"We can have no hair, but you can’t have no law,” shouted four women who had gathered in the central park of a Beijing residential compound and were taking turns shaving each other’s heads. In Mandarin, “no hair” and “no law” are homophones. In front of neighbours, foreign journalists and secret plain-clothes police, the women put their hair in a transparent plastic box along with pictures of them and their husbands. This all took place in Dece