Greenpeace China

January 2, 2011

If China is a totalitarian country without much freedom as critics such as Liu Xiaobo claim, why is Greenpeace thriving there without harassment from China’s central government?

Then, if democracies are so desirable, why did Japan send two Greenpeace activists to jail for one year after exposing widespread corruption in the Japanese government’s Southern Ocean whaling programme?

Even though the US remains the world’s worst number one CO2 polluter, during the Bush administration, warnings from government scientists were ignored as if climate change wasn’t happening.

While in China, efforts to combat climate change demonstrate that China’s government acknowledges the challenge as well as the responsibility of China to tackle them.


Listen to Greenpeace China’s Tom Wang in Tianjin calmly being honest about China’s pollution challenges.

In fact, Greenpeace China has offices in Hong Kong (opened 1997), Beijing and Guangzhou (opened in 2002) and is the largest non-governmental organization (NGO) in the People’s Republic of China.

Then in 2006, Greenpeace China was the only NGO to be consulted on an early draft of renewable energy law by China’s National People’s Congress.

Has the US government consulted with Greenpeace?

China has also allowed two Greenpeace expeditions to China’s Himalayan region in 2006 and 2007 where evidence was discovered of the dramatic retreat of glaciers, which was reported in National Geographic Magazine.

One Greenpeace China campaign focused on stopping Monsanto, a US-headquartered biotechnology giant, from patenting a Chinese indigenous soybean variety.

Earlier campaigns in China focused on food, agriculture and electronic waste while highlighting the dangers of PVC in children’s toys.

Today, Greenpeace China runs five major campaigns focused on climate, energy, food and agriculture, water pollution and a campaign on air pollution focused on Hong Kong only.

I admit finding this information about Greenpeace China surprised me because all I’ve heard in the Western media of Greenpeace is that they are a gang of dangerous activists doing crazy things to get attention.

Until reading about Greenpeace in China, I didn’t know what a positive force this NGO was for cleaning the environment.

Now I want to know why the US isn’t doing more.

Discover Where All that Pollution Came From

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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.

To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Home Alone in Rural China

December 30, 2010

In rural China, millions have left their homes to find work in the cities.

However, not all have the money to take their children with them. Some children stay behind alone.

The children left behind  in China are estimated to be over 22 million. In the US, we call them Latchkey Kids.

In fact, Jareb Collins at Associated Content says as many as 77 percent of American youth are Latchkey Kids.

Xie Xiang Ling is one of those children in China that lives alone. She is twelve and tells her story to Al Jazeera.

Ling says she lives alone in rural Anhui Province.

Her parents work in the city and she takes care of herself.  Sometimes her parents come home on the weekend and sometimes are gone for months.

Ling said there are too many people in the city where her parents sell fruit, tea and nuts.

When Ling visited her parents in the city, she had trouble sleeping nights because the city is so loud and there are so many cars.

Back home, Ling does her own cooking and eats fruit.

At times, she helps on her aunt’s farm and pulls the vegetables from the ground.

In school, she loves language class and math but does not like the English class since the teacher always screams at the students.

Ling wants to go to college and earn good money but her family cannot afford to send her to college.

Learn more about China’s Stick People

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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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The Beast of too much Self-Esteem and Positive Language

December 26, 2010

The New York Times reported Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators. China’s students were number one globally while the US came in 23rd.

How did the United States fall so far behind?

The scapegoat is not bad teachers or their unions. Even the flawed and biased documentary Waiting for Superman says only 7% of the teachers were found to be considered bad. Since the average student has about 50 teachers kindergarten through high school, this means less than four might be poor teachers.

The real culprit is the “positive language” and the inflated “sense of self-esteem” movement that has plagued the US for several decades.

In fact, Rapid Net.com reports that Edward Wynne, Professor of Education at the University of Illinois (Chicago Circle campus), and Kevin Ryan, Professor of Education at Boston University, question the benefits of the obsession with self-esteem in America’s schools. In their recently published book Reclaiming Our Schools, they note: “The self-esteem movement puts a false and infectious pressure on teachers. They are more and more expected to keep students feeling good about themselves. In other eras, teachers were expected to provide pupils with an environment and educational opportunity to grow and achieve.”

Rapid Net.com says, “A 1990 study contrasting the performance of American students in mathematics skills with five other countries revealed that the math scores of American 5th-graders were the lowest of the six countries. The Koreans were first. The test asked pupils to say whether they felt they would be “good at mathematics in high school.” Of the Americans, 68% said “yes” while only 26% of the high-scoring Koreans gave that reply.”

The answer is returning to Aristotle’s idea of the “Golden Mean”, which means avoidance of extremes since building a false sense of self-esteem in children is an extreme.

However, Aristotle is not alone.

In Chinese philosophy, a similar concept, Doctrine of the Mean, was propounded by Confucius.

Buddhist philosophy also includes the concept of the Middle Way.

Reverend Dr. George C. Papademetriou at Goarch.org says, “The way of (Christian) Orthodoxy is to converge on the golden mean, carefully avoiding extremes and the pitfalls that can lead to destruction.”

The extreme self-esteem movement in the US is leading the country towards destruction.

In China and in most American-Chinese homes, when a child brings a poor grade home from school, the teacher is not blamed.  The parents accept the blame and tell the child he or she is lazy and stupid and must work harder. 

Then the Chinese parent enrolls the child in private night or weekend classes to help them succeed.  They may also hire a tutor for the child.

Maybe the Chinese concept of raising children explains the 2009 PISA test results from Shanghai and the economic miracle that has taken place in China since the early 1980s. 

Since the Chinese are not as perfect as most Americans born after 1960 believe they are, the Chinese are willing to work harder regardless of low or high self-esteem.

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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

Democracy and Freedom – A Difference of Opinion

December 19, 2010

I’m sure that most Americans (as well educated as they are, and I’m being sarcastic) think all democracies are the same.

They aren’t.

The World Atlas lists 192 countries on the globe and according to Made in Democracies.org, there are 58 democracies. If correct, that means 134 countries are not democracies. This list excludes countries that claim they are democracies but are sanctioned tax havens for secret bank accounts or allow child prostitution.

If you read the entry for Democracy at Wikipedia, you will discover there are many different types of democracies.

The Economists Democracy Index has four categories. The next index from Freedom House has three.

In fact, Freedom House has another chart for Electoral democracies, which shrinks the list further.

There is another for Parliamentary democracies.

The smallest category may be for “liberal democracy” where elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive. Even liberal democracies are divided into categories.

The United States is labeled as a federal republic along with India, Germany and Brazil.

The United Kingdom is listed as a constitutional monarchy along with Japan, Canada and Spain.

The biggest difference between China and most democracies is that China’s republic has one political party, which controls the state-owned media. Yet there are city and regional media in China that often publish opinions that do not appear in the national media. In addition, China’s Blogosphere is very active when it comes to expression and opinions.

In the US, six huge corporations own most of the so-called free media and an American corporation owns only one. Foreign corporations own the other five.

In America, freedom of the press means that conservative talk radio may manipulate public opinion and influence voters through lies and exaggeration, which it often does. We just saw that happen in the 2010 election.


This video explains how America became a democracy dominated by religion.

In America, corporate lobbyists or special interest groups such as Evangelical Christians may influence elected officials to vote on bills that may not benefit the majority of the population such as confusing debates over abortion, global warming and the recent American health bill.

In China, the only way to influence a government official is by bribing him or her. If caught, that official may end up going to prison or face execution, which seldom happens in the US where bribed officials often go unpunished.

Although many call China a dictatorship, it is not. See Dictatorship Defined

Today, China is a one party republic, which is what the United States was under its first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams. In China, only Communist Party members may vote as part of a consensus and there are more than 70 million Party members.

In the American Republic created by the Founding Fathers in 1776, only white men that owned property were allowed to vote, which was about 10% of the population.

Critics of China claim that China’s 1982 Constitution allows for freedom of speech and religion. However, the truth is that there are limits on freedom of speech and religion that we never hear about from the Western media or politicians.

The US Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The Chinese Constitution says, “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration…”

Nowhere does it say in the Chinese Constitution, “the Party will make no law prohibiting the “free exercise of freedom of speech or of the press” as it does in the US Constitution.

In fact, the same article that says “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief” also says, “No one may make use of religion to engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state.”

The Chinese Constitution also says, “The exercise by citizens of the People’s Republic of China of their freedoms and rights may not infringe upon the interests of the state…” and “they must not commit acts detrimental to the security, honour and interests of the motherland.”

That is why the Tibetan Dalai Lama lives in exile in India, the Falun Gong religious cult was banned in China in 1999 and Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, is in jail. They all refuse to abide by the 1982 Chinese Constitution.

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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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Liu Xiaobo’s Manifesto, Charter 08 – Part 2/3

December 18, 2010

If you read the demands of Liu Xiaobo’s Manifesto, you will know that he wants China to become a mirror image of the democracy that exists in the US, which even America’s Founding Fathers were against since the men who founded the US Republic in the late 18th century believed democracy led to mob rule and chaos, which is true.

If China were to implement the reforms Liu Xiaobo calls for in his Manifesto, most of the work China’s centeral government has accomplished in the last thirty years to improve literacy and the lifestyles of the Chinese would end and possibly be reversed.

What Liu Xiaobo did with his Manifesto is illegal in China and he had to know it.  All schoolchildren in China are taught the meaning of China’s 1982 Constitution, which opened doors to more freedom than most Chinese had ever experienced before.

There are three articles in China’s 1982 Constitution, which explain why Liu Xiaobo went to prison.

However, most in the West have no clue.

From China’s 1982 Constitution:

Article 51 — The exercise by citizens of the People’s Republic of China of their freedoms and rights may not infringe upon the interests of the state, of society and of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.

Article 53 — Citizens of the People’s Republic of China must abide by the constitution and the law, keep state secrets, protect public property and observe labour discipline and public order and respect social ethics.

Article 54 — It is the duty of citizens of the People’s Republic of China to safeguard the security, honour and interests of the motherland; they must not commit acts detrimental to the security, honour and interests of the motherland.

Prior to December 2008, Liu Xiaobo gathered 350 signatures of Chinese intellectuals and human rights activist to promote his ideas of political reform and democratization in the PRC.

Liu Xiaobo’s manifesto was published on December 10, 2008. Since then, more than 10,000 people inside and outside China signed Liu Xiaobo’s manifesto.

I live in the US in California.

In California, we have a process to get an initiative on the ballot to change the laws in California. 

However, in the U.S. currently, less than half the states permit the initiative process.

In California, Ballot.org says the number of qualified signatures needed is 433,971 for a statutory initiative and 694,354 for a constitutional amendment, which is what Liu Xiaobo and his supporters are calling for in China where there is no initiative process.

California has more than 37 million people. China has more than 1.3 billion.

 In 1949, when the Communists won the Civil War, most of China lived lifestyles similar to Europe’s Dark Ages. However, since the early 1980s, the standard of living and the literacy level in China has continued to improve at an impressive rate for about three decades.

Why does Liu Xiaobo want to change something that still works? In Part 3, you will learn something about Liu Xiaobo and what he believes.

Return to Liu Xiaobo’s Manifesto, Charter 08 – Part 1 or go to Part 3

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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

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