China
The task of building a narrative for China by an unenlightened amateur seems not only insurmountable but an act of hubris.
I chose to try to build up some sort of picture through the use of sections with reference links.
Urban renewal as a manifestation of power configurations and forces of power in modern China
Interesting article, The Death and Life of a Great Chinese City in the New York Review of Books by Richard benrstein
Two of these books looks at the disappearance of Old Beijing, the increase in living standards, the interplay between the developers/commercial forces with the Party and its representatives along with the role played or not played by the people forced to relocate as well as the beneficiaries of this process in terms of the residents of the new modern buildings.
The third book looks at the same process through the lens of the ‘return og good food to the lives of the Chinese people after decades in which eating well was deemed a bourgeois affectation…’ (Bernstein’s words). More Bernstein, ‘Eating out thus involves both a return to tradition and a departure from it, an end to the old way of life, part of the disappearance, as Meyers puts it, of Old Beijing’.
Bernstein’s article encompasses both the loss of the old city and its communities and ways of living as well as the increase in living standards and comforts of a rising middle class in a context of raw Chinese capitalism which leaves little room for the expression of the interests of the citizens of the new China.