Live Crunch.comsays, The Internet was created by the United States government for universities to exchange knowledge. In 1994, Bill Clinton let private companies open up the Internet to the public. What happened next is the wild Wild West. If you wanted to say hateful or racist things that you would never say if others knew, you could say them. If you had snapped a naked picture of your neighbor…
You could put it online and anyone with a 56kb modem could look and there basically wasn’t anything anyone could do. Same deal with the URL address. URLs were basically given away. If someone else got there first, they kept it.
However, things on the Internet are slowly changing as the Internet regulators tighten rules.
Policing the Internetis exactly what Shanghai is doing. Besides, China’s famous Net Nanny so many in the West grumble about, Shanghai’s government has blacklisted 80 netizens and exposed their user names and IPs.
Most of the listed netizens are charges with offenses such as “spreading rumors” and “disturbing social and public order”.
However, what the definitions for these offenses are would differ between nations. I’m sure that there are behaviors that would be tolerated in the United States that other cultures and countries would frown on.
In fact, many netizens have exposed China’s most sensational cases of corruption. Some officials have lost jobs due to these exposures. Let’s hope Shanghai’s blacklist of netizens doesn’t include any corruption fighters. After all, only criminals need to fear them.
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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The Global Times quotes Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. “The nation’s rise and fall rely on education, as only first-rate education can generate first-rate talents who in turn can build a first-rate nation,” Wen said.
What Premier Wen Jiabao says is true of any nation including the United States.
In 2008, the premier chaired a State Council executive meeting to review and approve in principle the implementation of performance-based pay in primary and middle schools.
The new salary system for teachers consists of basic wages, seniority pay, performance-based bonus pay and allowances. China currently has about 12 million teachers in middle and primary schools. America has about 5 million.
However, the stories I’m hearing out of China is that this new merit system has led to some parents bribing school officials to get their kids into the best schools.
The best schools test the students applying for entrance and turns those with the lowest scores away sending them to the worst schools where few teachers earn merit pay no matter how many hours are worked.
Merit pay has been a controversial political issue in the Untied States for years. The teachers unions in America have resisted efforts to implement merit pay.
Merit pay for teachers will not influence “poorly performing” students and “bad” parents to change their ways. Even if a teacher works 100 hours a week, which I sometimes did when I taught, little will change with poorly performing students that are not motivated to learn. Motivation cannotbe legislated.
In fact, Get Schooled with Maureen Downey says, “Tell that child’s teacher that her salary will depend on the testing performance of that child and chart the negative consequences on children’s working conditions in schools. Teachers – workers in the system controlled by bosses above – will be exploited. Students – the “producing” workers in the system whose production of test scores will determine reward for those above them – will be exploited.”
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.
A friend sent me two e-mails about hit & run killings in China.
ChinaSMACK said a foreigner driving drunk and without a license, hit a 23-year old Yiwu girl crossing a street in a crosswalk.
If you believe the Chinese media is completely controlled and censored, you may be surprised to learn that ChinaSMACK is a daily-updated collection of translated Internet content from the Chinese-language Internet.
ChinaSMACK covers stories, pictures, videos, and topics that have become very popular and have spread across China’s major BBS forums, social networking websites, or through forwarded e-mails sent between normal Chinese people every day.
Since starting in July 2008, ChinaSMACK now attracts over 930,000 visits and over 2,300,000 page views each month featuring a vibrant community of commenters.
ChinaSMACK did not identify the foreigner (laowai), who was driving drunk without a license. The victim was thrown over 20 meters (more than 65 feet), and she died in the hospital.
The laowai sped away from the scene to avoid being caught, but the Chinese police tracked him down and arrested him.
The victim’s family is poor and her father died three years ago.
The first two comments to the ChinaSMACK post said, “If you had hit a person, you too would be arrested and administratively detained first and then what should be done will be done. Laowai cannot escape Chinese legal punishment.”
“Our country’s criminal law does not put foreigners outside of our country’s criminal law. As long as the foreigner does something that matches a crime in our country’s criminal law, then the foreigner cannot escape the criminal laws punishment.”
This news clip talks about drunk driving and hit-and-run accidents in China
The next story is about the killing of a 20-year-old college girl in another hit-and-run. When confronted, it was reported that the drunk driver yelled, “My father is Li Gang!”
Li Gang is a high-ranking police officer and a member of the Communist Party. The victim was the daughter of a 49-year-old peasant from rural China.
The father of the victim said in an interview, “I’m just a peasant. If it is unfair, let it be.”
However, an angry Chinese public on the Internet overruled the victim’s father and refused to “let it be.” Although there have been many hit-and-run accidents in Hubei province, there was anger at China’s powerful elite and the arrogance of some children of money and power.
Arab News and the Washington Post both reported that the fathers met and Li Gang offered compensation to the victim’s father. The other choice was to have a trial, which may result in a death sentence for Li Gang’s son.
Now that the hit-and-run by Li Gang’s son is international news and all over the Internet in China, there are people in the Communist Party with more power than Li Gang that may want to see justice done. I am thinking of people such as Bo Xilai, a member of China’s Central Committee, and a man famous and popular for cracking down on crime.
However, the rich, powerful and famous often escape punishment for horrible crimes. For an example, I offer you Senator Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick incident of alleged drunk driving that caused the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.
Then there is a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about Dominick Dunne and his 22 year old daughter that was murdered by her estranged boyfriend.
“When I attended the trial of the man who killed my daughter, what I saw was appalling,” said Dunne. “I realized that the rights of the defendant on trial exceeded the rights of the victim who had been killed…”
If you want to learn more about the rich, powerful and famous escaping punishment for horrible crimes, read about Claus von Bulow or William Kennedy Smith.
Is there a difference between China and America when it comes to justice for the rich and powerful?
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 copy of The Economist for October 30. The cover has President Obama surrounded by an angry American crowd with signs that shout, “Jobs Now, Jobs Stupid, Throw the Bums Out, Taxed Enough Already, Obamacare Makes me Sick!”
When there is a protest in China where people carry signs, the Western media rants about the Chinese being denied the right to a democracy, which includes the right to protest.
What if the majority of Chinese don’t want the kind of freedom or democracy the West has?
In fact, the only freedom most Chinese don’t have these days is a vote in Party elections. According to the Eurasia Review, the Chinese do protest often.
The Eurasia Review says of Labor Unrest in China, “To some degree, strikes are not something new in China. There are studies that speak of tens of thousands of protests taking place in China every year over a wide range of issues from workers’ back pay to illegal land seizures. Most end peacefully after the government meets some demands.”
However, ignoring these facts, the Hoover Institute of Stanford University urges the United States to be more aggressive in pushing for democracy in China by supporting and linking together Chinese groups and a few thousand individuals that call for democracy.
Let’s not forget that there are 1.3 billion Chinese and they do have a voice.
If they can organize tens of thousands of protests and negotiate settlements with the government, they can also call for changes in the political system if that is what the majority of Chinese want.
Yet, there is little or no evidence that the majority in China want political changes except for a handful of malcontents spurred on by the likes of the CIA, the Hoover Institute and the Noble Peace Prize Committee in Europe.
As for a free press in China, how can a press be free when it belongs to the government? When President Bush lived in the White House, his staff often censored news coming out of NASA and other government agencies and that was in the US.
In China, the situation is similar—the media in China belongs to the government as the US. Post Office and NASA does in America.
In fact, there is freedom of expression in China. The Chinese Blog more than any nation on the globe and used the Internet to organize national labor strikes in recent months that were spread across China.
China’s government supported those labor movements and chastised private businesses for not paying workers more.
Getting back to the anger that was splashed on that cover of The Economist. Correct me if I am wrong when I say that the anger in China isn’t that much different from the anger in America.
However, it seems the Chinese may be more civilized and open to compromise to solve disputes peacefully and avoid the anger and partisanship that has all but frozen progress in a debt-ridden US.
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.
“Tinpot dictator” are the two key words in the title of this opinion piece, as if the United States or the UK has never hosted and/or supported “tinpot” dictators. Before we discover China’s history with Burma/Myanmar, first we should look a little closer at the United States.
A well-written criticism of the U.S. government from Sri Lanka sets the record straight.
“I wish the spokesman of the (U.S.) State Department … would explain how Washington’s concern for democracy in Sri Lanka squares with US support for repressive regimes such as the one in Uzbekistan or the autocratic rule in Saudi Arabia, both countries in which the U.S. has military facilities.
“In post-World War II period, Washington has militarily propped up such dictators including several in South Korea, Ferdinand Marcos who was ousted by the Filipino people, Indonesia’s Suharto also thrown out by the people, Vietnam’s Dinh Diem, various military governments in Thailand, Singapore’s autocrat Lee Kwan Yew, the military dictators in Pakistan from Ayub Khan to Pervez Musharraf, all of them from our part of the world…” The Ugly Americans Once More (Lankaweb, Sri Lanaka’s first Social Media website)
The Economist only mentions a half century of history between China and Burma/Myanmar, yet, China’s history with Burma and then Myanmar goes back about two thousand years, and we will explore that later in this series.
The opinion piece also does not mention that China, since 1982, has not been into nation building as the U.S. has since 9/11, when President G.W. Bush launched wars against Iraq and Afghanistan with threats to Iran and North Korea.
Until doing research for this post, most of what I had read about China in The Economist had been educational, but this piece was stilted and biased—an example of China bashing.
What does the Beijing based unnamed critic writing in The Economist expect—that China, with its Communist, Taoist, Buddhist, Confucius culture, adopt America’s evangelical, neo-conservative role to spread “democracy” and “Christianity” to the world through nation building?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the critic writing in The Economist suggest that he or she expects China to spread “democracy” to countries like Burma and North Korea, which are by definition dictatorships, which the U.S. has a long history of supporting. See Cold War Origins of the CIA Holocaust to learn more.
If you haven’t read this opinion piece in The Economist, I suggest you do before going on to Part 3. Did you know that at the same time that the United States sells or gives weapons to dictatorships and authoritarian governments, it also hasprograms through the U.S. State Department to support religious freedom in many of the same countries?
For instance, Saudi Arabia, a country that prohibits any religion other than Islam and has a long history of human rights violations (Human Rights Watch World Report 2013). On October 20, 2010, the US State Department notified Congress of its intention to make the biggest arms sale in American history—an estimated $60.5 billion purchase by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The IAGS says this about Saudi Arabia: “Much has been reported about the complex system of terrorist financing and the money trail facilitating the September 11 terror attacks. Individuals and charities from the Persian Gulf—mainly from Saudi Arabia—appear to be the most important source of funding for terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda.”
Enough said about The Economist, Christianity and differences between dictatorships, democracies and republics, and back to the long history between China and Burma/Myanmar, which started during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 A.D.).
Due to deposits of jade in Burma/Myanmar and that region, Chinese merchants have been involved in mining and trade there for more than two thousand years.
Then during the Qing Dynasty, there were four major invasions (1765-1769) of Burma by China’s Manchu leaders. In 1784, the long struggle between Burma and China ended and regular trade started up again.
In November 1885, Sir Robert Hart favored a proposal that China, as Burma’s overlord, stand aside and allow the British Empire to pursue her own course there provided that Britain allow Burma to continue her decennial tribute (once every ten years) missions to China. Source: The I. G. In Peking, Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs 1868-1907, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, page 614, 1975.
Instead, the British Empire made Burma a province of India in 1886.
Since independence from the British Empire, Burma has generally been impartial to world affairs but was one of the first countries to recognize Israel and the People’s Republic of China.
Territories such as the autonomous regions of Tibet, Xinjiang and countries like North Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Burma, Vietnam and others along China’s long borders were considered vassal states by some Chinese dynasties, and these vassal states often sent lavish gifts and delegations to China’s emperors on a regular schedule.
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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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