Survival of the Dragon in Diamond Village
Hong Kong resident David Bandurski went behind the billboard hoardings displaying “China Dream” and the luxurious lifestyles and reveals the corruption, village slums and deceit involved persuading the poor to give way to high-rises for the wealthy and the disappearance of Chinese culture and its ancient communities. With the advent of construction sites several cranes has mushroomed in the country’s building boom in the last few decades.
In Guangzhou, the fate of the small village Xian with a population of 13m, a community that existed during the Song dynasty in the 13th century, which began in 9th century and ironically was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or true paper money, and they were the richest, most skilled, got swallowed up by the developers of luxury Chinese dream with a new migrant community. This is the new face of China where cities have expanded by encroaching in the countryside villages to accommodate hundreds of millions of new city dwellers. Village after village landscape disappeared to make way for new development so that rooms are let out cheaply to migrant workers flooding into the cities.
Developers wanted the land; the city of Guangzhou was eager to give it to them, and corrupt village headman simply stood and watched all these happen and did nothing.
David Bandurski by following the villagers of Xian and similar communities in Guangzhou, he was able to write an in-depth and readable book about how exactly China’s cities have grown.
Land grabs lead to unrest in China, and only carnage left behind is the unfinished construction sites, and local will be only too happy to point out to local grievances. He also describes Xian villagers’ fight to survive as communities. Modern China seems to have obliterated some of the local cultures in favour of state-sanctioned culture without dialects, or ethnic identities.
The Villagers of Xian although protested with lawsuits, banners and barricades but they also build the dragon boats the symbol of tradition and solidarity and a rare triumph-the ceremonial wooden craft prized by the waterfront communities of Southern China and South East Asia.
IN 2009, on the outskirts of the Southern metropolis of Guangzhou, Xian villagers secretly prepared for a Dragon boat festival to commemorate the death of poet Qu Yuan in 221BC, who threw himself into a river to protest official corruption.
Dragons in Diamond Village is about the courage of Huang Minpeng, a semi-literate farmer turned human rights defender who wanted to open a simple hair salon, and LU Zhaohui who refused to give up the land their families have cultivated for generations.
David Bandruski is a Human Rights Press award winning journalist in 2008, whose works have featured in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Far Eastern Economic Review, The South China Morning Post.
Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanising China. By David Bandurski Melville House £20.99/$27.99, 320 pages.