Gwyneth Paltrow Popular in China

January 7, 2011

With Country Strong, Gwyneth Paltrow’s popularity in China may mean a busy box office in Chinese theaters.


Gwyneth Paltrow – Country Strong – CMA Awards 2010

However, Facts and Details says, “Many foreign films never make it to China. The guidelines on content are very strict: No sex, no religion. Nothing to do with the occult. Nothing that could threaten public morality or portray criminal behavior—in other words, the basic ingredients for many successful films. Those that are allowed to be shown often have key scenes deleted.”

The China Daily reported how Paltrow asked Beyonce for singing tips while Country Strong was in production. She told Access Hollywood, “I kind of asked my girl singer friends for advice. I asked Faith Hill a lot of questions – and Beyonce actually too.”

Why would China Daily be reporting this of Paltrow if Country Strong hadn’t been approved for Chinese audiences?


Gwyneth Paltrow’s solo in Infamous

In fact, Paltrow’s belief in Chinese medicine may help see Country Strong, with some cutting, appear in Chinese cinemas.

About five years ago, Gwyneth attended a premiere in a backless gown revealing a collection of symmetrical, purple dots that graced the skin of her back. Those marks were a sign of “cupping” and sent a flurry of photographs around the globe and even prompted her friend Oprah Winfrey to explore this ancient (medical) practice on her show.

“It feels amazing and it’s very relaxing, and it feels terrific,” Paltrow told Winfrey. “It’s just one of the alternative medicines that I do instead of taking antibiotics.”

“I have been a big fan of Chinese medicine for a long time because it works,” Paltrow said.


Gwyneth Paltrow sings Bette Davis Eyes

Facts and Details reports of popular Hollywood movies in China, in 1994, The Fugitive, with Harrison Ford, became the first American feature film to be shown legally in Chinese cinemas. Titanic was also a big box office hit. Pearl Harbor was the second highest grossing film ever in China.

Then in 2006, Chinese sensors approved Miami Vice and left a steamy love scene with Collin Farrell and Gong Li largely intact.

In July 2009, Transformers 2 became China’s biggest box office hit replacing Titanic.

Discover Looking Like Jessica Alba in China

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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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Separation of Church and State — Part 1/3

January 6, 2011

In 1998, something dire happened in Washington DC while President Clinton was in the White House and the GOP controlled both houses of Congress.

Clinton must have made a compromise with the GOP since in the 105th Congress, the GOP held 55 seats in the Senate and Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House with 228 GOP votes of 435.

I have no idea what Clinton got out of the deal, but what happened was a huge victory for America’s conservative evangelical Christians. It also created a threatening situation for most of the world’s population.

These evangelicals are the same people who want to control women’s reproductive rights in the US and the same people who fight to block sex education designed to combat the spread of HIV AIDS.  These evangelicals are the same people that managed, while President G. W. Bush was living in the White House, to limit stem cell research possibly leading to many early deaths and much suffering among the living. 

To explore more on this topic, see Christian Today Australia – US evanglical engagement in politics is too partisan, say authors or Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right.

What President Clinton and the GOP majority in Congress did was turn the U.S. Department of State into a global advocate for organized religion.

For many in China, this blending of government with religion in the US may be of a particular concern since China has a history with Christianity that has often ended badly.

When the treaty was signed ending the First Opium War (1840-1842), the British Empire included a clause that forced China to open its doors to Christian missionaries.

A decade later, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) was led by a Christian convert that wanted to turn China into a Christian nation. In fact, Jonathan D. Spence wrote about this Christian convert in God’s Chinese Son.

In the end, more than twenty million were killed.  Ironically, Hong Xiuquan called the part of China he controlled the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace.

Then in 1900, there was the Boxer Rebellion (Righteous Harmony Society Movement), which was a popular peasant uprising to rid China of meddling Christian missionaries and foreigners.

An armed force made up of military from mostly Christian nations invaded China and ended the Boxer movement. The Christians stayed.

In Part 2, we will see why it is dangerous to allow a government to use taxpayer dollars to get into the business of spreading organized religion across the world.

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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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China Moving – Part 2/2

January 5, 2011

 To maintain perspective, I will start this segment about poverty in China by citing the CIA World Factbook. The CIA report says that only 2.8% of China’s population lives in “absolute poverty”, while reporting that 12% live in poverty in the US.

India’s listing says 25% live in poverty. The poverty percentage for the United Kingdom (Britain) was fourteen. Zambia, the highest poverty rate I saw was at 86%.

The CIA says, “National estimates of the percentage of the population falling below the poverty line are based on surveys of sub-groups, with the results weighted by the number of people in each group. Definitions of poverty vary considerably among nations. For example, rich nations generally employ more generous standards of poverty than poor nations.

In fact, the 2010 Global Hunger Index says there were 925 million hungry people in the world. The index ranks countries on a 100-point scale, with zero being the best score (no hunger) and 100 being the worst.

China’s score was nine.

Al Jazeera’s Samah El-Shahat says, “The Chinese economic miracle dominates headlines around the world.… The economy there is predicted to grow at 8% up to 2010 and beyond, which is an incredible rate of development.”

To make this happen, people migrated to where the jobs are creating crowded cities and empty villages.

This segment starts out in Sichuan Province on a family farm where bringing in the crop falls to a young girl and her grandmother, Wei Shu Bin.

Wei Shu Bin says the young girl’s parents are away working in the city to earn money—”that is their way of taking care of me.”

In fact, the money sent home from the city has transformed the family’s life in the countryside. Before the parents went away, the family lived in a hut with a thatched roof reminiscent of the middle ages in Europe.

Today, they live in a larger house, but most of the village people are very old or very young because 80% have gone to work elsewhere.

Yang Xui Ying in the village market says, “We keep pigs and grow vegetables for sale in the market. We can support ourselves.”

The reason stated for so many leaving the villages to work in the cities is to provide a better future for their children so they can attend school. However, there is a downside to not having parents at home—the crime rate among rural Chinese teens has gone up.

To build a modern China with improved lifestyles requires sacrifice and hard work. It doesn’t come free.

Return to China Moving – Part 1

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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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Harbin’s Winter Wonderland

January 5, 2011

Casey Chan of Gizmodo posted A Winter Wonderland in China with two photos of The Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, which is located in Northeast China where the average winter temperature is a (minus) – 16.8 degrees Celsius.  The Festival is held in January.

Wikipedia says the annual Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival has been held since 1963. 

However, it was interrupted for a few years during the Cultural Revolution until it resumed in 1985.  Mao died in 1976, and it took time for China’s economic engine to build momentum. The fact that the festival resumed in 1985 is a sign of the changes taking place in China.

In the Comment section of Chan’s Gizmodo post, Adam wrote, “China is awesome when it comes to giant decorations and celebrations (just remember the Olympics!), but the people there still have an extremely low quality of life. Why, if they can do some things so well, do they fail at others?”

Sega8800 replied to Adam,” How do you know their life is low quality?”

Adam’s answer was a Wikipedia  link to a post of a 1994 book, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. The couple that wrote the book spent five year in China (1988 to 1993) as journalists for the New York Times.

I laughed.

The material for this book is over 17 years old. Time did not stand still. During those years, China transformed itself by rebuilding the old cities while building more than a hundred new ones.

In fact, the standard of living in China has skyrocketed as the middle class expands and grows. Last year, Chinese bought more new cars than Americans did.

Even the lifestyle of peasants in rural China improved and will continue to do so as China extends electricity to rural China, subsidizes appliances for the rural Chinese, builds new roads, airports and railroads, etc.

The embedded videos with this post are of Harbin and previous festivals.

Learn of China’s Spring Festival, which comes in February.

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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.

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, environment | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China Moving – Part 1/2

January 4, 2011

To put this topic in perspective, I’ll start by talking about poverty in the United States.

Business Insider says that 45 million Americans lived in poverty in 2009, which saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.

U.S. household participation in the food stamp program has increased 20.28% since last year, and in June, the number of Americans on food stamps surpassed 41 million for the first time.

One of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.

More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the U.S. government health care program designed principally to help the poor, and 20% of children now live in poverty.

The poverty in China you will now read and/or see is not unique. Poverty is a global challenge.

In fact, the World Bank says the poverty rate in China fell from 85% in 1981 to 15.9% in 2005, while in India, 421 million live in poverty.

In this 2007 video, Al Jazeera reported that 150 million people left rural China to find jobs in the country’s rapidly growing cities.

On the outskirts of Shanghai is an illegal shantytown built by migrant laborers. Most migrant laborers are farmers who left their land to find work in the city.

The migrants in this Al Jazeera report collect debris from construction sites, which they sell to recycling centers. Even though these workers earn little, it is more than double what they earned at home.

However, the narrator “does not” mention that on the farm, there may not be much money to buy luxury goods but the home they lived in was rent-free and as farmers, they grew enough food to feed themselves.

The World Bank says that one percent of the world’s population survives by collecting valuable trash and debris as the men depicted in the Al Jazeera video do to earn enough money to survive.

Trash collecting represents the first tenuous step to escape the poverty of rural China.

Professor Shi Ming-zheng, Director of NYU in Shanghai, says the urban people have mixed feelings about the millions of migrant workers flooding into the city to improve their lives.

He says, “On one hand, the urban people feel the migrants are necessary to provide cheap labor. On the other hand, they also despise them because they come from uneducated, poor rural backgrounds.”

For most migrant labors, the only hope for the future is with the children and education is the key.

In fact, China’s government sees the importance of raising the education levels of children so they become useful people for China.

But, according to Al Jazeera, of China’s 20 million migrant children less than half attend school.

Part 2 of “China Moving” will focus on what happens in the countryside when so many people left to find work in the cities.

Learn more about The Urban-Rural Divide in China.

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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.

Leave a Comment » | America, China, cultural differences, economy, family values, parenting | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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