The Hollywood Reporter Takes a Dump on China

October 12, 2010

There is a lot I don’t know about China and the Chinese, but I know enough to recognize when someone is taking a sly dump on China’s government. 

That’s what Peter Brunette does in a film review of Mao’s Last Dancer in The Hollywood Reporter.

However, my review of the film paints a different picture.

When Brunette writes “what the aspiring, ‘Rocky’-like, against-all-odds dancer is escaping is not working-class ignorance and poverty, but hard line Chinese communist officials,” he is wrong.

The Communists who ruled China in 1979 inherited that world, and we see what they have done with it in the last thirty years in China’s Capitalist Revolution.

In fact, life was that way when the Qing Dynasty ruled China (1644-1911), and after the Dynasty collapsed, the situation in China became worse—chaos, anarchy, famine, starvation, warlords fighting each other, then a rebellion between the Nationalists and Communists, interrupted by the Japanese invasion of China during World War II followed by Mao’s Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution, which ended abruptly when Mao died.

China’s descent into “Madness” didn’t start with the Communists. It stared in 1835 when the British Empire, and France (among others) launched the Opium Wars to force China to accept opium as a legal import.

With all that happening, when did China have time to become as glitzy and soft as the US? Even the US didn’t change that fast or against those odds.

The transformation of China that we see today had not started by 1979 when the eighteen year old dancer was one of the first students from the Beijing Dance Academy to come to the United States or in 1981 when Li Cunxin decided to stay in America and embarrass his family, friends and country.

Instead, he married an American woman he was having an affair with and claimed he wanted to stay with his wife. Soon after the event, they were divorced.

The fact that the Chinese embassy let him go shows that China was struggling to change the way things had been under Mao. Under Mao, there would have been no trip to the U.S. for the dancer.

Brunette was right about one thing when he says the director knew exactly what he was doing every moment, which was playing to a Western audience that sees China through a red-colored lens that blurs the picture.

Mao’s Last Dancer is a good movie. I recommend seeing it, but take off the rose-colored glasses first.

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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

Entitlement – One of the Cancers that Kills Empires

October 11, 2010

Although Deng Xiaoping was misquoted by the Western media for saying, “Getting Rich is Glorious”, he should have the credit anyway.

By opening China to capitalism and world trade and introducing competition at all levels of society and ending the Communist, socialist economic model, Deng Xiaoping saved China.

A return to the socialist economic model means China will fall into step behind America, which is on the fast track to failure “in part” due to entitlement programs for the disadvantaged that were launched during President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which was designed to reduce poverty.

The government should not have played a role in lifting people out of poverty. Those who live in poverty should accomplish that for themselves.

After reading, editing and revising Escaping the Trap, K. D. Koratsky’s guest post, I believe I understand what he meant by following evolutionary principals to compete.


President Lyndon Johnson wanted to do something for everyone and America is still paying the price.

Although many in America blame China for lost jobs in the U.S., the fault belongs in America partially because of government programs like President Johnson’s Great Society.

Creating entitlements (preferences and favoritism) to minorities, single mothers or the handicapped was one of the mistakes that contributed to America losing its competitive edge in the global-market place.

Once discrimination is removed, socialist programs that create entitlements for individuals who cannot compete and win were wrong. 

The best qualified should win – not the other way around.

However, there is nothing wrong with a social-safety net designed to train individuals who lost jobs due to changes in the workplace so he or she may reenter society as a productive citizen, but only if he or she can compete without favoritism.

Evolution means competition at all levels where those who are the best qualified wins.

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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

Crackdown on Ignorance

October 10, 2010

Today, Yahoo News posted an Associated Press piece by Gillian Wong.

The lead paragraph says, “An imprisoned Chinese dissident who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was allowed to meet Sunday with his wife and told her in tears that he was dedicating the award to the victims of a 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters…”

When I wrote about part seven of a BBC documentary of China’s Capitalist Revolution, I said, “The protesters were not demanding Western style politics or an end to Communist Party rule as many in the West believe. They wanted the government to listen to their opinions about reforms and corruption.”

The banners the protesters carried said, “We support the Great Glorious Communist Party of China.”

There was no pro-democracy movement. The protest happened impulsively and got out of control like so many things young people do.

Since when has any country allowed hormone driven college students decide the course of a nation? 

The reason those students became heroes in the West was because the Western media made them heroes and turned the fiction of a pro-democracy movement into a fact believed by hundreds of millions.

It seems that Liu Xiaobo believes that fiction too.

If Liu Xiaobo wants to dedicate his Noble Peace Prize to anyone, it should be to the victims of the 2/28 Massacre in Taiwan where almost 30 thousand were killed by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops.

However, the reason few in the West know of this massacre was that Chiang Kai-shek was not only a brutal dictator but a converted Christian and an American ally.

It is regrettable that hundreds of misguided college students lost their lives during the Tiananmen Square Incident, but that doesn’t compare to what happened in Taiwan decades earlier.

In fact, what those unorganized students in Tiananmen Square accomplished in 1989 almost stopped Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms from succeeding. Source: Chinese Pod

See Nobel Peace Prize goes to Liu Xiaobo

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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

Escaping the Trap that Comes With the Evolution of Civilization – Part 5/5

October 10, 2010

Guest Post by K. D. Koratsky – Originally published at Living With Evolution. Due to its academic nature, this version has been edited, revised and serialized with permission from the author.

It is through this evolutionary lens, therefore, that the current trends in the West and the East were quite predictable.

For while China had largely embraced flawed socialistic ideas and enacted dysfunctional policies that were counter to evolutionary performance benchmarks, which in turn led to their performance stagnation, America enjoyed a meteoric rise in status by embracing the enlightenment ideals of constitutional democratic republicanism and free-market capitalism that are remarkably well supported by evolutionary principles.

And now, as the West has increasingly allowed a particularly virulent strain of socialistic cultural mutations to set in, reflecting the degree of its previous rise, the degradation in performance has been just as spectacular, leading to what may prove to be the most-rapid regression to the mean for an empire ever recorded.

Meanwhile, it is the East that has increasingly embraced the Enlightenment ideals that led to the rise of the West while the latter simultaneously abandons them.

Rejecting Regress

 

It is with all this in mind, therefore, that we know the regression to the mean can be overcome at every level of human existence.

Indeed, all one must do is, first, accept that the level of adherence to evolutionary principles will dictate success or failure, and second, fashion all policies around the ideas that stem from this acceptance.

The result will not only be greatest possible level of continued prosperity and survivability for any given individual or group that embraces evolutionary ideals, but the greatest possible level of prosperity and survivability for the human species as a whole.

Return to Escaping the Trap – Part 4

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K. D. Koratsky is the author of Living With Evolution or Dying Without it: A Guide to Understanding Humanity’s Past, Present and Future. Koratsky also writes a Blog on this subject at Living With Evolution.

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

Escaping the Trap that Comes With the Evolution of Civilization – Part 4/5

October 9, 2010

Guest Post by K. D. Koratsky – Originally published at Living With Evolution. Due to its academic nature, this version has been edited, revised and serialized with permission from the author.

Societal Regress

 

What happens in families after one successful generation often leads to a collapse over several generations meaning that what was achieved is lost and hardship returns.

This occurs generally for societies and empires too.

This is what is happening in America today.

As nations rise in rank by performing at a very high standard, the wealth and opportunity created by previous generation(s) is increasingly taken for granted.

Then a false sense of situational permanence, entitlement and invincibility set in. We see this happening in America with the self-esteem generation.

And correspondingly, dysfunctional decision-making and cultural mutations increase to the degree that a population begins to perceive itself as impervious to surrounding threats, assuming such threats are acknowledged at all.

The result is that ideas without regard for functionality and adaptivity lead to policies that at best lack functionality and adaptivity and at worse produce entirely self-destructive trends—noting policies that even allow the competition to gain an edge will almost certainly prove self-destructive somewhere down the line, likely when the next time of scarcity comes along.

Return to Escaping the Trap – Part 3 or go to Escaping the Trap – Part 5

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K. D. Koratsky is the author of Living With Evolution or Dying Without it: A Guide to Understanding Humanity’s Past, Present and Future. Koratsky also writes a Blog on this subject at Living With Evolution.

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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