Writing for the New York Times about WikiLeaks, Thomas Friedman, the author of “The World is Flat” and the winner of several Pulitzer prizes, recently wrote a humorous but painfully honest post, From WikiChina, of what China’s Washington Embassy e-mails to Beijing may say of America.
I had to resist copying Friedman’s entire post but will point out a few of his gems.
“They fight over things like – we are not making this up – how and where an airport security officer can touch them.”
“It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran.”
“But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are.”
“Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it.”
If you want to have a good laugh or possibly shed tears because this truth is painful, I suggest you read all of Friedman’s post.
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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I keep reading in the Western media and on the Internet that China is the bad boy for not taming North Korea even as WikiLeaks shows that China doesn’t have that much influence over the Hermit Kingdom.
One example comes from Jack Kim, a reporter in Seoul working for Reuters, who writes, “China, pushed again by Washington to bring North Korea to heel after last week’s artillery attack on the South, told Pyongyang their relationship had withstood international ‘tempests’.”
If everything we hear about the Hermit Kingdom is true, I must admit this is one country I wouldn’t want to visit.
However, why is China being bullied by the West to tame a beast it cannot control?
The answer is “Humanitarianism”, a concept born among the West’s democracies.
Remaking the World by Michael Barnett says, “Religious beliefs and organizations, most notably those influenced by Christian theology and ethics, helped to create modern humanitarianism in the early nineteenth century and have shaped its expanding scale, scope, and significance ever since.”
At Helium.com, I learned that “Humanitarianism” is the belief that the person was the most important aspect of society, and that it was important to value the individual over the group.
However, in Asia, especially China and North Korea, the group is valued above the individual. After all, China and North Korea along with other Asian nations are collective cultures.
This means that the West’s concept of “Humanitarianism” may not work in most of Asia.
Here’s what a definition for “Humanitarianism” in Asia might say—The belief that the group is the most important aspect of society and that it is important to value the group over the individual.
It this definition is correct, it would explain the death sentence rate in China and harsh punishments for individuals that threaten “Collective Humanitarianism”.
In fact, the real risk to the survival of humanity may be when Westerners take their beliefs to the extreme resulting in “Armed Humanitarianism”.
Top Feed News says, “Armed Humanitarians (by Nathan Hodge) traces how the concepts of nation-building came into vogue, and how, evangelized through think tanks, government seminars, and the press, this new doctrine took root inside the Pentagon and the State Department. Following this extraordinary experiment in armed social work as it plays out from Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa and Haiti…”
The Huffington Post says, “Nathan Hodge is no neophyte on security issues. He has reported from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and a number of other countries in the Middle East and former Soviet Union. For years he blogged on Wired magazine’s well known Danger Room blog and now reports on the defense industry for the Wall Street Journal.”
What happens if the West influences China to leave Confucian collectivism behind and to embrace the West’s humanitarian beliefs as flawed as they may have become?
Maybe an individualist, humanitarian China would become America’s partner in “Armed Humanitarianism” and divide the globe into a pie chart eventually leading to a third world war between China and the US to see who eats the whole pie.
Then hundreds of millions will die and the earth’s environment would be devastated to protect the rights of the individual.
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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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I read a TIME piece by Austin Ramzy about stolen children in China seeking answers. Some Chinese parents that lost children complain that the police do not do enough to find the missing children.
As usual, the story is more complicated than that.
In fact, Ramzy wrote, corruption began to rise, and organized crime, beaten back by relentless social controls during the Maoist era (1949 – 1976), grew once again (which means that with more freedom comes more risk due to crime).
Because of new freedom of movement, Ramzy wrote, gangs found it easier to take children from one place and sell them in another.
However, the police in China are learning. Last year, the police launched their biggest crackdown ever, with more than 15,000 people arrested over 17 months. The ultimate penalty for trafficking in children is death.
The longer the child is missing, however, the more difficult it is to find them.
Length of Al Jazeera English video 21 minutes
101 East, an Al Jazeera English program, did a special on this topic. The host says, “Tens of thousands of children are abducted and sold in China each year.”
Curious, I wanted to know if a similar situation exists in the US.
Checking FBI statistics, I learned that the FBI reported in 2009, 558,493 missing persons under the age of 18. Non-family members adduced fifty-eight thousand.
Further research revealed that most child abductions in the US and China are for different reasons. Another family member abducts most in America. In China, many of the abductions are so the children may be sold to strangers that live far from where the child was taken.
One reason for why children are kidnapped and sold to other families is due to cultural reasons. In China, parents depend on their children to care for them in old age and this motivates some Chinese couples to pay a kidnapper to find a child for them.
In fact, up until the early 20th century, children and women were often sold in China and it wasn’t against the law as it is today.
Of the thousands abducted in the US, the FBI says about a hundred children a year are murdered within three hours.
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.
I bought a pair of Ugg boots a few years back at Big 5 for less than $30 to keep my feet warm.
I didn’t consider where the boots were made, and I never intended wearing them to go shopping or outside. Since I work at home and save money by leaving the heat off on cold days, my feet get cold so it made sense to wear a pair. (I just Googled Big 5 and saw Uggs on sale for $39 a pair).
Uggs do not appear designed for outdoors, yet I see many young American women looking sharp shopping in Ugg boots. It seems to be the latest fad.
Curious, I did a bit of research to learn more about this popular fad.
I learned from Business Gather.com “Make no mistake about it: Ugg boots are not just for girls. Sure, they may look cute and snuggly, but with football quarterback Tom Brady on board as the brand’s new spokesperson, Ugg boots are poised to attract hoards of manly men all around the world.”
Then I wanted to know where Ugg boots came from and what it costs to make a pair.
I discovered this video on YouTube of a factory in China where the material and labor come together to make Uggs. The conclusion of the description below the video says, “These boots are the most cheap and excellent quality boots in the world.”
The New York Times recently reported “The salaries of factory workers in China are still low compared to those in the United States and Europe: the hourly wage in southern China is only about 75 cents an hour.”
Chinese factory workers often work overtime as long as sixteen hours a day for six days weeks.
However, in 2009, the US federal minimum hourly wage was $7.25, which pays about $15,000 a year for a full time job not counting hidden benefits, which don’t exist in China.
In China, the Ugg factory workers in that video are probably earning less than $3,700 (US) annually and working twice the hours to keep those Ugg prices down so American women and men may buy a cheap pair to look stylish while shopping.
This is a video explaining how to detect fake Ugg boots
After I watched this video, I checked the Ugg boots I bought from Big 5. They were fake. Does that mean they weren’t made in China?
Who makes a profit from the real Ugg boots? Deckers Outdoor Corporation holds the Ugg trademark in more than 100 countries worldwide and reported sales of 689 million US dollars under the Ugg brand in 2008 and sales were up in 2009. Source: Source: Wiki.Ugg Boots
How many Americans would be willing to pay four or five times the price for a pair of Ugg boots so those low paying minimum wage jobs would come to the US?
Then, how many Americans are willing to work for the federal minimum wage without benefits? Not many since there are about eleven million illegal aliens in the US working those jobs.
So, if you live in the US, next time you hear political ads or someone bashing China for stealing jobs from Americans, look in a mirror.
Update: After I wrote this post and up-loaded it, The Walking Company sent me an e-mail advertising “Zealand” slippers (another “Ugg” type product) on sale at 70% off. Instead of paying $65 a pair, I paid less than $20. I stocked up and bought four pair and was surprised when the shipment arrived to discover that the “Zealand” product line is made in China instead of New Zealand.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author ofMy 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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When Mao died in 1976 and China changed direction from revolutionary Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party wrote a new Constitution in 1982 and set out to reinvent China.
This did not happen in an instant and more than three decades later China is still changing.
In 1953, when China had its first modern census, it was revealed that China had a population of 583 million. By 1982, the population had almost doubled to a billion. Source: Columbia University
The poverty rate in China in 1982 was 64% of the population. By 2004, that rate had declined to 10%, which means about 500 million people left poverty behind during this period.
The World Bank says poverty refers to people whose income is less than $1.25 per day.
For three decades, most of the economic development took place in the cities. Deng Xiaoping said that a better life would eventually reach almost everyone but some would have to wait longer for it to happen.
Last year, China shifted the focus on economic development to rural China.
No one knows the exact number of migrant workers. However, estimates run from 200 to 300 million.
These people represent the largest migration in human history—three times the number of people who immigrated to America from Europe over an entire century.
As in the US, migrant workers in China and around the world are often required to work longer hours for lower pay than the law requires. Yet, most still earn more than from where they came from.
For example, when my wife first came to the US from China, her first job was in a restaurant where she waited on tables for no pay. She earned only the tips customers left behind.
Back in China, the migrants work in factories, construction, restaurants, beauty salons, housework, childcare, and brothels. Some work in the recycling industry.
In 2010, China set goals and started projects to extend electricity, roads and railroads into rural China to improve lifestyles there.
These modern improvements in rural China have already created jobs closer to remote villages and migrant workers are returning home to find jobs that pay the same as distant urban cities.
A government survey of migrant workers in 2009 found the number returning home had increased by 8.2% from the previous year and now accounts for almost half of the total migrant population.
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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