Enough, Already!

December 2, 2010

Christopher Bodeen of the Associated Press reported that a Chinese father was punished for food safety activism.

The AP wasn’t the only Western media to go ballistic with this story.

Amnesty International jumped in along with BBC News, Forbes, and CBS News among others. 

In the West, this type of story sells newspapers and boosts ratings for the five and ten o’clock news.

Be assured, this story will be “milked” for all it is worth.

The father of a three-year old child that was sickened by melamine-tainted milk, Zhao Lianhai, was convicted and sentenced Wednesday to 2 1/2 years in prison for inciting social disorder (in China), his lawyer said.

Bodeen’s lead in the AP piece was a masterpiece to appeal to Western anger. “A father who organized a support group for other parents whose children were sickened in one of China’s worst food safety scandals was convicted and sentenced…”

However, if you grew up in a Western culture and are capable of not seeing red, I suggest you read the rest of Bodeen’s piece before you start shouting. 

It also helps to understand how the Mandate of Heaven has affected Chinese civilization for more than two thousand years. Chinese history is filled with bloody rebellions and insurrections that were allowed to get out of hand.

In China, it is often better to make a mistake by throwing someone in jail than risking another Cultural Revolution or Taiping Rebellion where an estimated fifty million died.

What the government did sounds more like “Enough Already!”  The guy just wouldn’t get the hint and had to be hit upside the head.

After all, the event happened in 2008. Lianhai has had almost three years to protest before the government sent him to jail to shut him up.
 
In fact, there was a trial for the people behind the tainted milk and justice was served.
 
Three people got the death penalty.
 
The general manager and chair woman of Sanlu, the company at the heart of the scandal, was given a life sentence.
 

Dozens of officials, dairy executives and farmers were punished for allowing the contamination to take place.

When this type of tainted food scandal happens in the US, few go to prison and sometimes there is no justice even in court.

What China should do is free Linahai and send him and his family to the US where he can protest all he wants about tainted American food.

In fact, we need Linahai here.

Sarah Francis at MomsRising.org says that each year in the U.S., more than 76 million people get sick and more than 5,000 die from food-borne diseases.

The problem is that there are so many people protesting in the US, few listen unless you belong to the Tea Party.

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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

Women in Politics

December 2, 2010

In Party Women, I wrote how women in China have more freedom than at any time in China’s history and pointed out how many held important political posts in China.

I was correct when I said how China has been criticized in the Western media for not having enough women in positions of political power at the national level.

However, what I didn’t know was how wrong China’s critics were.

According to the UN, China has a higher percentage of women in positions of power at the national level than all but one of the countries I researched for this post.

In the United States, women hold less than 17 percent of the seats in both houses of Congress.

In China’s National People’s Congress (NPC), women hold 21.3 percent of the seats. Since there are 2,909 NPC deputies, that means there are about 620 women in positions of power at the national level.

In the United States, that number is about 100.
 

In Japan, a democracy, only 11.3 percent of the 480 members in the House of Representatives and the 242 members in the House of Councilors are women, which is eighty-one.

In South Korea, another democracy, there are 299 seats in the National Assembly.  Only 15.6 percent or forty-six are women.

In Thailand, there are 62 women out of 474 seats—about 13 percent.

There is only one country in Asia that has a higher percentage and that is Singapore with 23.4 percent of the seats in its parliament held by women.  There are almost 20 women of eighty-four elected members.

When it comes to building a government of the people from scratch, it now makes sense why Singapore is China’s role model instead of the US or the other Asian democracies.

In fact, China has twice as many women holding important positions of power in China’s NPC as all of the other countries mentioned in this post. 

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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

Selfish, Narcissistic Children

December 1, 2010

A friend forwarded a link to me of Dr. Mark J. Perry’s China’s Single-Child Adults Too Selfish for Marriage?

It appears that the question mark indicates Dr. Perry is asking a question of his virtual audience. Here’s my answer.

Dr. Perry sites an NPR All Things Considered report by Louisa Lim’s Lightning Divorces Strike China’s ME Generation.

Lim says Beijing has the highest divorce rate nationwide, with 39 percent of all marriages ending in a split.

One Beijing woman, Cheng, tells Lim of her six-month marriage that ended as fast as it started. She blamed the divorce on belonging to the generation of spoiled singletons, known as the post-1980s generation.

One answer may explain the change in China’s divorce rate is that eight years ago, a married couple needed permission from their work unit to divorce. Today, couples have the freedom to divorce without asking.

However, Dr. Perry, a professor of economics and finance in the US, seems to think that the upsurge in China’s divorce rate is because of the selfish and narcissistic generation of spoiled one-child children in China.

My question is how does China’s one-child generation compare to the US’s self-esteem generations?

A study by the Pew Research Center, in association with Time magazine says that 44% of Americans age 18 to 29 say marriage is obsolete. Forty-one percent of the next age group (30 to 49) says the same thing. Source: Washington Post

This pretty much covers America’s self-esteem generations since that method of child rearing began in the late 1960s.

Data from a US Census report says about 50% of first marriages in the US for men under age 45 may end in divorce.

In fact, China National News reports that one in five marriages in China ends in divorce — that’s 20%.

The interesting fact is that there has always been exemptions in China’s one-child policy, and the rules are changing all the time.

China’s 56 minorities, which adds up to more than one hundred million people, have no restrictions to the number of children a family may have and many rural Chinese may have two children due to the need for more hands on the farm.

Recently, due to changes in demographics, married couples in Shanghai that grew up as one-child, may have two children, and anyone in China may have more if he or she can afford to pay the fine, which means many of China’s rich and famous have started a trend by having an average of three.

It appears that China may easily reverse any damage the one-child policy may have caused in much of urban China, but the US seems stuck in “self-esteem” mode no matter what research shows us about the trend to grow up as a selfish narcissist when raised this way.

In 2001, the New York Times reported there were three withering studies of self-esteem released in the United States, all of which had the same central message: people with high self-esteem pose a greater threat to those around them than people with low self-esteem and feeling bad about yourself is not the cause of our country’s biggest, most expensive social problems.

Discover how some Avoid China’s “one-child” Policy

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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

Danziger’s “The China Price”

December 1, 2010

The Huffington Post published Jeff Danziger’s The China Price (see it here), a political cartoon that appears to be blaming China for America’s problems.

In Danziger’s “The China Price”, Uncle Sam is holding a box that says “Made In China” and there are seven flags on a string leading from the box to a shelf full of boxes that all say “Made in China”.

However, each flag on that string has a different reason that explains what has happened to cause America’s decline.

  1. One comment by Dan1902 said, “It is called Defeating America without having to FIRE a shot!!!”
  2. The second from fpie was more accurate but too long to copy.
  3. The third by johnnymainstreet repeated the common stereotypical complaint about US corporate greed being the fault.

The first flag hanging from the string says, “Loss of US Jobs,” which is true since US jobs have been lost to China.

However, more jobs were lost to Canada and Mexico due to NAFTA, and some jobs went to India and other countries as outsourcing, while eleven million have gone to illegal immigrants working hard for low pay in the US.

Many other jobs were lost as the world rebuilt industries after World War II and started to compete when manufacturing returned to Germany, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and to other European and Asian countries devastated by wars such as Vietnam.

China cannot be responsible for the fifth flag either, which says “US Schools Decline”. 

China has had nothing to do with the fact that many of America’s children have had their self esteem inflated so high since the 1970s that most don’t see the need to study or read. After all, success is guaranteed. Everyone is perfect. Every dream will come true if you can think it.


This video clip contains profanity!

In fact, China did not force 35% of US university graduates to study psychology while less than 5% earned degrees in engineering, technology or the sciences.

If Danziger is making a statement with his political cartoon that all seven of the flags on that string are the fault of American short sightedness, greed and selfishness, he is a genius saying America must stop taking its global position for granted.

Learn about Sinophobia and the Nation With the Soul of a Church

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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

Barbara Walters on North Korea and China

November 29, 2010

Recently, Barbara Walters talked to President Obama about North Korea’s shelling of a South Korean island near the DMZ.

Obama said South Korea was one of America’s most important alliances (in Asia), which has to be true since South Korea has many Christians (about a third of the population). It also has a strong open market, capitalist economy and a democratic government.

However, although China is considered North Korea’s only friend and ally, the two countries are different today.

First, China left the autocratic Maoist revolutionary form of government behind soon after Mao’s death.

Second, China is a republic that appears to be moving toward democracy and has an open market economy similar to South Korea’s.

I said in a previous post, “China’s reluctance to put public pressure on Pyongyang to step off the warhorse might be because the Chinese feel it would be like pressuring a family member.” Source: China and North Korea

That may no longer be the case.

Austin Ramzy writing for TIME says, “The news, delivered at a rare Sunday press conference, was that China was calling for emergency consultations between itself, North and South Korea, the U.S., Japan and Russia… it was a welcome call for calm by the North’s key ally.”

Many in the world should be glad of China’s relationship with the Hermit Kingdom. If it weren’t for China, there would be no one North Korea would listen to.

Walters also was in China with President Richard Nixon in 1972, and she paints a picture of China about thirty-eight years ago that vividly offers a contrast to today’s China.

Then in April 2009, Walters asked Jiang Zemin (China’s third president after Mao died) what happened to the famous “tank man” of the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989.

Walters says, “Did you execute him? We heard he was arrested and executed.”

Zemin replied that he did not know what happened to the man. Then he said he thinks the man was never killed.

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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 look 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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