She says, “Immigrants chose to come for various reasons, such as to live in freedom, to practice their religion freely, to escape poverty or oppression, and to make better lives for themselves and their children.”
Then why are people immigrating to China? After all, according to the Western media and millions of Sinophobes, China is an oppressive, brutal, totalitarian dictatorship.
In fact, President Obama’s half-brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, lives and works in Guangzhou and nearby Shenzhen. Source: Time Magazine
However, he isn’t China’s only immigrant. There are others—thousands. The city of Guangzhou has become home to about 100,000 African immigrants, and some are marrying Chinese woman and raising families.
According to Al-Jazeera news, many Africans have immigrated to China happy that China’s booming economy offers them opportunities to work, do business and prosper.
However, China has inconsistent Visa rules and there are problems. Beijing is now working on the law to improve it.
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.
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Deng Xiaoping was China’s George Washington. What he did was what Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted. China is a republic that combines Western thought with Chinese tradition.
However, the task to create China’s Republic fell to the Communist Party so China is a Socialist Republic.
In China, Piety is important and advice from elders is often followed as if it is law. Due to this, elder statesmen such as Jiang Zemin have great power in the government even after they no longer have a political title.
After all, this is Chinese tradition.
The Economist mentioned disagreements among Chinese leaders over what the country’s priorities should be—both on the economy and on political reform.
Whatever the final decisions will be after 2012, the consensus will allow Chinese tradition to guide them and not Western thought.
The changes “some” want will not arrive in a hurry if the wisdom of the I-Ching, The Book of Changes, is followed, which says change should come slowly.
In fact, China has proven it is a republic because none of China’s first four presidents are the sons of previous presidents and eventually death removes the elders. China’s presidents did not inherit that title due to heredity as kings do or the leader of North Korea.
As Deng Xiaoping died, so will Jiang Zemin, who is the elder statement today.
If Hu Jintao lives longer than Jiang Zemin, he will be the elder statesmen offering advice from behind closed doors, which Deng Xiaoping must have done up until his death.
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.
Martin Petty at Reuters writes an interesting piece about Suu Kyi in Myanmar (Burma) — not interesting as you might think but interesting in that it reveals an alien point-of-view.
China is mentioned four times and is referred to as Burma’s ally, a neighbor, between China and India, and that Myanmar could become “a province of China”.
However, Petty only mentions briefly (nine paragraphs into the piece) that Western sanctions on the Myanmar regime have failed because Myanmar’s neighbors China, Thailand and India and other Asian nations have been pouring investments into the resource-rich country.
Why didn’t Petty mention that one of those other Asian nations pouring investments into Myanmar is Singapore — one of America’s staunchest Southeast Asian allies and trading partners.
Singapore is also rated by Transparency.org as one of the world’s least corrupt nations tied with Denmark and New Zealand for the number one spot, while the United States is ranked twenty-two with a score of 7.1 ( a C-) to Singapore’s score of 9.3 (an A).
It isn’t as if Reuters didn’t know what was going on.
A 2007 Reuters piece says that Singapore was one of Myanmar’s biggest foreign investors with more than one billion dollars in trade that year.
Then later in the 2007 piece, Reuters says that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) admitted Myanmar as a member in 1997 even with international criticism.
Just what does “international” mean when the nine founding members of ASEAN do business with Myanmar.
Is “international” another way of saying “Western” or “America”?
Here’s the ASEAN list — Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. I didn’t see China or India on that list, and India is often touted as the biggest democracy on the planet — both trade with Myanmar.
In fact, South Korea, another democracy, also trades with Myanmar. In 2009, South Korea granted imports duty free and quota free on 253 goods from Myanmar. Source: People’s Daily
Then The Myanmar Times reported that trade between Myanmar and Japan (another democracy) increased about 33% in 2006-07.
Not wanting to miss out on the potential profits, Australia is on that trade list too (up 160%). Source: Democratic Voice of Burma
It is a fact that all of these Asian nations that trade with Myanmar were either occupied or victims of Western Imperialism going back to the18th century and lasting until the middle of the 20th century.
During this era, Western nations imposed Western values and religions on all of Asia and China.
However, all of Asia (except for Australia) has roots reaching back more than two millennia to Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Taoism.
Western nations and the Middle East have roots to the three Abrahamic Religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Is it possible these different cultural trees are worlds apart on the same planet?
Instead of trying to understand those differences, the West keep thumping its hairy chest and roaring when the other world doesn’t behave with Western moral expectations and beliefs.
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 Part 2, I explained why China was not a monarchy or a dictatorship. In this post and the last one in this series, I will show why China is becoming a republic as Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted by combining Western thought with Chinese tradition.
After Mao died, The Communist Party worked for several years to draft the 1982 Constitution, which included term limits of two five-year terms.
If you have read the Chinese Constitutioncarefully, it is obvious that America’s Constitution was used as a model.
However, these two documents are not the same as many Western critics and Chinese activists claim regarding freedom of the press, speech and religion.
If the Party leadership is not happy with China’s president, he can be removed after one five-year term. There is even an article of impeachment in the Constitution.
China’s first president was Li Xiannian (1983 to 1988). He served one, five-year term. Then he stepped down.
From 1988 to 1993, Yang Shangkun would be China’s president for one five-year term. Deng Xiaoping (born 1904 – died 1997) was the Chairman of the Communist Party from 1983 to 1993, which was ten years—what China’s 1982 Constitution calls for.
Due to how the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989 was handled, Yang had to step down at the end of his first, five-year term. The only other way to remove him would have been through impeachment.
In 1993, Jiang Zemin became President and Chairman of the Communist Party.
Then in 2003, Hu Jintao became President and Chairman of the Party. His term ends in 2012.
China has now had four presidents serve out their terms according to China’s 1982 Constitution.
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.
The Economist implied in the feature for the October 23 issue of the magazine, that China is a monarchy.
However, China is not a monarchy as the Kim Dynasty in North Korea has become or a dictatorship as many in the West believe.
In North Korea, what started as a Socialist Dictatorship modeled on Maoism has become a Socialist Maoist Monarchy.
China, on the other hand, started as a Socialist Dictatorship under Mao (1949 to 1976) and is becoming a fledgling republic with Western critics looking for cockroaches and slugs under rocks.
In fact, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the father of China’s Republic, wrote that he wanted to model China’s government after America but by combining Western thought with Chinese tradition.
He did not say he wanted China to be a clone of America’s Republic.
America was still a Republic prior to World War II. The US wouldn’t become a full-fledged democracy until the 1960s.
Unfortunately, Dr. Sun died in 1925 before he could finish what he started.
It wouldn’t be until after Mao died in 1976, that the leaders of the Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping would start the long journey to implement Sun’s dream of a Republic against great pressure from Western democracies to copy them.
In Part three, I will talk about what happened after Mao died and explain what “Chinese tradition” means.
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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