China’s Glorious New Past

By artappraiser on Wed, 06/01/2011 - 7:58pm |

By Ian Johnson, New York Review of Books Blog, June 1, 2011

....I’ve been in China long enough to know the futility of nostalgia for old cities, but I was still shocked when I recently made a trip back for the first time in ten years. Datong is now booming, thanks to the region’s rich coal reserves, which have created a class of coal barons as wealthy and crass as any character on the TV show “Dallas.” As with most Chinese cities, Datong is in the grips of rampant real estate speculation, with poor people evicted from their homes in the old city, which is being torn down for new developments. (This is a topic I explore in the context of recent books on the destruction of Beijing in new piece for the NYR.)....

What’s surprising is how all this happened....

URL:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jun/01/chinas-glorious-new-past/