On our way back to Beijing from The Great Wall at Mutianyu, our driver stopped at a factory-showroom where we learned about the manufacturing techniques for Cloisonné brass vases.
I’ve read some tourists/expatriates complain about these stops, but I enjoy window shopping and this was something new—sometimes I even buy stuff. In this case, I bought three vases (photos included).
First, we went on a tour where we watched men and women creating these vases. Once the tour was over, we went to the showroom.
The vases I bought (after negotiating the price) are yellow with a blue trim. One has a blue dragon on it, the second a phoenix beside a chariot, and the third running horses. Each one is about the size of my hand but larger around.
The cloisonné process is enamel on copper craftwork. It first appeared in Beijing in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and continued during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Cloisonné vases are crafted by using a copper porcelain process. The vase is made from copper with brass wires soldered to the body. Then a porcelain glaze is applied to cells between the brass wires.
After a series of complex procedures, such as burning, burnishing and gilding, the cloisonné vase is done. Chinese name: 景泰蓝（jǐng tài lán)
Return to Part 2 or start with Part 1
中
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Also, $10.69 US would be $16.42 Australian. I’m curious what the paperback/hardcover price for that book would be in Australia. it’s been around for a while. So, there may be used ones available. That’s how I found mine. I was in a used bookstore in Berkely, California when I found the copy I read.
Looking at the dates, it suddenly hit me that, like gunpowder, it was the Chinese that invented the process, not the Europeans. Our many-great-ancestors were probably still stomping around doing Crusades or something while the Chinese were living a culture of invention and art.
Another book, but this time I remember the title.
. I want to read it again but I think I gave away my copy. Will have to buy it again. This one is a biography of a real man and his incredible story discovering China’s history that the Chinese had forgotten or lost..
It sounds like a great book Lloyd but unfortunately I won’t pay that much for a Kindle version. I think trad. publishers are crooks. 😦
I prefer paper. Through Amazon.com the paperback cost $10.69 US.
lol – with postage and handling, that’d be double to Australia. One of the reasons I stick to ebooks. Eyesight is another. 🙂
I think Amazon also has print on demand machines in Australia. Still, I don’t know if that book is available to be printed that way, unless some traditional publishers are using PDMs. too.
I refuse to change my Amazon account to the Australian one so I’m stumped both ways.
Does that mean you have a choice between Amazon.com and Amazon.AU? I didn’t know that was possible. Still, what about setting up an Australian Amazon account under another name if you have more than one device (with one that has never been used with Amazon) to surf the internet and it’s using VPN?
When I first opened my account with Amazon, there was no amazon.com.au. It’s only fairly recently that Australia has received it’s own benediction. Unfortunately, .com.au doesn’t have the reach of .com so any Indie author who wants to tap into the US market has to have a US account. Or that’s how I understand it. As for opening a second, unrelated account, I’m not sure it’s even possible, and I know I’d never have the patience to do it, even if it was.
It may be possible but not worth the time and effort. A pen name, a different device with VPN to log on to the internet, an account with some financial intuition like a bank with your pen name, and then setting up an Amazon.AU account under that pen name with payment linked to the pen name’s financial account.
I think authors with pen names do something like this through Amazon KDP. I’m not sure about setting up a new Amazon.AU account to buy products from them.
lol – I feel weary just reading this! 😉
Internet trolls do it all the time. They create multiple accounts all with different names and different devises using VPNs.
Some have too much money and too much free time and are narcissists and psychos. They get their kicks bothering others.
Another category is those who work in dead end, mindless poverty wage jobs, hating the world for not being born rich, and on their free time sit in dark basements trolling others to get even with the world for what they did to themselves.
Or they are paid by someone like Putin to do it and it’s their job to spread misery and lies.
Another thought. They might be shopaholics with dozens of credit card account.
LMAO! I could easily see any and all of those. Definitely trolls. 😀
While hiding behind fakes names, it’s either a full-time paid job, or it’s a full-time obsession revealing a serious mental illness.
Yes. I came across quite a few of them when I was still on Twitter. The Russians aren’t the only ones who know how to use disinformation. The fossil fuel companies are past masters at it too. And they have the money to pay trolls by the hundreds if not thousands.
Is the internet really worth it? It isn’t like we didn’t have access to information. Before the internet, if we wanted to learn something, there were magazines, libraries, bookstores. If we couldn’t find what we wanted, they’d order it for us and let us know when it arrived.
Hmm…you have a point, and I have a filing cabinet full of science articles I cut out of New Scientist and other science mags back in the day. But…as someone who’s been shut in since the pandemic began, I would have gone stark, raving, staring, bonkers, mad without the internet. It’s been both a window to the outside world and a portal to a community of like minded readers and writers, yourself amongst them.
For all its faults, I literally could not live without it.
I’ve read, and tested it, that old habits can be changed in six months to a year. I mean, my habits before the pandemic and after it, a few years later, are totally different, and I have no desire to return to my old ways. I like the new ones better. I’m getting a lot more writing done too.
If the internet were gone tomorrow and never returned, six months to a year later, I think most of us would be doing okay with the way it worked before the internet. We might miss some things but not all.
Like, what I’d miss the most is how fast I could research a topic by asking google. The pre-internet world moved a lot slower. And I learned that the old way of shopping took too much time and was almost torture with all the driving from store to store if I couldn’t find what I wanted, and the selection of choices was very limited. Now, If I want something, I can spend hours looking at all the choices for the same thing without leaving my house. Talk about menu shock. With the internet, there are too many choices. Never enough time. Still, I find things I like better that I never knew existed before.
I agree, given enough time, we can get used to anything, but in the case of the internet, I’d rather see it cleaned up and regulated than cancelled.
I know a lot of people have perfectly good reasons for needing to remain anonymous online – victims of DV etc etc – but for the rest of us, interacting on the internet should be no different to interacting in the real world – do something wrong and there will be consequences.
At the moment, the Big Tech companies are raking in the dollars without taking any responsibility for the /product/ they put out there. That has to change. The wild wild west was not a nice place in which to live, fiction notwithstanding.
agreed
Canada has or had some tough laws for trolls. In the US, protection like that is nonexistent. About a decade ago, I had a run in with a Canadian troll. But he went by his real name, and I found out where he lived and his IP address.
The last time he insulted me online, I replied that I’d kept a copy of all of his comments (there were a lot of them) and would be more than willing to turn them over to the proper authorities in Canada with his IP and physical address. if he didn’t stop trolling me.
He stopped. Abusive trolling in Canada (then – I don’t know about now) came with prison time if found guilty.
I’m surprised that moron used his real name. Perhaps he felt he was invincible no matter what. So glad you put a stop to his nonsense.
I wish ALL netizens were forced to man up and not hide behind an alias or a cutesy handle. Authors like us have no choice but to be out there. I really wish the US would join the rest of the world in imposing common sense regulations. 😦
The story before the troll episode started over China. This Canadian was teaching English in Tiawan. I don’t know for how long. Several years, I think. He thought he was a Chinese expert, and he wrote a biased, hateful, misleading book about China, because the father of his Taiwanese Chinese girlfriend wouldn’t let her marry this guy who turns out to be an asshole. I’m not sure of the timeline, if the rejection came before or after the week he spent in mainland China as a tourist when he decided to become a critical China expert.
Anyway, it seems this rejection of his marriage proposal made him decide to hate China. The history of our interaction, how it started and turned into a debate and eventually him turning into a hateful troll attacking and insulting me took place on my iLookChina blog, and it’s still there somewhere. All of it. I just can’t find that needle in a huge haystack with way too many posts. Eventually, I stopped approving his comments but kept them in case. And he kept sending hate filled insulting comments aimed at me. I didn’t approve them for public view but save them and I think I published them all as a post with a public warning that if he didn’t stop, I’d sent an email with a link and his IP address in Canada of that post to the appropriate authorities in Canada.
That’s when he stopped trolling me.
Anyway, he published his hate book of China under his real name, so he was stuck during his flame war with me with his real name. No fake name. And because of his hate book of China and some praise he got in the US from China haters like him, he bragged about who he was in detail. It’s all there somewhere on this blog if I could only remember his name or come up with a search term to find those posts. I tried but failed. I think that took place more than a decade ago.
Because this all happened after he’d returned to Canada, every comment he left had his IP address and I traced him to the province in Canada where he lived or lives near Canada’s east coast.
And here we all thought ‘Heaven hath no fury like a woman scorned’. Sounds as if that poor woman dodged a great big bullet by not marrying that guy. He sounds like an awful person.
Re China: I know it’s become the done thing to bash China for its human rights abuses, but when I look at what my own government is doing to refugees who arrive by boat, I see the difference as simply one of degree. Not a single Western country has a pure record when it comes to refugees so it is hypocritical to criticise another China, especially when it’s China’s economic power that’s really being criticised. People in glass houses… 😦
I think countries (some maybe not all but certainly the US) that are ruled by Caucasians are afraid of China because of its success. China is the true hybrid where successful capitalism and some forms of socialism exist side by side. And its works at least for now.
Yes, that’s been my thinking too. After all the humiliations handed out to China during the expansions of Western empires, they want respect even if they’ll never get a real ‘apology’.
In The Man Who Loved China, a biography, I learned that China was the most technologically advanced and wealthiest country on the planet for 1500 years up until about the 1600s when the European colonial empires arrived. The two opium wars that were started by Europe and France in the early 19th century to force Opium trade on China were the beginning of the end of China’s golden era that had lasted so long. Since Mao died China’s turnaround has been miraculous. Rebuilding a country destroy by the Opium Wars, and World War II. Unless China is destroyed by nuclear weapons, I don’t think any other country will stop them from reclaiming what they once were, the most advanced technological country on the planet.
One of China’s most powerful weapons is a passion for education that isn’t found in the West on the same scale. China respects its teachers and treats them much better than teachers are treated outside of China, especially in the West.
Yes! China has gone through cycles of bust and boom, just like any other country, but what sets it apart is that the Confucian ideals and love of education return after each period of instability, and the next dynasty builds on the foundations of the old one.
China’s government now may be communist in its goals, but I believe that underlying culture is still there, still asserting itself in this latest incarnation.
I wish I could live for another 50 years to see what the world will look like once South East Asia becomes the dominant force in world affairs. China is already making moves, trying to broker unity between the Arab states. I just hope Israel comes to the party soon.
During the Richard Nixon era, when Mao still ruled China, Russia wanted to nuke China. Russia wanted to make sure the United States wouldn’t mistake that attack as an act of war and retaliate. Nixon told Russia that if they attacked China, the US would attack Russia with nukes,
Then Nixon went to China and changed history.
The reason China and Russia were not getting along is because Mao never went to Soviet Russia to be trained to be a communist Stalin style. This was before Sun Yat Sen died. Sun Yat Sen was building a democracy with multiple political parties. The Chinese Communist Party was one of the largest with the Nationalist being about the same size.
Then Sun Yat Sen died unexpectedly and Chian Kai-shek, a brutal monster, formed an alliance with the triads in Shanghai and attacked the CCP without warning killing all of the leaders and every communist party member they could hunt down. All the leaders who gone to Russia to be trained by Stalin’s people how to be communists were killed.
Mao was middle rank in the CCP at the time. He was a schoolteacher and poet. He was too low to go to Russia and be trained, but overnight he became the new leader of the CCP and what followed was the Long March he led across China through impossible terrain to escape total annihilation by Chung Kae Chek’s Nationalist Army.
Then Japan invaded China during WWII bringing the Civil War that raged from 1925 to 1950 to a stop for a few years until they could start fighting each other again.
So, Mao was called a communist, but he was more of a nationalist. During the civil war, Mao promised the peasants he’d reform the country, so they would no longer dirt poor and abused slaves of the land-owning class, about five percent of the population. Mao delivered on that promise during The Cultural Revolution and let the peasants do whatever they wanted to the wealthy class that had treated them worse than cattle for thousands of years. That’s where all the brutality came in and the West blamed Mao for that. Mao also made foot binding illegal and women equal to men for the first time in Chian’s history. I think it is easy to imagine how terrified the ruling class was, all those corporate CEOs, billionaires and millionaires, in all the western democracies seeing their counterparts in China lose everything and some their lives because a couple of million committed suicide after they lost it all and were denounced and treated like they had treated the peasants.
Mao turned the Cultural Revolution over to the children and peasants and retreated inside the Forbidden City and pretty much stayed out of it until he decided it was time to stop it and called in the Red Army to restore order, who he ordered to stay on their bases during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution.
I knew a little bit about Chiang Kai Shek and the Long March but I had no idea that Sun Yat Sen was involved or that the Russian/Stalin trained leaders were killed. That puts a whole new light on what came after and the bitter hatred that still exists between Mainland China and Taiwan.
Is Mao still revered in China? Or have his successors quietly expunged his influence?
The United States has a long history of human rights abuse against immigrants who are mostly not Caucasians and even some Caucasians from the wrong countries (whatever they are at the time — like the Irish during the famine who immigrated to the US) have been abused. The US is also guilty of a long history of religious persecution if you do not belong to the anointed Christan sect that’s in power in the area you live in. I think the US is going through another bout of that now with the US Christian nationals behind Project 2025, who also support Trump because that traitor is willing to promise he will give them what they want if they put him back in the White House.
Yes, the power of the religious right is insane in a country founded on the principle of separation of church and state. I can’t work out why no one is pointing that out. Fundamentalist christians are as bad as fundamentalist anythings. 😦
The US has been warned for years if not decades what the Fundamentalist Christian nationalist have been doing behind the scenes to manipulate the political environment. From what I’ve been told and read, that dangerous cult launched their long-term plot as far back as the 1960s and President Nixon and Reagon’s war on recreational drugs like marijuana was part of it. Reagan’s massive tax cuts. Reagan’s spending much more than revenues coming in. Reagan’s manipulating a report called A National at Risk that was cherry picked data and lies starting the war on our public schools. The Koch brothers. The Wal-Mart Walton family. The American Legislative Exchange Council – ALEC, a non-profit foundation that wrote legislation supporting their extreme right cultish cause, that elected representative they put in office would introduce as bills at the state and federal level – thousands every year for decades going back to the 1970s.
A shadow government. The real Deep State.
This Fundamentalist Cult started out small with billions of dollars following a long-term plant to take over the US slowly and they’ve been at least that long. Their goals, the short list: control the majority of state and federal courts (achieved), control more than half the states (achieved), get rid of the public schools so they decide who is taught and what they are taught (still working on that), censor books they don’t like (doing it now in some of the states they control), block the Equal Rights Amendment (achieved), take women’s rights away from them (still working on that), take over the courts, the White House, Congress, replace the US volunteer miliary, and the public police with corporate police and mercenaries …
That’s the short list.
I’m shocked, truly shocked.I’ve long thought that corporate America was the personification of ‘evil’, but I had no idea the fundamentalists had gained quite such a foothold.
But where is the money coming from? The corporates? And if so, why?
They money comes from extreme right billionaires. Two of the Koch brothers were involved from the start. David Koch died leaving Charles to keep on working to subvert the US Constitution. The brother’s owned and controlled the 2nd largest private oil company in the US and acquired other business through the decades. Koch Industries is one of the biggest polluters in the US and over the decades has been fined million if not billions.
I think those two were worth about $30 billion each.
Then there’s the Wal-Mart Walton family. Sam Walton died, and his children inherited. They are each worth billions and donate a lot of money to the extreme right organizations subverting the US.
ALEC is one of the biggest but there are others. The Heritage Foundation with more than a half-million extremist members was involved in writing Project 2025 for Trump. You can Google Open Secrets to learn more about them.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/23/david-koch-death-kochtopus-legacy-right-wing
Betsy Devos and her family is another one of the billionaire families behind the attempted subversion of the US.
I’ve read that ere are hundreds of foundations funded by extreme right billionaires that are involved in this.
“Wealthy Donors Bankroll Christian Nationalists to Sustain Unregulated Capitalism”
Funded by a 1 percent of megadonors and corporations, the religious right has grown to a grotesque size.
https://truthout.org/articles/wealthy-donors-bankroll-christian-nationalists-to-sustain-unregulated-capitalism/
OMG: ‘“David Koch won’t live to see the worst of climate change but the legacy of denial and the intensified delay caused by his funding will live on,” said Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigation Center. “It is clear that he provided life support to the denial machine.”’
I knew the name ‘Koch brothers’ but I didn’t know anything else about them. I’m both fascinated and horrified by the bit about their father being a rabid anti-communist. Both of my parents hated communism because they’d experienced it first hand, but I was allowed to grow up to believe in progressive/liberal/social values.
Australia is a kind of social democracy with compulsory, preferential voting in both houses – Federal and State – to ensure that as much voter intent is captured as possible. Apparently we invented the secret ballot way back when. 🙂
We have our own home-grown billionaires, but everyone seems to be conscious of the unfairness of money being the major driver of policy. I hope that never, ever changes.
There is an interesting history behind the Koch brothers’ father and his dislike of Communism. He was an engineer in the US oil industry who somehow was hired by Stalin to build Russia’s oil industry. The millions Koch Sr. was paid by Stalin ended up building the family oil empire in the US. From what I’ve read, the infrastructure he built for Russia’s Oil industry is pretty much still there and in working order, sort of. So, during those years in Russia he was a witness to what Stalin style Communism was like. It wasn’t communism. Stalin was a brutal dictator who had millions murdered and he held onto to power with bloody fists.
Ah, that explains a lot, actually. Koch Sr was lucky to get his millions and live to tell the tale. Stalin was a true monster. Sadly Stalins are what you get when a country goes from feudalism to the modern world without any of the necessary steps in between. The irony of democracy is that it /cannot/ be imposed from without. It can only work if the people themselves demand it. I think that’s one reason I fear for the US. Do Trump’s followers actually want democracy? I suspect not.
Many of Traitor Trump’s MAGA cult don’t know what they want. Their looking for someone to blame.
They certainly don’t know who the traitor is. If they knew monsters like Trump are mostly responsible for what caused their resentment, they wouldn’t vote for him. They’d be using The Trump for target practice.
Mmm…that is something that has always baffled me – how can any of them think he’s ‘one of them’? I guess they simply don’t see the connection between great wealth and their own poverty. I mean…no government forced any of the US corporations to outsource their labour to countries where workers live on the starvation line. 😦
I’ve read studies that conclude that the average reading level for US citizens is 5th grade. With more than 330 million people, about 60 million are avid readers. The average citizen reads maybe one or two books a year. While some value education, many don’t.
Ouch. That is not good. I hope education is one of the areas that Harris/Walz target /when/ they win.
Walz was a public-school teacher for decades. He supports the public schools and wants to stop what’s happening to destroy them. That makes him Enemy #1 to defeat anyway the fascists, who make up the leadership of the Christian nationalist MAGA cult, can keep Walz from becoming the next president after Kamala. Eight years of Kamala Harris as president followed by eight years of Walz would all by destroy the fascist movement in the US, that put Traitor Trump in the White House. Those fascists are also behind and wrote Project 2025. To them, Traitor Trump is a tool to use to achieve the subversive fascist goals they’ve worked for decades to achieve.
I’ve been watching some video Shorts on Youtube featuring Walz, and I have to say he is impressive – not slick but definitely smart, and he comes across as a man of integrity. I think the US could do a lot worse than him for the second 8 years.
I wonder what the tax rate is for Australian billionaires and millionaires. Are they taxed like the wealthy are in the Nordic countries or like the US? Or somewhere in between.
Rupert Murdock is also one of Traitor Trump’s supporters. How did Australia get rid of Murdock?
I think we’re somewhere inbetween – not as progressive as the Nordic countries, in any sense, but far more ‘fair go for everyone’ than the US.
As for Murdoch…that is one export most sane Australians regret, with shame. The irony is that his mother, Dame Elizabeth Murdoch, was a wonderful woman who was loved by everyone.
The majority in China know Mao was responsible for the Cultural Revolution but they also think of him as China’s George Washington, who ended China’s feudal system. The CCP is the first government in China’s history that has done something concrete to improve the lives of the majority who lived in extreme poverty for millenia.
Even under Mao’s leadership, China increased the average lifespan by more than a decade. Healthcare for everyone. And today, the average lifespan is much higher and still improving.
I don’t know if they still let people see Mao preserved in his glass coffin. But when they did, Chinese people would line up for blocks for a chance to see him and that was still going on in the early years of this century. Mao made a promise to the peasant class, and he kept it.
In the last few decades China is responsible for 90% of the world’s poverty reduction — all in China.
Mao’s Little Red Book. I remember learning about it. I also remember how shocked I felt when news of his death came out. The Cultural Revolution was a terrible purging of the old world, but if China was to leapfrog into the modern world, it was…effective. And yes, China’s transformation has been mind boggling. I suspect the speed at which it’s happened is part of what scared the West so much.
Mao is not responsible for what happened after his death. That was Deng Xiaoping. When Mao died, his wife was planning to take over. But Deng Xiaoping, one of Mao’s leaders of the PLA during the Civil War with the Nationalists that lasted more than 20 years, saw the error of Mao’s ways during the Cultural Revolution and wanted to stop that and create a democracy in China that would fit China’s culture. That was also Sun Yat Sen’s vision, that both the CCP and Taiwan consider the father of their republics.
Mao knew what Deng wanted and tried to get rid of him but failed. That’s another story.
Deng had worked for years in the background establishing alliances with PLA generals who refused to do what Deng wanted until Mao died. Once Mao died, with Deng as their leader, the PLA moved fast and arrested what’s known as the Gang of Four, led by Mao’s wife, before they could take over the country.
Once the Gang of Four was tried and convicted of crimes against the CCP, Deng led China, as the Chairmen of the CCP, to become the hybrid socialist-capitalist state that it is today. Deng’s faction still rules the CCP but Mao’s faction is still there, the Maoists, who want to bring back the insanity of the Cultural Revolution that Deng’s faction in the party doesn’t want to happen.
The CCP owns all the land. But in rural China, they own the land in conjunction with the peasants. The peasants can’t sell their home or property or borrow money on it without permission from the Party. In rural China, there is no mortgage payments, no property tax.
In urban China, the cities, the CCP leases homes and business to families to live in and use for decades. That property still belongs to the state, but the lease allows the people to treat their homes and businesses as if they own them. In rural China, the peasants are allowed to elect the leaders of their villages, Urban Chinese that do not belong to the CCP do not get to vote. Since the state owns all urban property, if a citizen becomes a criminal of some kind, including political crimes, they can lose everything.
That’s what I learned when I was studying Choina full time for a decade and blogging about it. Some of that may have changed. I haven’t kept up.
-grin- You are now my official resource for all things Chinese. I was particularly interested in the lack of private land ownership in China. It seems so foreign to our way of thinking, but I guess it’s only marginally different to how Western governments dictate how land can be used – e.g. freehold, below the ground, etc etc.
I am one of those people who likes to own things, including my house, but I’m realistic enough to know that I’m just a custodian at best.
Thanks for the info.
In China unless it has changed, there is, or was, no property tax. When a family in an urban area (cities and suburbs) leases a house for decades, they pay the tax once the year they sign the lease, and after that just the lease payment. When it’s time to renew the lease, the process is usually automatic. There are exceptions. In rural China, unless China changes that law, the family that owns the house owns it from generation to generation, pays no property tax, no mortgage or rent. Also, those rural families cannot sell their houses or take loans out on them, because their ownership is shared with the government. I think they call it a collective ownership and to change that requires the agreement of the government and the family that owns and lives in the house. Whenever there is a global financial crises and millions of rural Chinese working in urban factories lose their jobs, the CCP government usually pays their travel costs to return to their rural family home. Easy to do since the government owns most if not all the public means of transportation (rail and busses).
That’s interesting. I can well see how keep the /land/ in the family would be crucial to keeping the trust and faith of the populace. But what happens if a particular, rural family dies out? Or the kids have moved to the city and no longer want to work the land?
I don’t know the answer to that. Still. in rural China the farmland is usually only a half-acre. There are urban farms in China too around the fringes of the cities and sometimes even in the cities inside buildings (vertical farming). During Mao’s land reforms, I think after the failure of the collective farms and what’s called Mao’s Great Famine (more on famines in China later), Mao kept his word and divided the farms equally among the peasants who supported him during the Civil War between the CCP and the Nationalists (supported by the US even though Mao asked the United States for help to rebuild China in 1950.
In rural China, my guess is that if a family does leave rural China for the cities, maybe that property is worked by other families and the food or profits from selling the food divided up.
As for Mao’s Great Famine, the name is misleading. China is known as the Land of Famines. Historical records going back for thousands of years who that China had famines in one or more provinces annually. That was one of the reasons for building China’s Grand Canal and flood control projects going back before the birth of Jesus Christ. When famines struck in China, the Emperors would move grains from one part of the country to another using the Grand Canal system. Even today, it’s still the largest canal system in the world. The ancient Chinese invented the lock the west uses in the Suez and Panama canals. Politics inadvertently influenced by Mao also played a part in the famine being ignored by local authorizes so, not wanting ti disappoint Mao’s plans demanding an increase in crop yields, they lied to him. But some of his advisors told him about the famines and deaths. Mao didn’t know who to believe so he sent some of the PLA troops who guarded him where he lived in the Forbidden City, to go home to those provinces and investigate, then return and tell him the truth.
When those PLA troops returned and told them what they learned, he apologizes to the country and resigned as China’s leader, although he held on to the chairmanship of the CCP, who is the real leader of China when the president is someone else.
Mao also ended Great Leap Forward, the collective farming experiment, returning and dividing the land up among the peasant again. With so many peasants and limited arable land, that worked out to be about a half-acre per family. This collective Communist farming experiment was also going on in Russia under Stalin.
When something similar happened in Russia during Stalin’s farming collective programs, he didn’t even attempt t to save the people. He let them die or starved them out if they resisted is collective farming plans, killing tens of million deliberately. Most of them in Ukraine.
But Mao, who was never a Communist at heart, but a Nationalist, publicly asked for help from the West to save lives in China by selling China wheat so Mao could feed those starving people.
The United States refused, wanting the famine to trigger a Civil War so the nationalists could return and take over China. Meanwhile millions of people are still dying. Bit two countries defied the US.
France bought lots of wheat from Canada, who then shipped that wheat to China, saving millions of lives in China and helping to end the famine early. Australia also sold wheat to China.
I’m loving this, Lloyd. The more you tell me about Mao, the more I respect him. I did know about famines in China, although I thought the famines in India were more endemic. And I’m delighted that Australia sent wheat to save lives. I didn’t know that, but now I’m very, very proud of us for having done so. Letting people die just because there’s a political advantage [maybe] is pure evil in my book.
More please. 😀
I think evil is the foundation of US cutthroat capitalism. Steal legally from the working class, and give what’s stolen to the already rich. In the US, the wealthiest 10% are now richer than the bottom 90%.
Yes. But at its core, capitalism should be about competition, and that is what has been taken away since Reagan and the growth of neo-liberalism in the 1980’s. The anti-trust, anti-monopoly laws that /should/ underpin capitalism have become almost non-existent thanks to a system in which politicians can be bought with impunity.
But as I understand it, this is not new. Wasn’t it one of the Roosevelt presidents who imposed hard anti-monopoly laws on corporations way back when? I believe it was thanks to those laws that the US thrived for so long. Now? As Reich puts it, there’s social welfare for billionaires. 😦
Teddy Roosevelt – he wasn’t supposed to become president, but the Republican Party wanted him out as Governor of New York state because he was fighting for the working class in that position. The GOP thought as VP he’d be out of the way and stop stabbing his class (the wealthy) in the back as he fought for the little man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bully_Pulpit_(book)
That book (link above) is a good book about Teddy Roosevelt. When President William Mckinley was assassinated and Teddy became president, I imagine the corrupt leadership of the republican party couldn’t sleep for months and some may have had strokes.
“Two distantly related branches of the family from Oyster Bay and Hyde Park, New York, rose to global political prominence with the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) and his fifth Cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945), whose wife, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was Theodore’s niece.”
Thanks, Lloyd. Just went down a Wiki rabbit hole. 😀 I’m fascinated by how the values that defined the parties virtually flipped from one party to the other. I can see something similar in Australian politics too. The so-called Liberals have become more and more right wing and conservative while Labor has become more and more ‘middle’.
I was particularly interested to see that Teddy Roosevelt brought more diversity into his New Deal Coalition. That resonates with Australian politics now. We have an unprecedented number of Independents who are largely small ‘L’ liberal – i.e. progressive, and are more aligned with Labor and social welfare policies than the NLP [National Liberal Party].
I do hate how the names stop representing the values of the parties though.
I can write about it. Still, I don’t want to do it either. Just thinking about it makes me weary, too. Who are these people that do that kind of stuff?
lol – I don’t know but they must be completely nuts!