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The mother’s face brightens as she takes a thick wad of cash in her hands. Standing in a home kitchen filled with white appliances and tiled floors, the middle-aged black woman in a black headband, colorful graphic T-shirt, olive-green pants and blue nail-polish smiles broadly, takes the bills, counts them, shows them off, points and flutters around the room in celebration part of it...

CHONGQING, China , Demolition crews tore down a two-story brick house in early April 2007 that had become a national symbol of resistance after its owners refused to sell for a shopping mall project, reducing the structure to rubble within hours of a negotiated settlement. The house, left stranded on a roughly 10-meter earthen pillar amid a vast excavation pit in the Yangjiaping neighborhood...