A Difference in Defensive Thinking

June 20, 2013

Teddy Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Compare this to Sun Tzu, who wrote the Art of War. He said, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

I’m not sure that America speaks all that softly and that stick has been around the world more than once and has been costly.  I did a bit of virtual sleuthing and the military budgets approved by the Congress between 1946 to 2009 have cost the American tax-payer about 23 trillion dollars. These figures do not include the wars since World War II.

In today’s dollars, the Korean War cost more than $340 billion; the Vietnam War cost $740 Billion.

To date, the cost of war in Iraq has cost more than $810 billion and Afghanistan $629 billion.


To compare, the US military has more firepower.

China intervened in the Korean War and sent hundreds-of-thousands of troops. To understand why the Chinese got involved, Mao said,”Vietnam is the gums to our teeth. What happens when the gums are gone?”

Between 1965 and 1970, over 320,000 Chinese soldiers served in North Vietnam.

“Rather than worrying about this development, we should understand that Beijing’s maintenance of a large, modern military is driven by history.” Source: Huffington Post  “On 4 March 2010, Beijing announced China’s declared defense budget will only increase by 7.5% this year — the slowest rate in 20 years.”

In 2012, China defense spending increased by 11%—more than $100 Billion compared to $738 Billion for the US.

Discover When China’s generals laughed.

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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, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Chinese literature, cultural differences, military, military spending | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

What does the world’s fastest supercomputer; a Chinese Dissident and America’s top secret Internet-phone Surveillance System have in common?

June 18, 2013

Recently three revealing news items caught my attention. The first was about Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese dissident who fled China to become a visiting scholar at New York University.

I understand Mr. Chen doesn’t speak a word of English and was self-educated in China.  Therefore, his one-year job as a visiting scholar at NYU could be seen as a form of welfare offering him a way to earn money just by hanging around sharing his story of how horrible China’s government is.

Now that his one-year visiting scholarship job is ending, he is accusing NYU of being pressured by China to dump him. Is this an example of biting the hand that feeds you? I’m not surprised. Who wants to be unemployed?

“Chen, who has been blind from childhood and taught himself law, was a campaigner for farmers and disabled citizens. He exposed forced abortions in China before he was placed under house arrest in Shandong province. … NYU pointed to a PBS television interview in May 2012 with Cohen, who had said Chen would be at NYU for a year at most while he adjusted to a new country.” Source: Reuters

Then again, maybe the truth about Mr. Chen is that he’s just a paranoid guy with a wild imagination who likes to complain and now that he’s living in the US, he has to find something to complain about here. Maybe the Chinese really locked Chen up because they grew tired of hearing his unsupported, alleged complaints.

The second bit of news was China asking the United States to explain its Internet surveillance program: “China made its first substantive comments on Monday to reports of U.S. surveillance of the Internet, demanding that Washington explain its monitoring programs to the international community.

“Several nations, including U.S. allies, have reacted angrily to revelations by an ex-CIA employee over a week ago that U.S. authorities had tapped the servers of internet companies for personal data.”  Source: CNBC

I think there has to be another reason China is making this demand.  Either China wants the world to see that its biggest critic for Internet surveillance in China, the United States, also spies on its citizens and was keeping it a secret, or—then again—maybe China wants to learn from the United States how to build a better Internet surveillance system.  After all, the US is known for its innovation.

The third bit of news was about China’s new supercomputer. CNBC reported that “China has built the world’s fastest supercomputer, almost twice as fast as the previous U.S. holder and underlining the country’s rise as a science and technology powerhouse.”

It’s no secret—I think (no leak intended)—that the United States uses supercomputers to monitor its Internet surveillance system and eavesdrop on citizens’ phone calls and e-mails. And now that China has a super computer twice as powerful as anything in the United States, China may want to put it to good use just like the US is doing to keep a closer eye on its citizens—and so-called paranoid dissidents like Chen Guangcheng.

That way China will be able to move faster and grant these dissidents immigration status to the US where they will seek political asylum and be given positions as visiting scholars who don’t have to teach classes and who get paid just to hang around and socialize badmouthing China.

That should help divert the attention of America’s citizens off of their own government’s Internet and phone surveillance systems and back on China where the US government wants it to be focused.

Discover Liu Xiaobo’s Manifesto, Charter 08

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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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2 Comments | America, censorship, China, Communism, democracy, media, politics, science, United States | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Power Corrupts even the common man

June 13, 2013

The sun never set on the British Empire until endless wars brought that empire to its knees. I’m sure that at one time, a British citizen could easily say with arrogance, “If Russia (or China, or Germany, or Italy, or France or Spain) doesn’t behave, we will spank them.” And Britain did spank these countries and others for centuries until the empire was bankrupt and burdened with debt—sound familiar?

I read a piece in The Huffington Post recently and was reminded how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Then I remembered what an old friend said in an e-mail.  This friend is a conservative, born-again Christian. He claims to be guided by scripture. He believes that George W. Bush (GWB) was the greatest if not one of the greatest American presidents. He also believes in the nation building that GWB attempted in Iraq.

He makes part of his living as a handyman. He lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment and drives a very-used car that he keeps running by visiting junk yards for parts and doing the work himself. He also votes Republican and often bashes evil liberals while listening to radio-talk shows like Dennis Prager and reading authors like Ann Coulter.

This friend wrote in an e-mail, “If China doesn’t behave, we will spank them.” He also wrote once that Communism was evil. My reply was that individuals like Mao or Stalin were corrupted by their power and did evil things, but not all communists were or are evil.

I always thought that ‘power corrupts’ only applied to people in powerful positions like corporate CEOs or elected officials.  I was wrong. A nation’s power may also corrupt the thinking of its people.

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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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2 Comments | America, China, politics, religion, United States | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Cheating is a Global Problem

June 11, 2013

I guess I’m naïve or stupid or something. During the nine years I attended colleges and universities to earn my BA in journalism and MFA in writing, I did all my own work. It didn’t even occur to me that I could pay someone else to do the work for me.

And when I read, “Rampant cheating hurts China’s research ambitions” (Yahoo news), I was disappointed at the lack of balance. There was no mention that cheating is a problem globally—not just in China.

Was this another example of China bashing?

I taught journalism and was an adviser for an award winning high-school newspaper for several years, and the student reporters learned to write balanced pieces—even for the opinion page. I taught that both sides of an issue should be heard even if the balance isn’t perfect and one side is not politically correct.


Listen to the first few minutes to get the idea.

Since Yahoo’s headquarters are in Sunnyvale, California, I’m going to focus on cheating in America to correct this imbalance.

ABC News/Primetime published “A Crisis in America’s Schools — How It’s Done and Why It’s Happening“.  “…according to a 2002 confidential survey of 12,000 high school students, 74 percent admitted cheating on an examination at least once in the past year…. Lifting papers off the Internet is one of the newer trends in plagiarism — and technology is giving students even more ways to cheat nowadays.”

Then there’s “High-Tech Cheating in College” about cheating at MIT, California Polytechnic State University at San Louis Obispo, and Stanford University. “Many colleges offer no comprehensive approach to minor academic cheating (the exceptions are institutions with honor codes, though few have them according Tracy Mitrano, Cornell University’s director of information-technology policy.”

Then there is Lance Armstrong and the US cycling team.

Discover Education Chinese Style

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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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

“Peking to Paris” – more than a book review: a journey

May 6, 2013

This is the real life story of Dina and Bernard Bennett driving in a road rally from Beijing to Paris in 2007—starting in Beijing, China to the desert sands of Mongolia, braving the potholes of Russia to reach Eastern Europe and eventually Paris, France with endless break downs and repairs to keep an almost 70-year-old car running.

The closest books I can compare this reading experience with is Paul Theroux’s “The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia” and Tom Carter’s “China: Portrait of a People“.

The big difference is that Theroux rode the rails, and Carter walked for most of two years across China. In Peking to Paris, Dina and her husband drove a 1940 Cadillac-LaSalle 52 Coupe that Dina named Roxanne.

On page 79, Dina says, “China is full of surprises.” Then she dives into a description of a café that specializes in Mongolian hotpot. She says, “Behind me is a full wall of shelves and bins stuffed with vegetables, fish, poultry, pork, lamb and beef.  I count four sections, each easily five feet wide, divided by eight shelves reaching the ceiling. Every shelf is crammed with ingredient bins …”

With this description, Bennett shows us that China is an eating culture.  Food is important to the Chinese—very important.

In another chapter, she discovers that the Chinese and Americans have more in common than she had thought when they stay the night at a rustic Chinese dude ranch where urban Chinese come to rough it on vacations spending time with Mongolian herders.

In China, the ride seemed smooth and easy, but once they cross the border into Mongolia, a band of boys exercising their democratic freedoms throw rocks at the car and shatter the driver’s side windshield.

However, when they were still in an undemocratic China ruled by one party, the CCP, no one threw rocks at them. Instead, while driving down remote country roads police officers in fancy dress uniforms wearing white gloves waited at intersections to guide them in the right direction.

A few hundreds yard into Mongolia, the paved roads they had enjoyed in China suddenly end and the rest of the trek across this landlocked country is mostly on dirt and sand taking a heavy toll on the mechanical health of the LaSalle. Then they reach Russia’s paved roads where the challenge becomes avoiding horse-trough sized potholes capable of swallowing cars whole.

Because of this experience from Peking to Paris, Dina and Bernard are bitten by the travel bug and they have now completed more than a dozen road trips all over the world—after you read this memoir, you may want to follow them by visiting  the author’s Blog at Dina Bennett.net

I’m planning to.

Oh, and lest I forget, I was contacted by Dina’s publicist and agreed to accept a complementary uncorrected proof, which I read in record time. I have never met or talked to Dina and her husband online or in person.

 

The LaSalle in the above video is not the one that Dina and Bernard drove in the 2007 rally from Beijing to Paris, but the video gives you an idea of the car they drove 7,800 miles across China to Mongolia, then Russia to Eastern Europe and eventually Paris, France—thirty-five grueling days.

It has been some time since I read a book that I wanted to wake up early in the morning to read and eagerly waited to read before I slept. For me, reading Peking to Paris was an adventure, and I highly recommend it.

Discover Country Driving with Peter Hessler

 

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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Leave a Comment » | America, book promotion, book review, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese food, tourism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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