the Bookworm Literary Festival in Beijing on March 13.

• Diplomat - http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/change-and-control-in-chinas-media-interview-with-david-bandurski/

  Change and Control in China's Media: Interview With David Bandurski

  The Diplomat speaks with China Media Project’s David Bandurski about the recent past and future of Chinese media.
  tyler-roney-thumb
  By Tyler Roney
  March 18, 2014

  The Diplomat’s Tyler Roney speaks with David Bandurski, a China analyst, filmmaker, and journalist and editor at the China Media Project. Having written for the Far Eastern Economic Review, The Wall Street Journal, and the South China Morning Post, he has received numerous Human Rights Awards for his investigative commentaries. Bandurski continues to work with the University of Hong Kong Journalism and Media Center on CMP and with Lantern Films.

  First, can you tell us a bit about China Media Project?

  The history of the China Media Project goes back more than ten years now to 2003, to the SARS epidemic, Sun Zhigang and other stories of the day. In a sense, 2003 marked the culmination of a new generation of commercialized media in China. They were associated with the official Party media structure, yes, but they were also pursuing readers and advertisers in a still fledgling media market—and many of them saw themselves as working in the public interest rather than strictly in the Party’s interest. The Internet, though only really four or five years old in China at that time, was also revolutionizing communication. So the short of it is that you had newspapers, like Southern Metropolis Daily, with booming circulations, trying to make their mark professionally with meaningful news coverage that could potentially reach massive national audiences through Internet portals where millions would then comment in the margins.
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  There was no systematic research being done at the time about how this new pluralism of voices was possible in an environment where very strict controls were still in place. So that was the impetus behind the Project. In 2003, Ying Chan, the director of the Journalism and Media Studies Center, and Qian Gang, the former managing editor of one of China’s scrappiest new papers, Southern Weekly, launched the China Media Project here at the University of Hong Kong to monitor change in China’s media, in the context obviously of control. The last decade has been a whirlwind of change along with the relentless reassertion of control. We’ve gone from blogs, putting expression in the hands of Chinese in a way never before imagined, to the real-time world of the microblog. And meanwhile, the business of professional journalism in China has hobbled forward against incredible odds. It’s an exciting and rapidly changing field of inquiry.

  Complementary to our research, we have a regular fellows program in which we invite leading professional journalists to Hong Kong. The purpose is to support their work, and to allow substantive exchange that is not possible, or not very easy, inside China.

  What place do you think traditional media has in modern China? Do the infamous editorials from People’s Daily and Global Times hold the same sway they once did?

  For a number of years there was a sense in China that traditional media were in their halcyon days. While newspapers in the United States were shedding staff and shutting down foreign bureaus, and while the New York Times (for example) was making the shift from a newspaper with a website to a multimedia platform with a supplementary print edition, Chinese newspapers were booming. The thunder and lightning of the digital age was a long way off. China’s advertising market was growing by leaps and bounds. This was driven, again, by commercial metro newspapers and magazines. Meanwhile, the picture for Party media was more grim. Party newspapers, with their dull, boilerplate coverage of official announcements and CCP double-speak, were losing circulation rapidly, which presented the Party with an ongoing crisis of agenda-setting that first culminated, as I said before, in 2003.

  But the sense of optimism about the print market is now fading rapidly. Chinese traditional media, newspapers and magazines in particular, face an immense challenge from new media platforms like Sina Weibo and WeChat. The pressure has always been two-fold — on the one hand, pressure from the market, and on the other, pressure from propaganda controls. But this is truer right now than ever before. Traditional media are being squeezed between the floor and the ceiling. I’m guessing there will be a great deal of pain in China’s media market over the next decade, and we will probably see a lot of very ugly sensationalism, poor ethics and things like news extortion — or media holding negative coverage over the heads of companies and individuals for profit — as media try to avoid sinking in rough seas.

  In China’s information environment right now there is a crisis of credibility. Information controls mean it is very difficult for traditional media to build credibility with their audiences through strong and relevant coverage. At the same time there is a growing sense of disillusionment with Party publications and with the state-run broadcasters like China Central Television. Chinese turn increasingly to social media — to Sina Weibo and WeChat — to slake their thirst for information. But controls, once again, interrupt attempts at truth seeking. Rumors circulate, and before professional journalists can do the necessary work of reporting and verification, these incipient stories are shut down. The government wants to push its own “authoritative” version of events, but controls dissolve the credibility of its information, however true. Meanwhile, the government brands as “rumor” those shards of information on social media that may, in the end, offer the most factual account of events that are of real concern to the public.

  My favorite case in point is the PX protest movement in Dalian in 2011. This was a case of well-organized protest involving tens of thousands of people right in the middle of a major city. Millions of messages shot back and forth on social media, sharing pictures, videos, first-hand accounts, but the protests were never covered in the traditional media. The only report on China Central Television that night was an announcement that the PX chemical project in Dalian had been suspended. No explanation of why. Meanwhile, in the very same newscast, the Party leadership began its campaign against “rumors,” its way of legitimizing a crackdown on social media like Sina Weibo. So the “rumors” were the real news, and the “real news” was garbage. But if this isn’t sufficient illustration of the crisis, consider that the same newscast on China Central Television also ran a major bit of news about a new national income tax policy. A few days later, national tax authorities denied the policy’s existence, saying the document circulating on the web was a well-crafted fake. So CCTV was attacking social media as a hotbed of rumor while it reported — with a serious face and bullet points — a national tax policy that didn’t exist.

  On that note, you mentioned in a piece in February that China’s state media’s power has been waning since the 1990s. Would you care to elaborate on how and why that has happened?

  As I explained earlier, the emergence of a media market in China in the 1990s is one reason for the change. The phrase “media market” didn’t even exist in China until around the middle of the 1990s. But as the market developed, and as more commercial newspapers and magazines were available, you had choice. People in China were no longer just vessels to be filled with propaganda. They were media consumers, and they could vote with their pocketbook. Party newspapers, those traditional “mouthpieces” of the leadership at the city, provincial or national level, weren’t built for this sort of environment. They were chockfull of dry regurgitations of official speeches and Party jargon. Commercial newspapers offered local news, but also lifestyle sections, automobile sections, information about the property market. They offered relevance.

  You’ve also written on many of the subjects seen deleted from China’s increasingly isolated online world, from deleted Human Rights Day posts to criticism of Deng Xiaoping and the National People’s Congress. Can China expect an easing of such censorship in the future?

  Media control is an absolutely essential tool for the Chinese Communist Party in its maintenance of social and political stability. Barring any substantive progress on political reform in China, it’s impossible to imagine any real change in the environment for Chinese media. Real change hinges on a re-definition of the media’s role — as working in the public interest rather than in the Party’s interest. When China announced a new round of training in the Marxist View of Journalism last fall this was first and foremost a reminder to the media that the Party’s interests reign supreme. One of the central tenets of this so-called Marxist View of Journalism is the rejection of “Western” (Chinese hardliners would say that with a snarl) notions of freedom of speech.

  So far, Xi Jinping has signaled loud and clear that media control is a central priority, and the chill has been ongoing ever since the Southern Weekly incident last year. Xi’s leadership of a new Internet Security Group suggests he is taking the reins, and that the focus of media control is continuing to shift — as it has since around 2007 — to the Internet, and now social media. An easing? I wouldn’t put my money on it. But of course any apparent easing has to be seen in the context of ten years of tightening control. What we can count on is that media control will remain a major priority. That doesn’t mean, though, that media can’t make tentative steps forward. That has been the dynamic for the past decade — media working to do often ground-breaking work within a tough and shifting environment, and new technologies mixing things up.

Bandurski, David. Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China
Casey Watters
141.16 (Oct. 1, 2016): p92.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/

Bandurski, David. Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China. Melville House. Oct. 2016.320p. illus. maps, notes, index. ISBN 9781612195711. $27.99; ebk. ISBN 9781612195728. POL SCI

The traditions and lifestyle in rural Chinese villages are often overshadowed by the extreme urban growth China is experiencing. Journalist Bandurski (editor, Univ. of Hong Kong's China Media Project) here describes the lives and struggles of Chinese villagers. The book depicts the interwoven relationship between history and culture. The author presents a series of stories from Xian Village in Southern China where villagers struggled to protect their land in the face of development. The title comes from a story of resistance during the Dragon Boat festival and because "the dragon is a symbol of courage, perseverance, strength and wisdom, of nation and community, of the endurance of the culture and the people." This accurately captures the image Bandurski paints of the people of Xian Village. The narratives are entertaining and often read more like a novel in which, by the end, readers feel like part of the village. VERDICT This well-written and entertaining book will appeal to many readers.--Casey Watters, Singapore Management Univ.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Watters, Casey. "Bandurski, David. Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2016, p. 92+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464982298&it=r&asid=4912ff53029f980604218b47214af30e. Accessed 25 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A464982298
Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China
263.31 (Aug. 1, 2016): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China

David Bandurski. Melville House, $27.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-61219-571-1

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Hong Kong--based journalist Bandurski explores corruption in Chinese society through a very specific lens: the phenomenon of once-rural villages being overtaken by rapidly expanding cities. The main narrative involves Xian Village, which was absorbed by Guangzhou, China's third largest city. Set mainly between 2009 and 2014, this story involves village residents who refuse to sign demolition agreements to tear down their centuries-old homes, pitting them against the wishes of powerful locals. Bandurski weaves in other strands of resistance: a small businesswoman who finds herself entangled in an unsanctioned shopping center development and a rural villager who responds to losing his property rights in another village with protest. Bandurski also provides an impressive investigation into the convoluted trail of corruption at the heart of Xian Village's troubles. The organizational principle undergirding the narrative's interlocking pieces does not make itself readily apparent, and the jumps from scandal to scandal are discombobulating. Bandurski employs an engaging and clear voice that mixes the styles of reportage and memoir. At times, though, the writing includes too much reportorial detail when the reader hungers for deeper characterizations or more cultural context. The protagonists all read as noble ciphers standing up to indistinctly corrupt power. Nonetheless, the book provides an important and unique spotlight on the lives of those being run over roughshod by China's development. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285715&it=r&asid=11652bf40c321d1b7186e546dbbfd632. Accessed 25 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285715

Watters, Casey. "Bandurski, David. Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2016, p. 92+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA464982298&asid=4912ff53029f980604218b47214af30e. Accessed 25 Mar. 2017. "Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA460285715&asid=11652bf40c321d1b7186e546dbbfd632. Accessed 25 Mar. 2017.

• Insurgent Notes
  http://insurgentnotes.com/2016/12/review-david-bandurski-dragons-in-diamond-village-tales-of-resistance-in-urbanizing-china-2016/
  Word count: 3711

  Dec 28, ’16 11:39 AM
  Author Loren Goldner Categories Uncategorized

  In 2030, one billion Chinese will live in cities, two-thirds of the total population, or one of every eight people on the planet. At the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, 80 percent of the 400 million Chinese were rural; at the beginning of the Deng Xiaoping “reform era” in 1978, 70 percent of the population was still on the land. By 2012, 50 percent of China’s 1.4 billion people lived in cities. The post-1978 urbanization of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants, when complete, will amount to the largest migration in human history. Like much else about contemporary China, from total production, by way of the new nationwide high-speed railway network, to the dozens of new cities (largely unknown to the outside world and with populations in the millions), the dimensions of Chinese development are colossal. The book under review here takes us to one aspect of its dark underside. The slow rate of urbanization from the revolution to 1978 was the result of the conscious policy of the “hukou” system, a virtual Chinese apartheid putting urban residence, or even moving elsewhere, out of reach for the great majority of the peasantry. The hukou, which has been made more flexible in recent years but still plays a major role in controlling the movement of people, is essentially a local residence permit linked to one’s birthplace and providing access to an array of social services (education, healthcare, housing) in that birthplace and only there. For those born in the booming coastal cities of Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou, so much the better; the far greater part of the population born in remote and poor villages, is left with the choice of poverty, grinding out a meager living on the land, or joining the hundreds of millions of migrant laborers who live on the edge as second-class citizens in urban areas.

  The hukou has actually existed in different forms for 2,000 years, sometimes as part of a remarkably sophisticated census and tax system in earlier dynasties; in post-1949 China, the main objective of the hukou was preventing a mass movement off the land and the creation of the kinds of urban slums found in many underdeveloped countries, then and now. The result over time was, not unlike in the rural world of the former Soviet Union, the growth of a substantial population of effectively hidden unemployment or underemployment. This situation has not been overcome to this day, and is in fact one of the dilemmas which China’s ruling group confronts, namely integrating hundreds of millions of migrants, present and future, into a viable life in the cities. The basic economic strategy of Mao’s China was a systematic, planned exploitation of the peasantry to pay for urban industrial development. Whether farming small family plots or living in the communes formed in the 1950s, the peasantry sold agricultural products at controlled low prices fixed by the plan in return for more expensive industrial goods, in effect a process of planned primitive accumulation of the peasant surplus. This surplus fed the industrial sector, which actually averaged annual growth of 8–9 percent over the thirty years of China’s Stalinist planned economy, a very high rate for such a poor country.

  Even prior to Deng’s final consolidation of power two years after Mao’s death in 1976, some groups of peasants in poor areas such as Anhui province had banded together, sometimes clandestinely, to sell agricultural produce outside the controlled prices of the plan. Once the central state allowed this practice nationally, there was an initial burst, sometimes a 500 percent increase from previous levels, of agricultural production for sale in urban markets. Deng himself admitted with some candor that “it was as if a previously unknown army had appeared in the countryside” producing outside the plan. This explosion lasted into the early or mid-1980s, when local party elites were dismayed to discover peasants with incomes five times their own, and began a series of taxes and fees to tap this wealth for themselves. But this unplanned agricultural growth, combined with thousands of small, successful town and village enterprises (TVEs) producing everything from buttons to cigarette lighters to electronic goods, was the first general breakthrough of the reforms.

  During the same period, the large-scale movement of poor peasants to the booming cities of the coast, above all in Guangdong province, had also taken off, providing the cheap labor for China’s emergence as the world’s workshop. China in these decades and until ca. 2012 was benefitting from the so-called “demographic dividend” of a seemingly limitless supply of cheap labor from the countryside. (In 2012, for the first time, the total active population fell and has continued to fall. This, combined with intensified workers’ struggles, is part of the end of “cheap China.” The demographic dividend is over. Villages are increasingly populated by children of departed migrants, cared for by their grandparents.)

  These realities are the backdrop of the estimated 150,000 “incidents” now occurring in China every year. Mo Yan’s The Garlic Ballads (1988, banned in China in 1989 after the Tiananmen massacre) tells the story of peasants in one area encouraged to grow garlic by the local cadres, who then reject most of the crop because of overflowing warehouses, culminating in a riot in which the peasants storm party headquarters. This book was followed by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao’s Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants (English trans., 2006) a work of underground journalistic reportage conducted all over Anhui province, detailing further uprisings. Most of the estimated “incidents” are revolts against local party cadre in response to extortionist taxation or seizure of peasant lands for luxury housing and hotels or golf courses, not to mention ever-increasing urban strikes. David Bandurksi’s Dragons in Diamond Village takes us deep into this world. The author not only wrote about the struggles of soon-to-be displaced villagers, but also participated in them, with fluent Mandarin and tireless online detective work uncovering the financial and real estate machinations of local elites. Chinese “cities” are different in that their borders often include huge swaths of undeveloped land or farmland that will eventually be incorporated and developed.[1] The borders of greater Beijing encompass an area the size of Belgium; Chongqing, in western China, sometimes known as the largest city in the world, with a population of 30 million, actually has only 8 million people in the city proper. (But, between 2011 and 2013, China consumed 50 percent more concrete than the United States had consumed in the entire twentieth century). The idea is that such cities will absorb the villages and farms in their periphery over time. The authors cited in the footnote debunk the Western media myth of “ghost cities,” huge new areas of housing and office space with initially few or no residents, showing that in fact the Chinese state has its ways of filling them up, as in building 8–10 new universities in such a place and compelling students to move there, to be followed by restaurants, cafes, bookstores and thereafter, little by little, a regular urban population and urban life.

  But there is all too often, once again, a dark side to this process.

  Bandurski’s book shows in arresting detail the story of one village, hundreds of years old, that fought, and of the courageous residents who refused to roll over and play dead as Guangzhou, the dynamic capital of China’s booming Guangdong province, attempted to expel them, offering at most pennies on the dollar of the value of their land rights. (The state owns all land in China, but peasants are granted use of a plot of land, supposedly permanently, and others can lease land for 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 years.) As mentioned, Bandurski had worked with a number of individuals who refused to be bullied, intimidated or bought off. His complex story is ultimately centered on Xian Village as it was swallowed up by Guangzhou. Xian Village “lies at the heart of Guangzhou’s central business district, a small parcel of its formerly collectively held land (and) transformed in the space of five years, between 2005 and 2010, into a commercial property worth…about $303 million.”

  Lu Suigeng and members of his family were the local Communist Party officials who presided over this process, pocketing millions in “transfer fees” intended for village accounts after Xian Village’s collective farmland had been seized by the state and rezoned for non-agricultural purposes. “Lu Suigeng ran the village as a private fiefdom, monopolizing its business, politics and security,” in league with district officials and police, “who the villagers were certain were getting kickbacks.” As in so many cities around the world, hosting the Olympics for a few weeks is merely a pretext to seize valuable real estate for the long term. In Guangzhou’s case, hosting the 2010 Asian Games played the same role, as backdrop to the war for Xian Village, waged not only against long-term residents but also against the thousands of migrant workers who had settled there.

  Demonstrations demanding the removal of Lu Suigeng in August 2009 attracted thousands and were totally blacked out in China’s mainstream media. In spite of two weeks of sit-ins, Lu Suigeng failed to appear, stonewalled, and then unleashed a campaign of intimidation using cops, both plainclothes and in uniform. The main spark of the mobilization was an announced “regeneration” project that villagers knew meant their expropriation and expulsion. This was a protracted war of position, ultimately lasting years. The villagers over time tried every legal channel of appeal, petitioning at every level, and their petitions led only to official silence, bureaucratic run-around and thug violence.

  Bandurski introduces us to Huang Minpeng, a peasant from Hebu Village, somewhat to the north, which had already been razed. His years of struggle against “regeneration” had given him, a semi-literate who never finished primary school, a “rich informal education” in “law, land use rights policy, community organization.” After defeat in his home village, he became an organizer building networks in other villages facing the same fate. Huang’s struggle began in 2009 when district officials had a “signing ceremony” to requisition 208 acres of 22 economic cooperatives for a local university (creating universities is a common strategy in these types of expropriation: get the land for an ostensibly noble cause, then subdivide and sell off most of it for real estate scams). Various levels of leaders participated in the signing ceremony; everyone, in fact, except the villagers affected, who had been simply unaware of the negotiations.

  Bandurski introduces us in turn to the chengguan, “mercenary armies of quasi-police” who “handle the dirty business of urban order and cleanliness” and who “do the rough, insensitive and lawless jobs that the police want to keep at arm’s length,” as “fighters on the front lines of China’s urban assault on the countryside.”

  In this confrontation, the chengguan waged a “guerrilla war of intimidation.” Huang was arrested and detained; two days before his release, the chengguan and hundreds of cops seized Hebu Village while chengguan teams leveled the fields and the crops in them.

  He Jieling enters Bandurski’s book with her story of a different kind that begins, as in the case of Huang, with a festive spectacle, again attended by various levels of officialdom, to launch Ha Street in Guangzhou’s central Panyu District. Ha Street was promoted through various media, using corporate brand names such as Nike, Louis Vuitton and Starbucks, as another dream development opportunity. It was in fact a total sham that drew in the likes of He Jieling, a local descendant of “countless centuries,” a poor peasant descended from ancestors in the landowning class expropriated by the revolution. Becoming an activist and troublemaker was the farthest thing from He’s mind. She and her husband wanted to ride the ongoing real estate boom. She was drawn to Ha Street by the promise of a multiplex cinema to be opened there. Attracting thousands of moviegoers, such a cinema would feed into the shop spaces He Jieling leased. She planned a high-end beauty salon and a lottery ticket shop. She fronted roughly 400,000 yuan ($64,000) to sign the lease. It was all downhill from there, to total ruin. She renovated the beauty shop for another 500,000 yuan, and hired a staff of migrant workers. The management company delayed the grand opening but kept charging rent. The Asian Games that were supposed to be the backdrop for the commercial debut of Ha Street came and went. The building was unfinished; there were constant blackouts. He Jieling’s business license was constantly held up, for reasons unknown.

  At the celebration in December 2010 when the salon finally did open, a guest warned her of gossip that the management company was working with local criminal gangs. She dug further and discovered that her building had no planning permits at all. “Every one of the tenants had been swindled, not simply over construction delays and fees, but from the very start.” He Jieling began her struggle to have the laws enforced, unleashing “the storm that engulfed her entire family.” She was visited by a local official who tried to warn her off, and then by the plainclothes police. Thugs had already demanded payment for “protection.” She filed numerous official complaints. Thugs visited the salon daily. She was tailed by plainclothesmen. She plunged into online research. In March 2011, an unknown caller demanded that she surrender her businesses, and if she refused, her hands and feet would be cut off in front of her husband and son the next day. She posted an online appeal to continue the struggle after her death. The attack never took place, but the thugs kept “appearing from every direction.”

  In mid-August 2010, an attempted demolition of a meat and vegetable market in Xian Village led to a confrontation between riot police and chengguan on one side and up to 2,000 villagers on the other. By dawn, Xian Village was under police lockdown. A month later, five villagers were tried for attacking Lu Suigeng’s nephews in the melee. All were found guilty in kangaroo court fashion and sentenced to ten or eleven months in prison. When they were released, there was a wall surrounding the village, whose exterior was covered with pictures evoking a rosy future for its inhabitants after renovation.

  The cinema multiplex opened briefly and then closed for good, the final blow to all the people who, like He Jieling, had invested everything they had in Ha Street, often savings from years of migrant labor. “Every shopfront…displayed a broken dream.”

  One local official offered He Jieling enough cash to liquidate her debts if she would stop her whistleblowing, but she refused, choosing instead “the road to disgrace and ruin…All for a bit of dignity.” Further reports she filed with the police brought on an attack by ten men, forcing He to sign over her properties to cancel her debt. The first mention in the media of what had happened was an article about her failure to give the salon employees back pay. She did not, however, relent, and finally Guangdong Television ran a full documentary on the Ha Street scam, featuring He’s story. This was followed by an in-depth report in one of the feistier tabloids. Ha Street remained “a lie whose roots stretched down to some invisible and unaccountable source of power.” He Jieling and others teamed up organize further demonstrations. All the required applications to demonstrate were rejected; she was, in the grassroots expression, “dancing with shackles on.” Her network grew through the “138 Guanzhou villages” threatened by a similar fate. In 2012, the new Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinpeng announced the “Chinese dream” as the policy theme of his government. But, as Bandurksi wrote, “He Jieling’s dreams had been destroyed on Ha Street.”

  In the years in which He Jieling was being pulled further and further toward her and her family’s ruin, Huang Minpeng, of the razed Hebu Village, was getting his self-education as a petitioner in China’s bureaucratic maze. He wound up as a regular at People’s Park where petitioners in Guangzhou met to discuss their respective plights. He fell in with what became the “Thursday Club” made up of other villagers radicalized by similar experiences. They learned the contours of the maze by going through the futile petitioning process, the “hamster wheel,” as Bandurski calls it. Into this bureaucratic labyrinth exploded the fall of Bo Jilai, the disgraced high-profile mayor of Chongqing whose wife was convicted of murdering a British businessman, and whose own police chief had fled to the American consulate in Chengdu seeking asylum and telling his story. “Petitioning the American embassy” became a joke among the Guangzhou activists and one day in 2012 Huang Mingpeng and four comrades went to the United States consulate in Guangzhou with extensive documentation of their grievances. Unlike Chongqing’s police chief, they were set upon by twenty plainclothesmen. Huang Minpeng was jailed for ten days for creating a public disturbance and his petition died in the “rat’s nest” of the bureaucracy.

  Bandurski himself threw his energies into researching the empire of the Xian Village’s powerbroker Lu Suigeng, who had already faced down the mass protests mentioned above. This research, he found, led him “down blind alleys as murky as those between the tenements themselves.” He found, after detailing pages of interlocking companies “a bewildering knot of connections.” But it provided a portrait of “those who, like Lu Suigeng, could monopolize local politics, and therefore assets and resources, without any expectation of oversight…In China’s cult of official secrecy, nothing is guarded so religiously as the particulars of the powerful.” Bandurski’s long march through the maze of documents brought into focus a key figure in Lu Suigeng’s power: Cao Jianliao, Lu’s one-time immediate superior. Cao Jianliao, by 2013 deputy mayor of Guangzhou, was finally felled as the first local “tiger” in General Secretary Xi Jinpeng’s anti-corruption campaign against both “tigers and flies,” high officials and local bureaucrats. (Xi’s nationwide campaign targeted both “tigers”—the top-level corrupt bureaucrats—as well as the much more numerous “flies,” the local thousands of petty officials like Lu Suigeng.) But Bandurski’s story unfolds further before that campaign brings down Lu Suigeng. He recounts the 2012 jump to her death of Li Jie’e, whose house in Yangji Village, her sole source of rental income, had been demolished a few days before, while she was in jail. Nearby, Li Qizhong, another rare holdout in the largely razed village, had barricaded himself in his still-standing building with an arsenal of explosives. Through Li, Bandurski met other militant holdouts. Most of them were not radicals per se but merely citizen activists trying to hold the Communist Party to its own rhetoric and promises.

  The struggle of the Xian Villagers to bring down Lu Suigeng continued. The spectacular fall of Bo Xilai (as he was on the verge of being chosen for the CCP’s central committee) as well as Xi Jinpeng’s vows to fight corruption had changed the mood in the villagers’ favor. In fact, Lu Suigeng had been suspended from his local posts and was under investigation. “Conflicts over land-use rights were growing violent throughout the region.” In Xian Village itself, an elderly man was beaten unconscious by a demolition crew. Hundreds of villagers massed and blocked traffic in protest, and tore down the wall isolating the village for demolition. News spread through the internet while the official media blacked out the incident.

  Li Qizhong of Yangji village remained barricaded, alone, in his condemned house, with his arsenal prepared to fight to the end. Thugs and demolition crews destroyed the holdout houses one by one. Li’s internet account was eradicated. He finally accepted a payout that would buy “a decent apartment on the outskirts of the city.” His house was demolished shortly thereafter. Finally, in August 2013, an official investigation from higher up toppled Lu Suigeng, his relatives and his hangers-on. The residents of Xian Village erupted in celebration. “For more than four years they had routinely petitioned leaders at the city, provincial and national levels only to be answered with inaction, intimidation and abuse.” Then in December 2013 the “tiger” Cao Jianliao, Lu Suigeng’s political ally and Guangzhou’s deputy mayor, was arrested; the news was again greeted with jubilation. Details of the cases dribbled out in the official media, revealing more of the machinations that Bandurski had uncovered in his own research, “a pattern of corruption among local leaders, village chieftains and property developers.” But the subsequent trial in 2014 focused only on the “crumbs of wrongdoing,” passing over in silence much larger scams. The “fly” Lu Suigeng fled the country and became an Australian citizen. Lu and his network were replaced by a new team that, within months, was using the old stratagem of “deceit and inaction.”

  If one were to criticize Bandurski’s book in any way, in light of the hard-won material he presents from years of direct participation with local militants, and the online detective work with which he attempted (not entirely successfully) to ferret out the networks of local power, it would only be because it fails to show the fall of Cao Jianliao and Lu Suigeng in some larger context; why, in other words, they were vulnerable and were selected for ouster, out of so many possibilities throughout China. This is a petty criticism insofar as Bandurski has already taken us into realms that few books on contemporary China reveal; one can hardly imagine He Jieling or Huang Minpeng featured in an academic book on urban affairs. But it is also clear that much of the (four year, ongoing) anti-corruption drive in Xi’s China is used to settle political scores and factional disputes, and hardly for the first time. That petty criticism aired, we can acknowledge that Bandurski has written one hell of a book, with lessons that go far beyond China, for the growing worldwide struggles against urban “improvement campaigns” and gentrification.

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  Dragons in Diamond Village by David Bandurski review — tales of resistance from urbanising China
  A village swallowed up by the sprawl of Guangzhou seeks to protect its identity
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  November 11, 2016

  by: Lucy Hornby

  Construction sites are so common in China that most people pass them without a glance. At one point during the country’s multi-decade building boom, the joke was that the crane was the national bird.
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  But behind the hoardings’ cheerful messages of luxurious lifestyles and the “China Dream” is another, darker story: of how villages become slums, of the corruption and deceit involved as homes for the poor give way to high-rises for the wealthy, and of the loss to China’s culture when its ancient communities disappear forever.

  David Bandurski, an independent writer living in Hong Kong, went behind the hoardings in the centre of Guangzhou (population: 13m) to track the fate of Xian village, a community that existed during the Song dynasty in the 13th century. By the time Bandurski first visited, it was no longer a recognisable village but a thriving migrant neighbourhood, the streets smelling of urine and lit by bare lightbulbs strung on shop fronts. In other words, the last place most people would look for Chinese traditions that date back eight centuries.

  As China’s cities have expanded to accommodate hundreds of millions of new city dwellers, they have swallowed the surrounding countryside. But the villages rarely disappear, at least at first, thanks to complex land laws that cede some measure of ownership to their inhabitants. Former farmers divide courtyards into dozens of rooms or bolt ramshackle second, third and even fourth stories on to the original footprint of their home. The rooms are let out cheaply to the migrant workers flooding into cities, neatly solving China’s housing shortage and allowing foreign visitors to come to the comfortable conclusion that China, alone among developing nations, lacks slums.

  Bandurski found himself in the heart of an epic of corruption and resistance thanks to his interest in the landlords of Xian village: peasant farmers who had found a niche providing housing in the metropolis. Although they had been born far from the city, urban sprawl meant they were now smack in the middle of it, sitting on real estate valued at millions of dollars. Developers wanted the land; the city of Guangzhou was eager to give it to them, and the easily corruptible village headman (and the rapacious district government behind him) was all that stood in the middle. By following the villagers of Xian and similar communities in Guangzhou, Bandurski has been able to write an unusually thorough and readable book about how exactly China’s cities have grown.

  Land grabs are the leading cause of unrest in China, both in the countryside and in city neighbourhoods earmarked for “regeneration”. One Chinese researcher who specialises in analysing local unrest on Beijing’s behalf has told the Financial Times he has a secret formula for starting his investigations: look for the unfinished construction site and ask the neighbours why it has been held up. The answer will almost always unlock an explanation for local grievances, as it does in Xian village.

  The layers of government interests and the thugs at officials’ command provide the punch for Dragons in Diamond Village. But Bandurski draws beauty from the Xian villagers’ fight to survive as a community. Modern China has done its best to obliterate any forms of local culture in favour of a state-sanctioned sameness, free of dialects, ethnic identities or local loyalties. What communism couldn’t uproot is now wilting under the force of urbanisation, as young migrants leave their homes, neighbourhoods are demolished and cities swallow traditional communities. “There’s an internal truth that’s been paved over,” says popular Chinese novelist Yan Lianke, whose latest book explores the theme of urbanisation. “You need to see how many people have been torn apart to create today’s cities.”

  The villagers of Xian did not just protest with lawsuits, banners and barricades. They built dragon boats — the ceremonial wooden craft prized by the waterfront communities of southern China and Southeast Asia. Dragon boats stand for tradition and solidarity (they must be paddled by many men, in rhythm). As Bandurski gets a ride in one, it also becomes a symbol of a rare triumph — the triumph of a small community’s fragile victory over the much larger forces seeking to bury it.

  Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China, by David Bandurski, Melville House RRP£20.99/$27.99, 320 pages

  Lucy Hornby is the FT’s deputy Beijing bureau chief

• Kirkus Reviews
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-bandurski/dragons-in-diamond-village/
  Word count: 398

  DRAGONS IN DIAMOND VILLAGE
  Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China
  by David Bandurski
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  KIRKUS REVIEW

  A grim investigation of how urbanization is destroying traditional Chinese communities.

  Journalist and documentarian Bandurski focuses on the phenomenon of “urban villages,” rural spaces gentrified by land speculation and overbuilding. “The more I heard villagers talk about the community’s history and troubles,” he writes, “the more I was enchanted by what Xian [village] seemed to represent.” The author is attuned to rural China’s fragility, noting how community traditions conflict with rapacious, state-endorsed capitalism. “Behind [village] walls,” he writes, “a bitter struggle was taking place: the villagers against the village leaders and their private army of thugs.” Bandurski first establishes how, in and around cities like Guangzhou, “the scale of urbanisation...is so immense it beggars the imagination.” He discerns deep corruption and state-sanctioned brutality couched in the ornate language of the modern Chinese state, where troublemakers are routinely accused of the ominous offense of “disrupting public order.” The author tracks the stories of several individuals (whom he protects with pseudonyms) who invested their savings in new business developments only to be overwhelmed by shoddy construction and demands for kickbacks. One such impoverished woman’s eventual suicide is depicted as “one of the most iconic tragedies of China’s urbanisation drive.” Contrastingly, he found that in these urban villages, a few well-connected families “ran the village as a private fiefdom, monopolising its business, politics, and security.” In today’s globalized China, he argues, “public ‘success’ cloaked [scandals] involving misappropriated land and purloined millions.” Throughout, he emphasizes, he “was astonished” at the level of corruption he witnessed. Bandurski demonstrates a keen understanding of the traditional lifestyles under attack by enforced modernization, as in his use of the Dragon Boat ceremony as a framing device, representing the villagers’ resilience. However, his overall narrative of civic corruption is harder to follow, with limited appeal for readers lacking familiarity with the arcane social structures of contemporary China.

  An intense look at globalization’s tragic hidden costs.
  Pub Date: Oct. 25th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-1-61219-571-1
  Page count: 320pp
  Publisher: Melville House
  Review Posted Online: Aug. 21st, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1st, 2016

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