I’ve been in the Number One Shanghai department store off Nanjing road and seen Chinese consumers taking TV’s from the box to insure they work.
Recently, my father-in-law and his wife were up at four in the morning walking to the Apple Store a forty-minute walk from our Bay Area house.
To buy an iPad 2 in America, they were willing to get up that early and wait in line for several hours until the store opened to buy this new Apple product.
When I asked why not buy the iPad 2 at one of the Official Apple Stores in Beijing, I was told if you buy something in the US even if made in China, the buyer can be assured of the quality.
There is some truth to that. My father-in-law’s wife arrived with a new camera bought in China.
The camera stopped working the first week she was here so she bought an expensive Sony and loved it because it worked just as promised and kept on working.
It would seem that Chinese manufacturers have a long way to go to earn the trust of the Chinese consumer.
Meanwhile, sixty million Chinese tourists are leaving China annually and buying “Made in China” outside of China then taking those purchases home.
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.
Shaun Rein, a CNBC contributor, reported, “China is on the verge of overtaking Japan as the world’s largest consumer of luxury good, spending $13 billion, or 22 percent of the world total, in 2010.”
Reign says that is because it is 30 percent cheaper to buy luxury products in another country due to taxes and tariffs.
There is another reason why many Chinese tourists buy “Made in China” in other countries.
While my Chinese father-in-law and his wife were visiting in the US, I learned why Chinese buy in the US — quality.
If you read the China Law Blog, you may know that in China there are several levels of quality that do not exist in the US. When buying anything in China, there is always a risk you may end up buying a fake or the real thing but of a lower quality.
From what I have read at the China Law Blog, it seems there is no way to tell which level of quality you are buying when in China.
That doesn’t mean “Made in China” is always of a poor quality. The language of the contract between the foreign buyer such as Apple and the Chinese manufacturer is important.
In fact, most of the products Apple sells globally are assembled in China and many are manufactured there too (Apple has manufacturing facilities spread around the world but assembles most of its expensive electronic items such as the iPad in China).
This explains why the Chinese in China often if not always make sure a computer or a TV (along with other merchandise) works before buying and taking it home.
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.
More than two billion Christians believe Jesus Christ was the son of God and is God.
About 13 million Jews see Christ differently. Some Jewish scholars note that though Jesus may have used the phrase “my Father in Heaven” (cf. Lord’s Prayer), this common poetic Jewish expression may have been misinterpreted as literal.
In fact, Rabbi Jacob Emden considered Jesus a righteous man, who brought the light of faith and morality to the world, but not as a Messiah.
One and a half billion Muslims, on the other hand, see Jesus as a savior and a reformist. Mission Islamsays, “Jesus is known to the Muslims as ‘Issa – this is the name for Jesus that we have been given in our scriptures.
“To Muslims, Jesus – or ‘Issa – is a savior, a reformist, the Messiah (the anointed one), the ‘Word of God’. He was elevated to heaven. He could cure the ill, raise the dead, fashion inanimate objects and blow life into them, all by the Will of God.
“We believe that the one who disbelieves in Jesus is not a Muslim, because the person who disbelieves in one of the prophets disbelieves in all of them. So Muslims believe in Jesus and in his message. His message was one with all the other messengers. In the Qur’an, it is said that God never sent a messenger to mankind except that he was sent with one warning: Worship Allah alone.”
There are even atheists that recognize Jesus Christ as an important historical person. In Atheists for Jesus, we learn that Ken Schei has a goal to rescue Jesus from the Religious Right then from the Bible.
Schei says, “I have come to have a great deal of respect for the teachings of Jesus. My respect for Jesus is not based on the Cross, but rather on the Mount—not on His death and supposed resurrection, but on His teachings as exemplified by the Sermon on the Mount.”
Now that I have established the wide variety of people and beliefs that recognize the importance of Jesus, John 8:7 in the New Testament says, “So when they continued asking him (Jesus), he lifted up himself, and said unto them, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’.”
With John 8:7 in mind, what are we to say of critics that continue to cast stones at Amy Chua, the Tiger Mother.
At Amazon.com, in some of the one-star reviews, critics often cast brutal stones heavy with opinions at Amy Chua accusing her of child abuse, being a narcissist, a psychopath, a liar and a backstabber all because Chua spent hours each week with her daughters setting high expectations and following through sometimes using insults and threats to achieve her parenting goals.
China is another example of critics casting stones, and the Western media often casts these stones at China without telling the whole story.
One example of a “stone thrower” is an anonymous Blogger that writes Understanding China, One Blog at a Time—An American in China.This Blogger mostly writes criticisms of China such as the most recent one, “Irrational Chinese and Crazy Nationalism”.
This anonymous Blogger often judges all of China based on his or her personal experiences while living and working there and this Blogger has attracted fans with similar opinions that enjoy criticizing China without much evidence and/or understanding of China, its people and its history to support those opinions.
Would Jesus Christ have approved of these individuals that so easily cast stones?If He were here today, what would He say?
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.
Against all odds, since the 1960s, the average Asian-Americans parent (including Chinese-Americans) held on to traditional parenting methods more in line with the Old Testament and old-world values.
Why is this?
Nicholas D. Kristof, writing for the New York Times, says, “Perhaps as a legacy of Confucianism, its citizens have shown a passion for education and self-improvement — along with remarkable capacity for discipline and hard work, what the Chinese call “chi ku,” or “eating bitterness”.
In Time magazine, Amy Chua said, “‘I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too.’ The tiger-mother approach isn’t an ethnicity but a philosophy: expect the best from your children, and don’t settle for anything less.”
In 2003, 49.8% of Asian-Americans over age 25 had bachelor’s degrees, compared to 27.6% of whites and 17.3% of blacks.
Also according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2008 Asian-Americans had per-capita incomes of $30,292, whites had per-capita incomes of $28,502, and blacks had per-capita incomes of $18,406.
For thousands of years starting well before the birth of Jesus Christ, old word values, as defined by the Old Testament, guided parents and there was a reason for that.
There’s an old saying that there is “nothing new under the sun”.
Some will argue that were no jet planes, cell phones, laptop computers, fax machines, and mp3 players during ancient times.
However, the saying that “nothing is new under the sun” refers to the intangibles of life as defined by human behavior, not specific inventions and gadgets. The reason why most parents around the globe (such as Amy Chua) still raises children using old-world values was that time proved those methods worked best while rejecting what didn’t work.
In the 1960s, when the “average” American parent rejected those old-world parenting values for the soft, self-esteem building approach to parenting, they turned their backs on what worked best for millennia.
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.
This post first appeared on March 26, 2011, at Crazy Normal, a blog about education, parenting and coming of age.
About a year ago, Business Insider.com published, “It’s Official, Asian-American Students Work Way Harder to Become More Educated Than Everyone Else” then went on to say Asian-American students take far more Advanced Placement (AP) classes during high school than most other Americans.
To verify this, I used the Academic Performance Index (API) in California to rank and compare four high schools.
Although Chinese are the largest Asian minority in the US, they are not listed separately but are included with other Asian-Americans, which are Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese and Koreans.
Today there are about 14 million Asians in the US. As a group, Asian-Americans outperform all other racial groups academically.
At Rowland Unified School District’s Nogales High School, 76% of the student population is listed as Hispanic and 11% as Filipino. The Filipino/Asian students averaged 790 on the API while the Hispanic students averaged 627
At Oakland High School, three ethnic groups were listed. African Americans make up 26% of the student population with an API average of 517; Asians are 53% of students with an API of 667 and Hispanics are 16% of the student population with an API of 519.
At Los Lomas High School, 74% of the student population is white with an API average of 851 while the 11% Asian population averages 861.
At Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, 53% of the students are white with an API average of 895. Asians make up 32% of students and average 921 on the API.
Education.com says that Asian-American students generally fare better than other racial minority groups in respect to grade point averages, standardized test scores, or even numbers of high school, bachelor, and advanced degrees obtained compared to other racial minorities (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003; U.S. Census Bureau, 2003).
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.
This post first appeared on March 25, 2011, at Crazy Normal, a blog about education, parenting and coming of age.
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