A few days after Ma Yan hears that her family cannot afford to continue her education past fifth grade, Pierre Haski, the French journalist, visited her village. After seeing the diaries, Haski promised that he would help her continue school then go to a university or even further than that.
Needless to say, after the publication of her diaries, Mao Yan continued on to middle school along with lots of attention from the media.
Ma Yan says that most of the media asked her about her experience at school and she wanted to tell them what it was like so the world would hear of the other poor children that wanted to go to school longer.
Because of that media attention, the students at her elementary and middle schools received offers of help.
That outpouring of interest led to the founding of Children of Ningxia, which will soon celebrate its tenth anniversary. The Children of Ningxia reports that the nonprofit has reached out to more than 2,500 students, scholarships to more than 150 and fourteen have finished their university studies since 2009.
China’s government also abolished school fees through ninth grade but many remote, rural families still struggle to pay for boarding fees.
One student, who is still in school, said she would have been doing farm work if it hadn’t been for Children of Ningxia.
As the Al Jazeera segment of Ma Yan’s Story ends, I thought of the billion people living in poverty around the world. Less than 10% of those people live in China and this story is only of a few of those people.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
In January 2010, Al Jazeera Witness reported the story of Ma Yan, a young Chinese girl that lived in rural China in the same poverty that rural Chinese have lived with for centuries and how The Diary of Ma Yan was published in many countries including China (where it was a best seller) and the US.
The village where Ma Yan lived is described in Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, but since that time, few outsiders have visited it. The United Nations says this is a region unfit for human habitation. Source: China.org.cn
Contrary to popular opinion, the poor in China did not get this way because of the Communists. The hardship and poverty of Ma Yan’s people and many others in China has been that way for centuries.
It didn’t help when the Communists won China’s civil war and the defeated Nationalists took the nation’s treasury and most of the ancient Imperial treasures to Taiwan leaving China nothing but people and the land.
In this segment of Witness, we travel with Mao Yan as she breaks the cycle of poverty.
By chance in 2001, a French journalist was visiting remote Ningxia province in northwest China when a Muslim woman wearing the white headscarf of the Hui people thrust her daughter’s diaries into his hands.
Ma Yan writes that the economy where she lives has not been developed. However, Mao Yan is not alone wanting to escape the hardship of poverty.She wrote that her life was like a death sentence.
Then the French journalist read the diary Mao Yan’s mother had given him and was so impressed, he arranged for excerpts to be published in one of the French daily newspapers.
By 2007, Ma Yan passed a university exam and was one of the first girls from her village to be eligible for a university education. Her next move was to Paris where she lives with a French family and attends a university there.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Aaron Back of India Real Time reports that Brazil, Russia, India and China have invited South Africa to join their group of emerging economies referred to as the BRIC possibly changing that acronym to BRICSA.
Aaron asks how South Africa could join the BRIC when the “rainbow nation” lacks the main unifying characteristic of the group: a fast-growing economy.
However, my answer to Aaron is that India Real Time may have missed the fact that Brazil’s economy was also sluggish until China became a major trading partner. Now Brazil is growing at about 8% a year.
Another factor is that China is now South Africa’s largest trading partner, and Radio Netherlands Worldwide says South Africa (unlike the US) enjoys a trade surplus with China that may only grow. The Chinese ambassador Zhong Jianhua, says that it is the warm diplomatic ties between China and SA since 1998 matched by growing economic engagement, which has put SA among China’s top three African trading partners.
South Africa also has another alternative to a fast-growing economy. The CIA says, South Africa is rich in these natural resources — gold, chromium, antimony, coal, iron ore, manganese, nickel, phosphates, tin, rare earth elements, uranium, gem diamonds, platinum, copper, vanadium, salt, natural gas.
The South African Guide says, the mining industry is one of the most productive in the world and raw materials make up about 60% of the country’s exports… South Africa is also the single country in the world to produce fuel from coal.
Then the BBC reports that South Africa faces major problems. Many South Africans remain poor and unemployment is high—about 25%.
After all, what South Africa has, China needs to continue the growth of its middle class, and it was these same factors that caused China to become Brazil’s major trading partner. As the trade surplus grows in South Africa’s favor, unemployment will shrink.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
China’s love affair with superstition, pseudoscience and the fantastical may be traced back over five millennia, whence some of history’s oldest myths and legends originated.
Journey to the West (Xi You Ji), published anonymously by scholar Wu Cheng’en in the 16th century Ming Dynasty, remains China’s most beloved fantasy story. Considered one of the “Four Great Classical Novels” of Chinese literature, the 100 chapters of ‘Journey’ are replete with monkey kings, flesh-eating demons, immortal sages and celestial battles.
When science fiction became all the craze in 1950’s America, Red China followed suit by founding its first sci-fi periodical.
However, unlike the west, where rapid advances in the tech sector fueled science fiction, China promoted sci-fi to help inspire its own dormant technological progress.
Conversely, about the same time during the 70s when American director George Lucas was preparing to film a little space opera called Star Wars, the Cultural Revolution was banishing all China’s scientists to hard-labor communes.
Indeed, where the Chinese have categorically failed in speculative fiction (programming on the Communist-controlled CCTV is evidence enough that future perspective is held in little regard here: of China’s 19 official television channels, all feature serials set in olden times, some in the present, none about the future), they remain masters of mythology and purveyors of the past.
Present-day PRC is seeing a renaissance of the fantasy genre. The wuxia-inspired Chinese film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a critical and commercial success, generations of young, Chinese cyber-punks are hopelessly addicted to the virtual sorcery of World of Warcraft, and Harry Potter remains China’s “most pirated novel ever”.
Even so, no Chinese author has ever been able to replicate the success of Journey to the West; as a result, publishing houses in the Middle Kingdom prefer to translate western best-sellers such as Lord of the Rings and Narnia rather than take their chances on local fantasy fiction writers.
Enter Zee Gorman (nee Yan Zi-hong) China’s response to J.K. Rowling.
Born in Guangdong province during the Cultural Revolution (both her parents were exiled to the countryside for being “intellectuals”), Zee was raised on a literary diet of propaganda and scar literature.
Rather than publish a clichéd daughter-of-the-Revolution memoir about her hardships, the aspiring author opted for the escapism of fantasy. Hence, her decades-in-the-making debut novel, The Altethlon Chronicles.
A high-fantasy fiction set in a parallel universe either far in China’s future or in its past, The Altethlon Chronicles is a complex blend of military, history, romance and sorcery.
Leading the rich cast of green-eyed, purple-skinned characters is the royal yet rebellious teen Ximia (“what kind of princess are you anyway, running around like a wildcat?”) and her forbidden lover, Nikolas, the leader of a rival tribe – a tumultuous relationship most likely inspired by Zee’s own experience with cultural clash when she immigrated to the U.S. and married an American.
Ximia is misled into believing that Nikolas has been killed during an escape attempt, whereby the princess is married off by her father to a dastardly lord. The two young warriors go on to lead their respective armies until the day when destiny arranges for them to meet again in battle.
Lots of magic, weird names and epic battles of Tolkien proportions (note: this reviewer has never actually read a J. R. R. Tolkien book; I just thought it sounded cool to say that) ensue.
In creating this alternate world, Zee draws heavily on her Chinese heritage.
Kingdoms such as Manchuli, Dalong and Taklaman are each reminiscent of real regions in China.
Nonetheless, Zee, who is bi-lingual and holds dual degrees in English Literature, chose to write The Altethlon Chronicles in her second language and self-publish in America rather than risk having it pirated in China’s nascent fantasy market.
Some realities are worth escaping.
Discover Blond Lotus, anotherbook review by Tom Carter.
Gillian Wong writes, “The persisting suspicions about Qian’s death reflect a growing lack of trust in China’s government as rampant corruption and official abuse erode public confidence.”
The language Wong uses to place blame bothers me. What she writes assumes that China’s central government has total control over everything that happens in China, which it doesn’t. China is about the size of the United States with five times the population and most police work and governing takes place at the local level as in the US.
In fact, China couldn’t join the World Trade Organization in December 2001 without having a legal system similar to most Western democracies, which means this issue of a rural village leader being murdered over a land grab has to be dealt with by China’s infant legal system guided by the laws of China as such a crime would be dealt with in America under US laws.
This means criminals often go free as in the US. If the evidence and witnesses do not exist, no one is punished. The old days of Chinese officials rounding up the accused and executing them without evidence and a proper trial are supposed to be over.
For example, in 1973, Al Pacino played the part of an honest New York cop, Frank Serpico, who blew the whistle on corruption in the city police force only to have his comrades in police uniforms turn against him. Pacino’s movie was based on a true story.
The US even has a witness protection program to protect the lives of innocent people from criminals that want to erase all evidence against them even if it means murdering witnesses
I’ve written about corruption in China before and what is being done about it. What the West considers corruption in China and all of Asia was a way of life for several thousand years. The old ways of doing things do not change instantly just because a foreign legal system and new laws are created.
To allow this new legal system to work, the slow wheels of justice must be allowed to turn and that doesn’t guarantee that justice will be served. If you believe China is doing nothing about crime and corruption, learn from Bo Xilai’s 32 Million.
Another American movie, Walking Tall, was also based on the true story of honest Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser, who almost single-handily cleaned up his small town of crime and corruption, but at a horrible price, and he nearly lost his life as Serpico did.
No, I cannot blame that rural village leader’s death on China’s central government, and I cannot expect Beijing to send in the teenage Red Guard goon squad, which doesn’t exist anymore, as Mao would have done during the Cultural Revolution to punish everyone accused of a crime, even innocent people, without evidence as defined by China’s new legal system.
Gillian Wong also says, “Qian’s death is the latest violent incident to touch a nerve among the Chinese public, angry over official corruption and abuse of power, including unfair seizure of farmers’ land for development…”
Wong’s statements make it sound as if the land belongs to the farmers. It doesn’t.
After all, the land the farmers worked belongs to the collective and the government but not individuals. In fact, even the title to urban homes individuals buy in cities clearly says that all the land belongs to the government. It’s more of a long-term lease than owning land.
How do you measure fair compensation of land that never legally belonged to the farmers in the first place?
Before 1949, most rural land belonged to wealthy landowners. In fact, the ancestors of the peasant farmers working the land today were tenant farmers that paid a rent of some sort to the real landowners, who often abused the peasants.
After winning the Chinese civil war, Mao had many of the original landowners executed for supposed crimes against those peasants. There were no fair trials. The peasants complained and the Communists executed the accused.
Correct me if you have other “facts”, but most of China’s farmers have worked the land free for about sixty years with no rent, no mortgage and no property tax.
As for murder, with a Western style legal system and no witnesses willing to step forward, there is no case. The main character of My Splendid Concubine wrote in one of his journals that in China the innocent were often punished along with the guilty while in England the criminals often went free and there was no justice for the victims.
If what Robert Hart wrote in the 19th century was true, then it seems Western justice has arrived in China. Maybe China’s central government needs to start a Western style witness protection program if they don’t have one yet.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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