Bertel Schmitt writes in The Truth about Cars that GM will introduce the battery powered VOLT in China in the second half of 2011.
According to the Schmitt, GM has already conceded the Volt will be a failure in China because Chinese consumers are buying mostly gasoline and diesel powered cars and trucks.
There is one advantage China has over America and most of the world. The centeral government may decide to require taxis then the rest of China’s car owners to buy electric or hybrid and set a deadline.
Imagine how that would succeed in the US. In fact, China is doing something the US is having trouble getting started.
China is building wind farms off its coasts and replacing out-of-date coal burning power plants with modern, cleaner coal powered generating plants.
In fact, China has a long way to go to clean up its environment but it is moving in that direction.
Meanwhile, in the US, the top ten selling cars for 2010 are all gasoline powered as they are in China. Source: Good Car Bad Car
Even with polluted air, gasoline power remains king. I drive a hybrid and walk whenever possible. However, many people who live in the same town drive huge, gas guzzling SUVs.
Statistics tell us that the Chinese middle-class consumer isn’t that different from similar people in the US.
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.
One thing China has been proud of is the ability to produce enough food to feed its people.
For millennia, China has managed to avoid widespread famine except during Mao’s Great Leap Forward when millions starved to death due to “bad” political decisions based on ideology instead of reason. After Mao died, Deng Xiaoping would return the country to reason.
To deal with the threat of widespread drought and famine, China’s Emperors started construction of the Grand Canal around 500 BC.
Other emperors improved methods of agriculture and added to the canal.
Today the fear of famine has returned. Although China currently has more than enough food to feed its growing population, for the first time in history, China has to import some foods from Europe, Africa, Australia, South America and the United States.
In fact, Freakonomics says, “China gave up any pretense of being self-sufficient in soybean production a long time ago and is now the world’s largest soybean importer.”
China is largely sufficient in growing grain, so it is a net exporter of grains. However, it has to import other products like sugar, oil seeds and vegetable oil.
Some high quality convenience food items such as butter and cheese are also imported in small quantities.
In 2008, China Daily (Xinhua) reported that imported foods to China would total 1 trillion yuan or 147 million US dollars in the next five years.
As China’s population continues to grow and food demand outpaces domestic food production, the fear of famine and political blackmail from countries that import food to China will grow.
Since China’s centeral government does not want to depend on other nations, this is a sensitive area.
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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.
Since The Economist’s home office is in London, the magazine represents more than the American media—it represents the Western media and this piece was written in Hong Kong.
This isn’t the first time I’ve read about China’s reputation for trampling intellectual-property rights and that an authoritarian government couldn’t possibly compete with a democracy when it comes to innovation.
However, the conclusion points out that China is becoming more innovative and is starting to be serious about protecting intellectual property rights through China’s changing legal system.
What The Economist piece misses is that democracies do not hold a patent on innovation. For more than two millennia, innovations were rampant in an authoritarian China ruled by emperors without much of a legal system. The usual form of punishment was decapitation.
In fact, the list of innovations from ancient China is long and historians are starting to revise the textbooks to show that most of what we have today came from an authoritarian China.
I’m sure there are those who will deny the West “borrowed” these innovations from China and claim that the West reinvented them, but the evidence shows that these ideas traveled West along both the north and south Silk Roads as early as the Roman Empire more than two millennia ago. It just took time for the West to learn how to copy what the Chinese invented then claim it was the West that came up with the ideas.
Too bad that the patent laws, lawyers and courts of today didn’t exist then. Imagine the settlements over these ancient Chinese innovations, which revolutionized the world we live in today.
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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.
The earliest evidence of the use of drums in China was found in Oracle inscriptions from the Shang Dynasty (1783-1123 BC).
Drums were used to motivate troops, set a marching pace and for sending orders or announcements.
The drum had a purpose in almost all elements of Chinese life. Copper drums come from southern China and date to almost a thousand years before Christ.The copper drum was also called the war drum.
The Han Dynasty used copper drums for war too.
The Fengyang Drum Dance originated in Anhui Province and was used by traveling musicians and dancers in the streets of villages and towns. In time, it would represent poverty.
Tibetan drums are part of the Sholdon (Yogurt) Festival, which occurs in late August.
Drums are also used for the traditional Chinese New Year’s Lion Dance.
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.
After Qin Shi Huangdi unified China, he decreed that there would be one language. If he hadn’t done that, the chances are that China would eventually have fractured and stayed many countries similar to Europe, South America and Africa.
After all, China has fifty-six minorities and the Han Chinese are divided between the Cantonese in the south and the Chinese north of the Yangtze river. Even Shanghai speaks a different dialect from Beijing.
Having one written language instead of many helped unify China and kept it that way leading to the most innovative civilization in history.
The Associated Press published China defends language policies in Tibetan areas where we learn that Tibetans are once again protesting that, “Chinese policies are wrecking their unique Buddhist culture.”
Anyone who reads iLook China regularly knows how “unique” that Buddhist culture was.
I use past tense hoping that “unique” Buddhist culture never returns to a feudal society ruled by a few landowners and lamas making up one percent of the population.
Before 1950, the other ninety-nine percent were either serfs or mandatory Buddhist monks, who did not know any other way of life.
To understand what life must have been like in Tibet for the majority, here are a few definitions for “serf”.
1. a member of the lowest feudal class, attached to the land owned by a lord and required to perform labor in return for certain legal or customary rights.
2. a person in bondage or servitude.
3. an unfree person, esp one bound to the land. If his lord sold the land, the serf was passed on to the new landlord.
4. a person who is bound to the land and owned by the feudal lord
With a “unique” culture such as that, who needs the old ways?
Besides, it has been sixty years since Mao occupied Tibet for China. If you doubt that China ruled over Tibet before 1950, read the October 1912 issue of National Geographic.
Mao was fourteen when Dr. Shaoching H. Chuan, who wrote the piece in National Geographic, went to Tibet in 1907 with a medical team ordered there by the Qing Emperor to deal with a cholera epidemic in one of China’s vassal states governed by two Chinese political governors assigned by the emperor.
Since the average life expectancy for Tibetans was 35.5 in the 1950s, it should be safe to say that most Tibetans who lived there at the time are as dead as China’s first emperor and Mao.
Today, thanks to a modern lifestyle and better medical care provided by China, life expectancy in Tibet has improved to 67.
In fact, only 10% of the region’s population is over 60.
In the last five decades, Tibet’s population has grown about 140 percent. The reason for that growth is that Tibetan families are not subject to the nation’s one-child policy, which is so unpopular in the West.
Why don’t we ever hear these facts from China’s Western critics?
Last year, Tibet had 2.9 million permanent residents. That means 2.7 million Tibetans never lived in the feudal Buddhist society that existed up to 1950.
When a few hundred ethnic minority university students in Beijing recently protested learning Mandarin, I’m sure they had no idea what life would have been like if Tibet had remained free of China.
These same misguided youths are also lucky that Mao and Qin Shi Huangdi are dead.
The first emperor had the scholars that protested one written language dig their own grave then had his troops set fire to them before burying the charred bodies.
Mao would have just had the students executed with one shot to the back of the head.
However, now Tibetan university students protest in Beijing and nothing happens. That’s progress.
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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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