China, the source of high-tech products – for now

July 31, 2011

The June 2011 National Geographic Magazine (NGM) is sitting on my desk reminding me to write a post about THE SECRET (Chinese) INGREDIENTS OF (almost) EVERYTHING.

In fact, today, China supplies 97% of the world’s rare earth needs.

NGM’s Folger tells us, “Although China currently monopolizes rare earth mining, other countries have deposits too. China has 48 percent of the world’s reserves; the United States has 13 percent. Russia, Australia, and Canada have substantial deposits as well. Until the 1980s, the United States led the world in rare earth production …” Then China entered the competition and soon dominated the global market.

How important are these rare earth minerals to our modern high-tech world?

The U.S. military depends on these minerals for night vision goggles used in combat, and to help control Predator drones, and Tomahawk cruise missiles.

MRI medical scans need a rare earth mineral to work while hybrid cars would not exist without them and wind turbines used to generate an alternative source of energy requires hundreds of pounds of one rare earth element while compact fluorescent light bulbs use another rare earth to light up.  Even our smart phones, flat-screen televisions and sunglasses (to protect our eyes from UV light) use rare earths.

Folger reveals that there is currently a shortage of rare earths with global demand about 60,000 tons. However, China will only be exporting 24,000 tons this year, since its growing middle class demands the same high-tech toys that many Americans and Europeans take for granted.

To have a better idea of how this demand of rare earths will grow in China, the McKinsey Global Institute predicts China’s middle class will reach about 612 million Chinese by 2025 to become the world’s largest population of consumers. This will change ‘made in China‘ to ‘sold in China‘ possibly creating markets for luxury goods made in the USA.

Does this mean that soon Chinese may be complaining about US workers stealing jobs from China?

Meanwhile, other nations (such as the US) are rushing to develop rare earth metals until the US is capable of producing enough to supply the demand in America for high-tech gadgets.

Discover more from Keeping the Rare Earths in China

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story that Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Facts about Education — China and the world versus America – Part 3/3

July 30, 2011

Myth:  “American Universities Are Being Overtaken.” (concerning research and development)

ANSWER: “NOT SO FAST.”

Wildavsky says, Asia’s share of the world’s research and development (R&D) spending grew from 27 to 32% from 2002 to 2007, led mostly by China, India, and South Korea.

However, R&D spending worldwide massively surged in the last decade from $790 billion to $1.1 trillion, up 45 percent, and in 2007, the U.S. spent $373 billion (up from $277 billion in 2002) on R&D, which was very high by global standards totaling more than all Asian countries’ combined ($352 billion was spent on R&D in Asia).

Myth: “THE WORLD WILL CATCH UP”

ANSWER: “Maybe, but don’t count on it anytime soon.”

While the global academic marketplace is without doubt growing more competitive, the United States doesn’t have just a few elite schools as most of its foreign competition does, and the U.S. spends about 2.9 percent of its GDP on postsecondary education, about twice the percentage spent by China, the European Union, and Japan in 2006.

If this three part series of posts sparked a curiosity to learn more on this topic, I urge you to take the time and click over to Foreign Policy magazine‘s Website and read all of FP’s Think Again: Education written by Ben Wildavsky.  It’s always nice to discover the facts before you form an opinion or believe someone that does not know what they are talking about. After reading Wildavsky’s piece in FP, it is obvious that America’s schools are not failing and have never been failing and are actually either holding their own or slowly improving.

That doesn’t mean the US should stop working at improving the public education system.  It means that many of the opinions and claims you may read or hear are probably wrong and the key to improving education in the US rests with the parents and not the teachers.

Considering the handicaps and competition teachers in the U.S. public schools face from the average child/adolescent’s poor lifestyles choices while eating horrible diets along with lack of proper sleep and spending far too much time dividing his or her daily hours (more than 10 hours a day on average) watching TV, playing video games, social networking on sites such as Facebook, and sending endless text messages instead of reading and studying, the evidence says American teachers are doing an incredible job.

Return to Facts about Education – Part 2 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Facts about Education — China and the world versus America – Part 2/3

July 29, 2011

Myth: “The United States Used to Have the World’s Smartest Schoolchildren.”

ANSWER: Ben Wildavsky says, “No, it didn’t. Even at the height of U.S. geopolitical dominance and economic strength, American students were never anywhere near the head of the class … the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967 … Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom …

If American’s ahistorical [unconcerned with or unrelated to history or to historical development or to tradition] sense of their global decline prompts educators to come up with innovative new ideas, that’s all to the good.  But don’t expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age—there wasn’t one.”

Myth: “Chinese Students Are Eating America’s Lunch.”

ANSWER: “Only Partly True … China’s educational prowess is real. Tiger moms (such as Amy Chua, who wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) are no myth—Chinese students focus intensely on their schoolwork, with strong family support, but these results don’t necessarily provide compelling evidence of U.S. inferiority.”

Wildavsky then says that many of the students in rural China outside Shanghai (the only Chinese city where the PISA international test was conducted) are poorer and less educated than ‘China’s’ coastal cities …

(American) alarmist comparisons with other countries, Waldavksy says, whose challenges are quite different from those of the United States, don’t help.

He says, “Americans should be less worried about how their own kids compare with kids in Helsinki (Finland) than how students in the Bronx measure up to their peers in Westchester Country.”

Myth: “The U.S. No Longer Attracts the Best and the Brightest.“

ANSWER:  “WRONG!”

While Wildavsky mentions that the U.S. should be concerned about the future, the U.S. college education system was (and still is) second to none since the United States has long been the world’s largest magnet for international students.

In fact, he says there are more foreign students in the United States now than there were a decade ago—149,999 more in 2008 than in 2000.

For international graduate study, Wildavsky says, American universities are a particularly powerful draw in fields that may directly affect the future competitiveness of a country’s economy: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Continued on July 29, 2011 in Facts about Education – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Facts about Education — China and the world versus America – Part 1/3

July 28, 2011

Tired of reading endless criticisms of just about everything global, I dropped my weekly subscription to The Economist magazine (TE) with its emphasis on Sinophobia.

To me, it seemed that most of TE’s staff does not have the intellectual ability or knowledge to write with much depth. I only remember one piece that was well researched and written that impressed me.

Instead, I have shifted to Foreign Policy (FP) magazine, which comes once every two months, and from what I’ve read so far in a few issues, the writing and ability of its staff is on a much higher level than TE.

Maybe that’s because FP has more lead-time to research, think, write, revise and edit before the next issue comes out.

This isn’t the first post I wrote due to something I read in FP. The first came after reading Chicago on the Yangtze, and the post that followed was Bo Xilai’s 32 Million.

This post is from reading FP’s Think Again: Education. The journalist was Ben Wildavsky, a senior scholar in Research and Policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the author of several scholarly books.

Knowing who wrote what is a big leap from TE, which is probably wise since what TE publishes is often insulting, biased and flawed.  However, it is better to know who wrote what since writing in anonymity may lead to lazy, biased and sloppy writing.

What Wildavsky does in FP magazine is debunk the lies and myths about the American educational system, and he does an excellent job.

MYTH: “American Kids are Falling Behind”

ANSWER: To this myth, Wildavsky says, “Not Really”, and explains, “the U.S. education system … doesn’t look to be failing so spectacularly.

“The performance of American students in science and math has actually improved modestly since the last round of this (PISA) international test in 2006 … and reading scores … are more or less unchanged since … 2003.”

Continued on July 28, 2011 in Facts about Education – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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More on China’s July 2011 Rail Accident

July 27, 2011

Passport, a Blog by the editors of Foreign Policy Magazine ran, “You think this weekend’s Chinese train crash was bad? It’s nothing compared to India’s deadly rails.”

Passport reported, “India has one of the largest railway systems in the world, carrying about 19 million passengers every day on about 7,000 trains. It’s called the ‘lifeline to the nation’, Unfortunately, that often means trains are jam packed.”

It’s worth visiting Passport for the photos to see how crowded India’s trains get.

Then a friend, the author of East of Indus, about life in the Old Punjab, sent an e-mail that said, “Accidents can occur, but Chinese technology is as advanced as anywhere in the world. India’s development is not nowhere near that level; accidents with multiple deaths are a way of life in India and don’t shock too many people there.”

At this point, I asked myself what the ratio of deaths and injured were compared to the total number of people travelling by rail in India, China and the United States.  After that, I spent several hours hunting for statistics, and finding facts for the United States was not easy.

What I discovered was, “China had 876.22 billion passenger kilometers in 2010; India had 838.03 billion passenger kilometers in 2009, and the United states had 17.21 billion passenger kilometers in 2008.

The United States has the largest railroad system in the world with 226,427 kilometers of rail (2007). China is third place with 91,000 kilometers (2010) and India is fourth with 64,215 kilometers (2011).

Then I found these statistics for the United States from an American government source.

In 1990, there were 599 fatalities and 22,736 injured in rail accidents.

In 2005, there were 525 fatalities and 10,424 injured.

In 2008, there were 514 fatalities and 7,993 injured.

In 2009, there were 458 fatalities and 7,103 injured. (Note: these numbers are much higher than the source I found for High Speed Rail Tragedy in China Reveals Small Minds in the West and may include light commuter rail). Source: RITA Bureau of Transportation Statistics

For China in 1990, no rail accidents were listed, while India had seventy killed.

For China in 2005, there were five killed, while India had 122 killed and many injured.

For China in 2008, there was seventy-two killed and 416 injured, while India had no fatalities or injuries reported.

For China in 2009, seven were killed and 280 injured, while in India thirty-two were killed and 280 injured.

Source: List of Rail Accidents (Wiki) Note: I suspect this source gets most of its information from the major media reporting on rail accidents.

In the United States for 1990, 2005, 2008 and 2009 (combined), there were about 30.3 deaths for every billion passenger kilometers traveled. In addition, according to Parilman & Associates, a National Law firm that specializes in rail accidents, “Every ninety minute (in the United States) there is a train derailment or collision.”

For every billion passenger kilometers traveled in China for the same four years, there were .02 deaths.

For every billion passenger kilometers traveled in India, there were .07 deaths.

The death rate in America was 1,515 times higher than China for each billion passenger kilometers traveled.

In addition, delays are common on long-distance Amtrak routes in the United States. This is because private railroads own the tracks used by Amtrak, and are more concerned about their own freight trains than about Amtrak’s passenger trains. Average delays vary considerably among routes. However, as of 2008, Amtrak has increased its efforts and most trains arrive on time well over 50% of the time.

Note: As a journalist, I am aware that the media does not always report on types of accidents or tragedies that happen often. However, the media does report on rare accidents and tragedies such as an airplane crash.  For this reason, it is possible that rail accidents are so common in the United States, the media does not bother to report most of them unless it is really horrendous, which leaves the public ignorant of how unsafe America’s rails are.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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