Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 3/7

October 23, 2010

In Post 2, I talked about the importance of literacy in a democracy or republic.

To fix this problem, China leaders planned ahead fifty to a hundred years with this question in mind—what would it take to successfully modernize China and educate the people for a republican government?

In 1982, China wrote a new Constitution with term limits and age limits so there would not be another modern emperor like Mao.

That constitution has been amended several times.

Although Western critics claim the Party hasn’t implemented the freedom of press and religion mentioned in the Chinese Constitution, what isn’t said is that there are other articles that give the central government and the courts the power to stop anyone deemed a threat to the stability of China’s government and economic growth.


This video is outdated but accurate in some of its facts.  In Fact, China is now the world’s 2nd largest economy.

Article 5 says, “All acts in violation of the Constitution and the law must be investigated. No organization or individual may enjoy the privilege of being above the Constitution and the law.”

Article 28 says, “The state maintains public order and suppresses treasonable and other counter- revolutionary activities; it penalizes actions that endanger public security and disrupt the socialist economy and other criminal activities, and punishes and reforms criminals.”

Article 35 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.”

Notice that the language in Article 35 does not guarantee this freedom but says, “enjoy“, whatever that means.

China’s Constitution is not America’s Constitution. Yet China is often judged by Western critics as if it were.

Return to Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 2

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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

Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 2/7

October 23, 2010

In Part 1, I talked about how Sun Yat-sen was the father of China’s republic and how Chiang Kai-shek destroyed any chance of having a two-party republic after Sun died.

Even after the Chinese civil war ended in 1949, it would take decades to prepare the people so Sun Yat-sen’s dream becomes a reality.

By reading India Falling Short, you will discover what happens when a democracy or republic moves too fast from a feudal society to a modern one.

For a republic or a democracy to survive, people must be educated and literate.

In fact, literacy in the US is listed at 99 percent. However, studies assert that 46% to 51% of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn “significantly” below the threshold poverty level for an individual. This means that the chances of the US surviving as a republic or democracy are grim.

In 1949, when the Communists came to power about 32% of the people above the age of 12 could read.

By 1976, literacy was 20% when Mao died. The reason literacy had dropped so much was because of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution, which the nine top leaders of the Communist Party voted against.

Mao had those men eliminated or removed from power one at a time and went ahead with The Cultural Revolution.

Today, literacy in China is more than 90%. See China’s Literacy Policies

During the Tiananmen Square incident, Deng Xiaoping said that the Party wanted democracy for China, but Western style democracy would bring the economic growth to a grinding halt because the country (as India still is) wasn’t ready yet to become a democracy or the kind of republic Sun Yat-sen envisioned.

In 1989, China’s literacy program was in its infancy. Almost a billion people in rural China lived in conditions similar to serfs during Europe’s Dark Ages.  China’s cities had not been rebuilt.

Return to Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 1

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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

Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 1/7

October 23, 2010

The China Law Blog challenged an opinion I wrote about China becoming a republic with more freedom for the people.

I wrote, “The Economist wants India to win this race, because it is called a democracy as is the U.S., but what isn’t mentioned is that China is becoming a republic with a Chinese twist, which is what Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted.… Once you read the two pieces in The Economist, you may understand why India’s democracy cannot beat China’s evolving republic.” Source: Comparing India and China’s Economic Engines

The China Law Blog criticized this post saying, “In other words, iLook takes what he sees as China’s aspirations and assumes (without a shred of factual support or even argument) that China will very shortly fully achieve those aspirations.”

I don’t recall writing “very shortly“.

In fact, the freedoms the world’s democracies are urging China’s government to implement ASAP may not materialize for decades and some freedoms found in the West may never appear.

To understand why China may be moving toward more freedom slowly, the best place to start is with Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866 – 1925)

Sun is known as the father of China’s Republic.

To achieve this dream, Sun started by unifying the Communists and Nationalists into a two-party republic in southern China in the early 20th century. Both parties respected Sun, and he made it work.

Unfortunately, Sun died in 1924 at a time when China was in ruins and torn by anarchy and violence between competing warlords.

Then, Chiang Kai-shek, who was a member of the ruling class and a man who hated the Communists, went on a rampage slaughtering Communists and igniting a civil war that would rage even after Japan invaded during World War II. 

Chiang’s first move against the Communists was in the south. His next was in Shanghai to break the labor unions the Communists had been organizing to improve the lives of sweatshop labor working in foreign owned factories. 

Chiang Kai-shek’s goal was to exterminate the labor unions and the Communists, and he had support from the foreign factory owners.

The Communists that survived had no choice but to defend themselves. Surrender wasn’t an option.

Decades later, in 1949, the Communist Party won the revolution under Mao’s leadership and with the support of China’s peasants.

Chiang Kai-shek would flee to Taiwan and protected by the US, he would rule that island under martial law as a brutal dictator for twenty-six years. Taiwan would not become a democracy until years after Chiang and Mao’s deaths.

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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.

2 Comments | America, China, Chinese history, Communism, cultural differences, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Democracy’s Economic Roller Coaster

October 22, 2010

In a Brief History of Economic Downturns, Business Intelligence says, “At the amusement park that is the American economy, capitalism is a lot like that roller coaster, a never-ending ride with lots of twists, turns, ups, and downs – or booms and busts…”

Nine major economic crashes were listed.

There was the Panic of 1819, which lasted five years.

The Panic of 1826 went for six years.

In 1857, a single major company went out of business and dragged the entire US economy down.

In 1873, Jay Cooke & Company, the largest US bank at the time failed triggering a recession that lasted six years.

The next serious crash was the panic of 1907, causing massive job losses and many business failures.

In 1918, hyperinflation in Europe and the end of US wartime production caused a brief but severe downturn in the American economy.

The Great Depression imploded in 1929 with the collapse of the stock market and the American banking system and wouldn’t end until the beginning of World War II.

In 1973, the price of gas at the pump soared leading to long lines to fill gas tanks.

Then the Dot–Com Bubble burst in combination with 9/11/2001.

When the sub-prime mortgage bubble exploded in the U.S. in 2008, about 80,000 private owned businesses in China went out of business and 15 to 20 million workers lost jobs – much bigger numbers than the U.S. suffered.

However, within a few weeks, those who had lost their jobs in China were back at work or had returned to rural China to the collective farm.

Why should China cave in to pressure from America and Europe and turn its economy into another Wild West show?

Also see The Reasons Why China is Studying Singapore

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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.

2 Comments | America, China, economy | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Triumph in Chile Leads to Criticism of China

October 20, 2010

On the “media menu” in America, there is “Hypocrisy” listed near the top of the front page, and it is cheap.

In a New York Times piece of China Cheers Rescue Halfway Around the Word, we learn that the state owned media in China has been covering the rescue operation to save 33 miners in Chile.

How the New York Times turned good news in Chile into a criticism of China is another story.

If you read the entire piece in the Asia Pacific section of the NYT, go to the bottom to see what I’m talking about.


Rush Limbaugh Lies

In the conclusion to the piece, David Barboza, the reporter, quotes someone identified as Mr. Guan, the poet and blogger, who wrote a few lines of verse about Chile’s rescue on the Web, “What the government (of Chile) did warms our hearts. They didn’t suppress the truth, they didn’t secretly pay anyone money, they don’t make irresponsible statements, they don’t forgive those who should be responsible for it. And they don’t laud themselves with clichés.”

If the NYT didn’t make a point that this was aimed at China, anyone could make a case that the same verse is about the media in America.

 


Glen Beck Lies

 

Have you listened to people like Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck or read Ann Coulter or how about lies and deceit in political campaign Ads?

In fact, who is Mr. Guan, the poet and blogger? I used Google Blog Search and Google and came up with zero. Did Barboza fabricate Mr. Guan?

The United States Department of Labor documented 1,546 average deaths for all mining fatalities and 81,341 injuries between 1936 to 1940 in the U.S.  Between 2006 to 2007, they reported 69 deaths and 11,800 injuries.

 


Ann Coulter Lies


Then “In one of the most scandalous crises in workplace safety in the United States, over 10,000 coal miners have died needlessly from black lung disease (from the inhalation of coal dust) in the last decade.” Source: Chesapeake Climate

In addition, the NYT made no effort to mention that there is evidence that China is eager to lower the number of coal mining fatalities as reported by Internet Marketing Strategy for Business.

More research using Google shows that fatalities in mines are a global problem. I found a post in All Africa.com about South Africa’s high mine fatalities.

However, what did David Barboza, the New York Times reporter do? He dug up a poet called Mr. Guan. The truth is that the media in America is free — free to lie.

See more about Unbalanced Reporting 

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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. 

Leave a Comment » | America, China, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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