Manipulating Public Opinion: China vs the U.S.

September 17, 2013

Have the Tea Baggers in the United States been learning from China, or is it the other way around?

“Another strategy is manipulation. In recent years, local and provincial officials have hired armies of low-paid commentators to monitor blogs and chat rooms for sensitive issues, then spin online comment in the government’s (China’s) favor.

“Mr. Xiao of Berkeley cites one example: Jiaozuo, a city southwest of Beijing, deployed 35 Internet commentators and 120 police officers to defuse online attacks on the local police after a traffic dispute. By flooding chat rooms with pro-police comments, the team turned the tone of online comment from negative to positive in just 20 minutes.” Source: New York Times

Isn’t this what Fox Network’s Glenn Beck, then Rush Limbaugh—who is heard on more than 600 radio stations—have been doing for years. Filling the airwaves with their opinions controlling what people hear and think. The American Tea Baggers are doing the same thing with the same results—behavior control.

For an example of how the media twists facts to influence public opinion one only need look closer at the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin incident. What does the public really know about these two individuals?

Is America really that different from China and is there anyone we can believe?

Discover China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

4 Comments | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, cultural differences, government, media, politics, propaganda | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

A World of Cyber Spies & Crooks

September 12, 2013

The internet is a crowded battleground and no one is safe. On April 7, 2010, it was reported that the Yahoo email accounts of 10 Beijing-based foreign journalists and the IFJ’s Hong Kong-based coordinator were infiltrated. Source: Scoop

China is not the only player in the cyber-spy game. The German Police and Intelligence Agencies hired a company to create Trojans capable of capturing traffic from Skype and SSL, and the recording industry wants the right to hack into your computer and delete stolen MP3s.

After a Chinese fighter collided with an American surveillance plane in April 2001, Chinese hacker groups cyber-attacked American businesses causing millions of dollars in damage.

“The Carders“, cyber-criminals that specialize in using a sophisticated and automated process to steal information from credit cards, have made off with billions.

When the “Cult of the Dead Cow” gains access to a computer, they spy on you through your own webcam and microphone. Imagine what the “Dead Cows” see if that webcam is in your bedroom. Good thing they consider themselves “Dead”.

The American National Security Administration’s (NSA) Red Team is suspected of distributing malicious software across the web acting as illegal hackers, but they do it under the protection of the law.  In 2008, an elite U.S. Military Unit shut down a Saudi-CIA Website that was seen as a threat to US security. Source: CBS News

America’s NSA has the ability to listen to the phone calls of US citizens and capture e-mails, and the US is not alone because Britain’s NSA [the GCHQ] listens its citizen’s phone calls too. Source: Mother Jones

China isn’t alone on this battlefield where a mix of authoritarianism and anarchy wages war, so why does China get more than its share of media attention?

Discover China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

2 Comments | America, censorship, China, crime, government, human rights, media, politics, propaganda, United States | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Father of China’s Republic, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen

August 15, 2013

“An individual should not have too much freedom. A nation should have absolute freedom.” – Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1866 – 1925)

He is referred to as the father of modern China.  If there were no Sun Yat-Sen and his revolution, there might not be a modern China as it is known today.

While attending a Christian school in Hawaii (1882), he converted to Christianity, which shaped his revolutionary future. It was obvious that his writing was influenced by American thought. With the support he received from the Hawaiian Chinese community, he networked with Chinese people all over the world.

He went on to publish revolutionary ideas seeking to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty and create the Republic of China. In 1904, he wrote that he wanted to model China’s government after America but by combining Western thought with Chinese tradition.

Yet, he was considered an idealistic dreamer—that his ideas were impractical. He said, “The whole world is one family.” (1910)

In 1882, when Sun Yat-Sen was exposed to American politics, the United States was a republic—not the democracy we know today—and women did not have the right to vote yet. What type of republic do you think he wanted for China—one closer to the America of 1882 or today?

Discover The Roots of Madness

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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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

1 Comment | America, China, Chinese history, cultural differences, democracy, politics, United States | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Pearl S. Buck’s 1966 China Predictions

July 11, 2013

Pearl S. Buck appeared on the Merv Griffin Show in 1966 and made a few predictions.

  • Buck said China will be what we make it to be. She meant that the United States will either make China its enemy or its friend.
  • Buck said the Chinese are marvelous friends and frightful enemies. If this is true, why are so many Americans and the US media demonizing China instead of cultivating friendship?
  • The Chinese have a marvelous sense of humor, Buck says. The Asian people are very human.
  • Communism will change. Buck said China will moderate and will modernize in time. She saw Communism arrive in China in 1921, and said it was an impractical, impossible scheme of life. She was right. China has changed and is now a hybrid, socialist-capitalist country with a market economy and an authoritarian, one-party (with more than 80-million members) government.

During her career as an author, Buck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Good Earth in 1932 and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938.

Only seven American authors have been awarded both the Pulitzer and the Nobel: Sinclair Lewis; Eugene O’Neill; Pearl S. Buck; William Faulkner; Ernest Hemingway; John Steinbeck; Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison—five men and two women.

Pearl S. Buck was born in America (1892 – 1973) and at the age of three months went to China. Except for attending college in the United States 1911 – 1914, she lived in China until age forty

Meet Pearl S. Buck in the following mini-documentary that runs 2:14 minutes.

“She was a builder of bridges between China and the rest of the world,” says Edgar Walsh of his mother, Pearl S. Buck. 

In this mini-documentary, Walsh describes how his mother was “ideally positioned to write about China.” Buck was the daughter of missionaries and spent much of the first half of her life in China, where many of her books are set. 

What do you think of China?

Discover China: Dictatorship or One Party Republic

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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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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2 Comments | America, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Communism, history, media, politics, socialism, United States | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Printing Books in China

July 9, 2013

I read a post on another Blog that complained about printing books in China for the American market, and this was my response.

If American’s stopped buying products made in China, Americans at home would lose jobs.  Since companies like Wal-Mart have most of its products manufactured in China, Wal-Mart might go out of business or shrink—which might be a good thing.  But many low wage people that work for Wal-Mart in the United States would be unemployed like American autoworkers during the recession.

Most Chinese products are manufactured for American companies.  Most of Apple’s products are manufactured outside the country like iPods in China. Try to buy a car—any car—that’s 100% manufactured in the United States.  Does it matter where the jobs go?  They are still gone. People in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc. are manufacturing goods that are sold in the United States. China isn’t the only country that does this.  Yet China seems to get all the blame. Why?

Many products may be built in other countries but an American puts them on the shelf, sells them and gets paid for it. When you buy an e-book, where is it manufactured?

Discover Doing Business in China

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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.

His latest novel, Running with the Enemy, was awarded an honorable mention in general fiction at the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival.

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Leave a Comment » | America, business, capitalism, China, Chinese history, Chinese literature, economy, history, United States | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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