Innovative Chinese-American Fusion

May 3, 2010

Sitting in Young Hall (CS 50) at the 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on April 24, I heard Zachary Karabell explain why China and the United States were one economy.  If you want to learn more, I suggest reading Superfusion. Karabell also said China relies on American innovation.

This morning, an example of that American innovation appeared as an advertisement for the CODA, an all-electric car.  Usually, I ignore the Ads, which often are pains slightly below the tip of the spine.

The CODA, an all-electric car

This time, I clicked the Ad and discovered that the CODA was being manufactured mostly by a joint effort between China and a few of those American innovators Karabell mentioned.  To give you an idea of how global the CODA is, check out the following list.

“About 40 percent of the components in the car, when measured by monetary value, come from US manufacturers, such as Borg Warner. The battery inside Coda’s sedan comes from a joint venture owned by Coda and China’s Tianjin Lishen Battery Co. The electronics for thermal and battery management of the pack were designed and will be produced in the US and shipped to Asia. The car will be built on assembly lines in China, with Coda engineers remaining full-time on the manufacturing floor to oversee production. Maybe ten percent of the original [Chinese] design is left.” Source: Matter Network

Also see Holding a Vital Key to Humanity’s Future

Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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4 Comments | America, business, China, economy, environment | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Life of Confucius – Part 1/5

May 2, 2010

Confucius was born 550 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.  Ironically, he was born into a time of war and bloodshed and his father was a fearsome warrior. Due to the father’s skills in battle, his king made him governor of Tsou, a village southeast of today’s Beijing.

Although the father had more than one wife, nine daughters and one crippled, sickly son, he was lonely. He wanted a healthy son, so at age seventy Confucius’s father took a 16-year-old concubine who gave him a healthy son, who would become the man we call Confucius. Confucius was not a pretty baby. His head looked like a hill shaped like a crown.

Confucius was not his real name. Twenty-one-hundred years after his birth, Christian missionaries would change his real name to what we know today.

Confucius was three when his father died. Jealous older wives disowned his mother. Facing starvation, mother and child traveled to a nearby city ten miles from the village. Life for Confucius and his mother was not easy and his path to wisdom was going to be hard. The suffering would cause Confucius to vow that he would bring peace to China.

Go to Part 2 of “The Life of Confucius” or hear the music of The Yangqin

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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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2 Comments | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Confucianism, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Next Super Power

April 30, 2010

On April 24, I attended a panel at the 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The topic was “China: The Next Superpower?” The experts were Richard Baum, author of China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom; Zachary Karabell, Superfusion, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, China in the 21st Century.

Baum is an expert on politics; Karabell on money/economics, and Wasserstrom on history.

Wasserstrom said that China is not the older country. The PRC was sixty-years old while the United States was more than two hundred, and that the Communist and American Revolutions rejected colonialism then both expanded into other countries and territories to become world powers.

Baum added that the cultural differences are significant starting with Confucianism, which expresses collective rights instead of individual rights as in America.

Karabell mentioned that there was a lot of misunderstanding and ignorance between the United States and China. For one thing, China’s trade with the world is about even between exports and imports and what China buys from the United States keeps many Americans working.

Learn about Human Rights the Chinese Way

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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. 

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4 Comments | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Grand Canal

April 30, 2010

An example of how hard the Chinese work stands in the Great Wall of China and the Grand Canal. To understand the significance, we will look at the Suez and Panama Canals first as a comparison.

China’s Grand Canal

In the 19th century, the French built a canal 100 miles across the Isthmus of Suez. When it opened, the Suez Canal was only 25 feet deep, 72 feet wide at the bottom and 200 to 300 feet wide at the surface. About 20,000 ships use the canal each year. Source: History.com

The Panama Canal was started in 1881 by the French but ended a failure. The Americans finished the canal between 1904 – 1914. The canal was 51-miles long.  Today, it handles over 12,000 ships a year. Source: The Panama Canal

When I was in grade school, we learned about the Panama Canal in glowing terms. I’m sure the French and British brag about the Suez Canal in their textbooks too.

Until my first trip to China in 1999, I had never heard of the Grand Canal, which is the oldest and longest man-made canal in the world at more than a thousand miles from Beijing to Hangzhou south of Shanghai.

China’s Grand Canal

The construction started almost five hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ and was completed centuries later.  The canal is still in use today.  To finish it, the Pound lock was invented in the 10th century during the Song Dynasty. There are 24 locks and about 60 bridges.  Source: Wikipedia

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.

Honorable Mentions in General Fiction
2012 San Francisco Book Festival
2012 New York Book Festival
2012 London Book Festival
2009 Los Angeles Book Festival
2009 Hollywood Book Festival

Finalist in Fiction & Literature – Historical Fiction
The National “Best Books 2010” Awards

E-book_cover_MSC_July_24_2013

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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One Step from the Global Gold Medal

April 30, 2010

Globally, China’s buying power has increased to the number two spot. Source: World Bank

Salary gaps still existed. In Beijing, people working in industries such as securities, banking and air transport obtained more than 100,000 yuan (14,245 U.S. dollars). While workers in the textile and agriculture industries had less than 20,000 yuan (2,849 U.S. dollars). source: Sina.com

Olympic Medal

An argument could be made that Americans earn more.  However, “The average annual income of Chinese farmers hit a record 5,000 yuan (732 dollars) this year as increased demand for migrant workers saw more money sent back to rural areas, state media reported Monday. Source” France 24 International News.” Source: France 24

With 1.3 billion people, a slight increase in earnings means more spending. China’s GDP to overtake U.S. by early 2020s, says analyst. Mainland to become world’s largest in about a decade, says Deutsche Bank. Source: Market Watch

See “Deng Xiaoping’s 20/20 Vision” http://wp.me/pN4pY-2o

 

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