For a China correspondent, a slow news week might include a deadly landslide in Sichuan, farmers unearthing 125-million-year-old dinosaur fossils in Liaoning, or a multibillion-dollar listing by a tech giant. Beijing’s particular brand of top-down control means that there is also a steady stream of stories about state efforts to overwrite human nature through social engineering projects, such as intrusive family-planning campaigns and forced relocations that shift entire villages to make way for dams and highways.
