Diamond Village? Well, they don't display much brilliance or sparkle, but the villages referred to in the book are former farming villages which have been swallowed up by China's ever-expanding urban areas. Engulfed in industrial and commercial activity, the villagers find that their arable acres have become immensely valuable to developers. As work becomes available nearby, village houses can be converted to hostels for migrant laborers from the inland provinces. A village surrounded by a city becomes diamond-quality real estate.

China's villages are generally run by family clans. The land belongs to the state, but the village committee administers usage rights, and individual households have a sort of perpetual lease on their dwellings. An investor seeking to acquire and develop village land for commerce or industry must therefore strike a bargain with the village committee. The terms will involve very substantial cash compensation plus, in most cases, a promise to house the villagers once the re-development has been completed. In summary, the process involves farmers becoming landlords for migrant workers and then retiring to live on rent on the money they received for surrendering their land rights.

Dragons in Diamond Village documents this process through detailed accounts of how it played out in three villages swallowed up by Guangzhou. What makes this presentation fascinating is that in all three of the cases Bandurski describes, the villagers were robbed. Crooked officials made off with the developers' money, leaving the villagers with no place to live and no income. This sort of thing has led to many violent protests all across China in recent years, and Bandurski describes some of the most notable Guangzhou incidents in remarkably fine detail.

Bandurski's three main stories document three different ways in which villagers can be cheated. In some cases, well-connected Communist Party cadres simply seize the land on invalid pretexts, grease the palms of those in government who must turn a blind eye, and develop the land without compensating the villagers at all.

An alternative is for the village's Party Secretary to strike an under-the-table deal with a developer and pocket most of the compensation himself while paying the villagers a pittance and concealing the details of the agreement.

A third situation is rather like eminent domain in Western economies, where the government needs the land for some public purpose. But in China, the government sets the compensation unilaterally with no useful channel for appeal. If the compensation leaves the villagers with insufficient funds to buy another place to live nearby, that too is likely to lead to protests.

Protests motivated by these three sorts of scams are the heart of Bandurski's story. His initial interest was in photographing vestigial villages surrounded by urban Guangzhou, but as he visited the villages and met the residents, he came to understand their difficulties and became interested in the course of their protests. He followed their struggles over about five years and reports on them in great detail.

The common thread is naïveté. When they realized they were being cheated, the villagers in each case turned to state institutions for redress: the police, China's petitioning system, and eventually the courts.

All was of course futile. In a Leninist polity, the first duty of every institution is to maintain Communist Party rule. As long as the developer has squared a party member, every state institution invariably sides with the party member against the villagers. Bandurski documents how protesters who persisted eventually ended up in jail.

In repeatedly visiting those doomed villages and associating with the protestors, Bandurski ran some significant personal risk. The developers and their allies routinely hire bands of thugs to intimidate their victims into signing away their rights for insufficient compensation. Those thugs are effectively above the law, and Bandurski makes it clear that in many situations he might well have been beaten in an alley were it not for his obvious foreign status. He made good use of his immunity to assemble accounts which offer an invaluable perspective on the news, while at the same time making riveting reading.

Of course, such stories always have three sides: the villagers', the developers' and the version that appears in the press. Bandurski perforce presents only the first and the third of these. He did some valiant digging to unearth the true identities behind some of the developers' shell companies, but those he found were of course not commenting. With the thugs lurking, Bandurski certainly can't be faulted for not digging any deeper in that garden. The press too is an institution required to support party rule, so the version of a village protest appearing in the press is usually a version the developer favors.

Sadly, the paperback edition of this enlightening work ran into a rather serious production problem. The index was compiled using some previous version of the manuscript, then the text was repaginated in the production process, making complete nonsense of the page references. That's inconvenient, because the English reader has the usual difficulty in keeping all the Chinese proper names straight. They're all listed, but the reader is required to insert his own page references if he wants to find them again using the index.

But don't despair; the stories are worth the effort. Bandurski has created a truly valuable chronicle.

Bill Purves is a Hong Kong-based writer. His book China on the Lam: On Foot across the People's Republic was published by Bookworld Services

Reprinted with permission from The Asian Review of Books