If you read about China, you may have heard that hundreds of millions live below the poverty level. After all, many peasant farmers in rural China do not earn much money.
Are they poor? Are they starving? Are they homeless?
How do we measure poverty in an industrialized, electronic, virtual Internet nation? The answer is that poverty is measured by the lack of money and/or credit.
In the above video, the narrator says that the way people lived in America before the Industrial Revolution was different from the way we live today. Nine out of ten people in rural areas.
There was a large, mostly poor lower class, a small rich upper class and not much of a middle class.
Rural people raised most of their food on small farms. They didn’t have to leave home each day to work at a job in a town or city. There were families and small village communities that depended on each other in a collective lifestyle.
Back then, there were no electric lights, no movies, no telephones, no recorded music and no cars (and not much pollution).
Ordinary people used their hands to make most of the things they needed.
The world was quiet because there were no noisy machines. The pace of life was slower.
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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In 986 A.D., a Sung Dynasty emperor ordered that an encyclopedia be written.
This ancient encyclopedia is known as the Four Great Books of Song (宋四大书), which was compiled by Li Fang (925 – 996 A.D.) and other scholars during the Sung Dynasty (960–1279 A.D.).
The last book (Cefu Yuangui) was finished during the 11th century. The four encyclopedias were published with the intent to collect all known knowledge of the time. Source: History Cultural China
There were one thousand scrolls with 2,200 biographical entries.
This ancient example of the literary world printed about a thousand years ago was commissioned by Vice Primer Zhou Bida (Sung Dynasty), who had a group of scholars proof read the original copy of the encyclopedia before block printing it.
Surviving copies are kept in China’s national library. Bookworms, who over the years fed on the paper, scarred the original encyclopedias.
Although there are textual errors, the work is still valuable for historical research.
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 this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Unlike India, China’s one party political system allows for quick decisions that often benefit the country.
Another important factor to remember is that China is still a collectivist nation as India is.
Due to this fact, China and India have more in common than India and America.
It does not matter that India is considered the world’s largest democracy, because to counter that, India also has a large bureaucracy that makes it difficult to get things done.
However, in India, the bureaucracy has a reputation for being tremendously arrogant. It is a truism that Indian bureaucrats are generally smug and supercilious… source: Open India
Indian bureaucracy has often been criticized for being cumbersome and stretching procedures to sanction projects. Source: Meri News
Unlike India, China’s one party political system allows for quick decisions that often benefit the country.
Another important factor to remember is that China is still a collectivist nation as India is.
Due to this fact, China and India have more in common than India and America.
It does not matter that India is considered the world’s largest democracy, because to counter that, India also has a large bureaucracy that makes it difficult to get things done.
However, in India, the bureaucracy has a reputation for being tremendously arrogant. It is a truism that Indian bureaucrats are generally smug and supercilious… source: Open India
Indian bureaucracy has often been criticized for being cumbersome and stretching procedures to sanction projects. Source: Meri News
A friend, Tom Carter, while shooting his next book in India, discovered that it was easier to travel and stay in China than India.
A study of Individualist and collectivist orientations across occupational groups in India by Anjali Ghosh where he refers to a study by Sinha & Verma (1994) … that master’s-level students express more idiocentric (individualist) orientations than allocentric (collectivist) due to Western influence, immediate life concerns and exposure to mass media.
However, Verma & Triandis (1999) observed that Indian students were more vertical collectivist than U.S. students were.
Another fact is that China and India both have ancient civilizations more than 5,000 years old and they are next-door neighbors as Canada and the US are.
A friend, Tom Carter, while shooting his next book in India, discovered that it was easier to travel and stay in China than India.
A study of Individualist and collectivist orientations across occupational groups in India by Anjali Ghosh where he refers to a study by Sinha & Verma (1994) … that master’s-level students express more idiocentric (individualist) orientations than allocentric (collectivist) due to Western influence, immediate life concerns and exposure to mass media.
However, Verma & Triandis (1999) observed that Indian students were more vertical collectivist than U.S. students were.
Another fact is that China and India both have ancient civilizations more than 5,000 years old and they are next-door neighbors as Canada and the US are.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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A new comment appeared on my Blog linked to another Blog, A Modern Lei Feng, which is also about China but seems to focus mostly on what happens in modern Beijing.
I followed that link back to see whom or what had left tracks to my Blog, which I often do.
I only read the one post that complained about my Blog, so I cannot pass judgment on the rest of the content.
What I discovered was interesting—an opinion that disagreed with an opinion I wrote in Changing Names.
I clicked the “About” link to discover who the Blog master was behind A Modern Lei Feng and learned that he was a “young guy” living in Beijing who knows a little something about China and is willing to freelance on that topic but not for free.
Since I couldn’t find a name, I will call him “Lei Feng”.
I asked my father-in-law, who lived in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China, what “A Modern Lei Feng” might mean.
My father-in-law, who is Chinese, doesn’t speak English fluently, but he did what he could to translate what “Lei Feng” might mean.
He said there were many translations but this one might refer to a young solder in the PLO that Mao praised to the nation in the 1960s. This soldier’s name was Lei Feng. Mao said everyone must learn from him because he is an excellent role model.
It seems that Lei Feng helped everyone else for free instead of helping himself.
The modern Lei Feng said in his post, “I’m no tech genius, but I’d imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to add the character to a word processor and input program, especially considering the government sent out a circular last year to strictly recognize such names, though it appears this one was left off the list.”
My response, Since I took a class in HTML, program my Websites, and know a professional programmer who made his money (he is retired now) programming for the U.S. defense department and commercial airlines, I know a little bit about what it takes to update software and it isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The programming part would probably be easier than implementing it. The difficulty comes when one program is replaced with another. To do that often means shutting down security systems, loading in the new program and rebooting the computer then turning the security back on. Then, as sometimes happens, the new program might cause the system to crash, and I’m talking about one computer.
In China, we are talking about several hundred million computers, which might operate on different systems. Each system would need another program and a different update.
Besides government computer systems, which may not all be linked since China’s government is decentralized more than most foreigners know, there are more than four hundred million personal computers linked to the internet in China.
I suspect that the decision not to go back and add the Chinese character for this family name that represents 200 people was due to the scope of the project to fix the error and the time it would take.
If it was easy and cheap, why not do it?
However, the issue isn’t over yet. If enough people in China Blog about this and express opinions that the government should make the change, it might still happen, although I doubt it.
China’s central government doesn’t care much about what foreigners think, but they do listen carefully to the people even if they do not always do what “most” of the people want.
In China, small groups do not have as much power as a majority of the population does.
Why there shouldn’t be an “American with Disabilities Act”
As for the Americans with Disabilities Act, I used that as an example to show how expensive it is to cater to a small segment of the population at the tax payers’ expense.
Lei Feng mentions that new buildings in Beijing offer ease of access to people with disabilities.
That’s understandable.
In recent years, most Chinese cities were rebuilt and many new cities mushroomed across China.
During the construction phase, it isn’t that expensive to add a ramp or a wider door but it is labor intensive and expensive to go back and fix something like that after construction ends just as fixing that Chinese language computer program for a nation of 1.3 billion might be too expensive and fraught with problems.
Although I agree with Thomas Paine about Social Security and a few other limited social safety nets that help people survive during hard times, America has a HUGE deficit threatening the nation’s economy and any expensive, unnecessary program should be examined carefully and cut or shrunk.
Idealistically, doing all we can as a nation to help as many people as possible is a good thing but realistically idealism doesn’t always work.
Lei Feng also quoted a phrase from The Declaration of Independence to support his opinion. He said, that there was a promise in the U.S. Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equally” and that we all have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
In fact, the United States Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American Colonies were at war with Great Britain. That is all it was.
The (first) law of the United States was the Articles of Confederation. This document was so weak that in May 1787, a Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia to present a new Constitution that was sent to the States for ratification later that year, which is the law of the U.S. today—not the Declaration of Independence.
Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States does that document say that the government and the taxpayers are responsible to pay for the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” of other citizens who cannot afford to pay for his or her dreams or easy access to cross a street in a wheelchair.
Adding more ramps to make it easier for people in wheel chairs to cross intersections might be a nice thing to do, and I wonder of Lei Feng would like to chip in and donate enough money to build a few and help reduce the U.S. deficit.
I’m sorry to say, I cannot afford to do that. My taxes are too high.
______________
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.
There appears to be an obsession in the West that India, since it is a democracy, is the country that will counter China’s economic and military growth.
The American Interest published a piece in their May/June 2010 issue – The Return of the Raj, which points out that where G. W. Bush failed to build an Indo-U.S. defense pact, Secretary of State Clinton in a visit to India in July 2009 did open the door to significant arms transfers from the U.S. to India.
If the United States and India can together rediscover and revive the Indian military’s expeditionary tradition, they will have a solid basis for strategic cooperation not only between themselves but also with the rest of the world’s democracies. Source: The American Interest
In another piece, A Himalayan rivalry, The Economist focuses on the 1962 conflict between India and China saying, “Memoires of a war between India and China are still vivid in the Tawang valley…”
However, memoires aren’t everything. There is also knowledge, and China is not the same country it was in 1962.
In 1962, some of the factors that led to the war between India and China were linked to Mao’s policies, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
The Maoists were removed from power in the 1980s, and China is not a socialist nation as it was then.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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