From The International Herald Tribune, via A Glimpse of the World:
A glimpse of China’s future popped up last week as furtive as a groundhog emerging from its hole.
To trust appearances, it is a future involving some significantly greater measure of pluralism. And because the evidence made its appearance in broad daylight, and not in the realm of shadows, this does not, as some would have it, have the feeling of a dream.
When exactly this future arrives is, of course, unclear, but this harbinger of recent days suggests that it is not so far off. What seems clearer are the hints about how this future will and will not take form.
The event was the remarkable battle of a homeowner against the city of Chongqing and powerful allied property developers, who had earmarked a large site for fancy redevelopment and excavated a huge ditch around what came to be known as the “nail house,” because of the couple’s success in stalling its demolition until they could achieve a shift in what old-fashioned Marxists often used to call “the correlation of forces.” [Full Text]
