The New Year Migration in China

December 4, 2010

We visited China and traveled during one of China’s national holidays in 2008. 

My sister and her youngest daughter went with us. 

Both are evangelical Christians and mentioned they didn’t believe in China’s one-child policy. I heard this more than once but after they arrived in China and experienced that migration, both became quiet about the one-child policy.

It was so crowded at times, it was as if we were swimming through a thick sea of people.

After that, I said the next trip to China would not be during any of China’s national holidays.

In fact, to deal with this migration, inhabitat.com says, “China has released a massive rail development program, which will expand the high-speed rail service to 42 more high-speed lines by 2012.”

This Al Jazeera report is about China’s annual New Year Migration of 2010. For readers who haven’t been to China, this may be your only chance to experience a taste of what it is like to live in a country with more than 1.3 billion people.

Tony Birtley of Al Jazeera, reports from a train heading south from Beijing to Hebei province.

Birtley says, “Welcome to the Chinese New Year and to the world’s biggest annual migration.… There’s something like 2,000 people on this train and you can hardly move.”

The rail system in China barely managed to move the average 220 million people traveling home to celebrate the Chinese New Year with family.

It is possible that a passenger will have to stand for a trip of 16 to 48 hours to reach their destination.

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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

Building Things and Going Places

December 3, 2010

I discovered this time-lapse video at zerohedge.com of a fifteen-story hotel being built in a few days in Changsha, a city in south-central China.

While watching, I thought of all that China has accomplished in more than two-thousand years that no other country or civilization has achieved.

There’s the amazing miracle the world has witnessed since the early 1980s as China rebuilt and reinvented itself from a medieval kingdom to a modern nation with the only maglev line in the world.

It is obvious that the Chinese don’t give up easily once they start something.

After all, the Chinese spent more than two thousand years building the Great Wall and about a thousand years building the Grand Canal.

The largest palace on the earth, the Forbidden City, is in Beijing and was built more than five hundred years ago. 

The first emperor of China had a tomb and a Terra Cotta army built that makes the pyramids of Egypt seem insignificant.

Then there was the great fleet commanded by Admiral Zheng He during the Ming Dynasty.

In recent years, the Chinese announced they are going to build a space station, since the West won’t share theirs with China.

China has also said they are planning to build a colony on the moon, mine for rare earth metals and send a Chinese expedition to Mars within a few decades.

The Chinese recently proposed building a bullet train from Beijing to London while building thousands of kilometers of rail for bullet trains in China.  America doesn’t have one bullet train yet.

Does anyone doubt the Chinese won’t accomplish these tasks once they have announced the goals?

No wonder the Western democracies want China to have a Western style democratic government.

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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

Stealing China’s History and Leaving Guilt Behind

December 3, 2010

I’m writing about Dunhuang China, a documentary.  Dunhuang is located in northwest China in Gansu province.

The video is in Mandarin but there are English subtitles competent enough to understand what the lovely host and the experts on the panels are saying about the meaning and history of Dunhuang’s Buddhist hand-carved grottos.

Dunhuang was located at the beginning of the ancient Silk Road and was first built during the early Han Dynasty (206 BC -219 AD).

Trade caravans came to Dunhuang from Europe, the Roman Empire, Persia, and India. Dunhuang was also the city the caravans left on the long trek west from China.

Dunhuang became a multicultural city that prospered during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 906 AD).

Over centuries, Buddhist grottos/caves were carved from the cliffs of Dunhuang and a monastery was built in this remote location.

About a thousand years ago, the site was sealed and abandoned to the shifting sands of the desert.

Then in the late 18th century, a Buddhist monk accidently rediscovered the library cave where thousands of priceless Buddhist books had been stored for millennia.

It’s as if a Tang Emperor saw the future and realized to save some of China’s history, it would have to be hidden in a remote, desolate location.

The documentary leaves a strong impression that China treasures what is left of the wall and ceiling paintings that captures centuries of Chinese history.

Many Chinese feel guilt at allowing some paintings to be cut away from the walls along with ancient Buddhist texts that were looted in the early 1900s by charlatans and thieves from Japan, England, France, Russia, Germany and the United States.

The documentary goes into detail of who these thieves were.

For decades now, a few scholars have sacrificed and struggled to study and preserve what’s left.

In October 2010, Tele Times International reported that PCCW Limited was awarded a contract by the Dunhuang Academy China to provide a digital theater system at the Dunhuang Mogao Caves Visitor Center. The plans call for four digital theaters.

Crystal Inks.com says, “Dunhuang has 492 caves, with 45,000 square meters of frescos, 2, 415 painted statues and five wooden-structured caves. The Mogao Grottoes contain priceless paintings, sculptures, some 50,000 Buddhist scriptures, historical documents, textiles, and other relics that first stunned the world in the early 1900s.”

Discover more at  A Millennia of History at a Silk Road Oasis

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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

The Virtue of Saving Money

December 3, 2010

Hung Huang, one of China’s four Opras and the CEO of China Interactive Media Group, the host of TV talk show Crossing Over and one of the top-five most popular Bloggers in China wrote a post for the New York Times Economix Blog about why the Chinese save so much. She thinks the Chinese save out of fear.

I don’t agree, because China is not unique when it comes to Asians saving money. Galbi Think.org says, “Savings rates for East Asian economies averaged about 35% of GDP.

Another study reported by All Business.com says, “The fact that the saving rate of rural households (in China) is considerably higher than that of urban households even though their income levels are so much lower is surprising.”

Not so surprising. I married into a Chinese family and I’ve come to believe the Chinese can out frugal anyone. The less earned, the more the Chinese save.  All it takes is saying no to buying frivolous junk and eating out when the money isn’t there.

In fact, I found the comments to Huang’s post to be more convincing.

Melvin Chin says, “Asians, including Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, are predominantly brought up with the concepts of frugality and saving from very young.… Saving teaches them to be proud of what is accumulated, enjoy the fruits of abundance, and cherish the habit as a virtue.”

B. Ray says, “The strong family connection is the reason for Chinese to save. It is the same in Taiwan. Almost every elder person I know saves for their descendents.”

Fei says, “Simply look at the generations of Chinese who live in North American, you’ll find out that the majority of them still maintain a lifelong enthusiasm of saving … because saving is a habit that’s deeply rooted in the Chinese culture.”

If all Asian cultures are so good at saving money and are all collective cultures, what does that say about the West and North America’s individualistic cultures?

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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

Enough, Already!

December 2, 2010

Christopher Bodeen of the Associated Press reported that a Chinese father was punished for food safety activism.

The AP wasn’t the only Western media to go ballistic with this story.

Amnesty International jumped in along with BBC News, Forbes, and CBS News among others. 

In the West, this type of story sells newspapers and boosts ratings for the five and ten o’clock news.

Be assured, this story will be “milked” for all it is worth.

The father of a three-year old child that was sickened by melamine-tainted milk, Zhao Lianhai, was convicted and sentenced Wednesday to 2 1/2 years in prison for inciting social disorder (in China), his lawyer said.

Bodeen’s lead in the AP piece was a masterpiece to appeal to Western anger. “A father who organized a support group for other parents whose children were sickened in one of China’s worst food safety scandals was convicted and sentenced…”

However, if you grew up in a Western culture and are capable of not seeing red, I suggest you read the rest of Bodeen’s piece before you start shouting. 

It also helps to understand how the Mandate of Heaven has affected Chinese civilization for more than two thousand years. Chinese history is filled with bloody rebellions and insurrections that were allowed to get out of hand.

In China, it is often better to make a mistake by throwing someone in jail than risking another Cultural Revolution or Taiping Rebellion where an estimated fifty million died.

What the government did sounds more like “Enough Already!”  The guy just wouldn’t get the hint and had to be hit upside the head.

After all, the event happened in 2008. Lianhai has had almost three years to protest before the government sent him to jail to shut him up.
 
In fact, there was a trial for the people behind the tainted milk and justice was served.
 
Three people got the death penalty.
 
The general manager and chair woman of Sanlu, the company at the heart of the scandal, was given a life sentence.
 

Dozens of officials, dairy executives and farmers were punished for allowing the contamination to take place.

When this type of tainted food scandal happens in the US, few go to prison and sometimes there is no justice even in court.

What China should do is free Linahai and send him and his family to the US where he can protest all he wants about tainted American food.

In fact, we need Linahai here.

Sarah Francis at MomsRising.org says that each year in the U.S., more than 76 million people get sick and more than 5,000 die from food-borne diseases.

The problem is that there are so many people protesting in the US, few listen unless you belong to the Tea Party.

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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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