Harlequin Romance Invades China

December 8, 2010

Guest Post by Tom Carter

Growing up in a rural, slate-roofed village deep in the countryside of southeast China, the only English books my Chinese fiancée had to read back then were a brittle copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and a set of Harlequin novels.

Yes, I’m talking about Harlequin, those pulpy paperbacks found on revolving wire racks at supermarket checkout aisles across North America and the UK.  Their enticing cover art – usually, nay, always featuring shirtless, square-jawed men hovering millimeters away from the glistening-red lips of a damsel in distress – and formulaic flirt/fight/fall-in-love storylines mercilessly targeted housewives and secretaries longing for a 200-page escape from the dirty diapers and pot-bellied husbands of their mid-life realities.

As it turns out, it was by reading books like “Stormy Voyage” by Sally Wentworth and Roberta Leigh’s “Two-Timing Man” (bought used for 7 RMB out of a sidewalk vendor’s book cart), amongst other Harlequin classics, that my fiancée managed to teach herself English (which explains her tendency to throw her head back dramatically whenever we kiss).

Curious how Harlequin, the forbidden fruit of literature, could be found anywhere in a Communist republic that has the world’s most strict state-sponsored vetting process for publications, I was surprised to learn that in 1995 (about when my fiancée found her copies) Harlequin received official, red star-stamped permission to place half a million copies of twenty titles in Mandarin and a quarter-million copies of ten English versions on the shelves of Xinhua.

Harlequin’s stated goal: “to bring romance to millions of Chinese Women.”

A China.org article on the increasing popularity of romance books in the P.R.C. concurred with Harlequin’s audacious move: “Chinese women today have new demands for their Prince Charming: first, he must be powerful and distinguished…next, he must unlimited financial resources.” 

Wosai!  No wonder China has become home to the world’s highest surplus of single men!

Harlequin, which puts out 1,500 new titles annually in over 100 international markets, has yet to think up a romance set in present-day China (Possible storyline: wealthy, second-generation Beijing businessman seduces sexy xiaojie with his shiny black Audie, pleather man-purse and a thick stack of redbacks; he agrees to save her Anhui village from being bulldozed by corrupt cadres if she will become his kept woman.). 

Until that day, we will have to entertain ourselves with stories set in China’s olden times starring princesses and concubines.

Discover China’s Sexual Revolution

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Travel Photographer Tom Carter traveled for 2 years across the 33 provinces of China to show the diversity of Chinese people in China: Portrait of a People, the most comprehensive photography book on modern China published by a single author.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

2 Comments | America, American culture, business, capitalism, China, Chinese women, expatriates, media | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Looking at WikiChina

December 5, 2010

Writing for the New York Times about WikiLeaks, Thomas Friedman, the author of “The World is Flat” and the winner of several Pulitzer prizes, recently wrote a humorous but painfully honest post, From WikiChina, of what China’s Washington Embassy e-mails to Beijing may say of America.

I had to resist copying Friedman’s entire post but will point out a few of his gems.

“They fight over things like – we are not making this up – how and where an airport security officer can touch them.”

“It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran.”

“But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are.”

“Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it.”

If you want to have a good laugh or possibly shed tears because this truth is painful, I suggest you read all of Friedman’s post.

Discover more of Friedman at China’s Green Challenge

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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.

1 Comment | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Bullying China over North Korea is a Mistake

December 5, 2010

I keep reading in the Western media and on the Internet that China is the bad boy for not taming North Korea even as WikiLeaks shows that China doesn’t have that much influence over the Hermit Kingdom.

One example comes from Jack Kim, a reporter in Seoul working for Reuters, who writes, “China, pushed again by Washington to bring North Korea to heel after last week’s artillery attack on the South, told Pyongyang their relationship had withstood international ‘tempests’.”

If everything we hear about the Hermit Kingdom is true, I must admit this is one country I wouldn’t want to visit.

However, why is China being bullied by the West to tame a beast it cannot control?

The answer is “Humanitarianism”, a concept born among the West’s democracies.

Remaking the World by Michael Barnett says, “Religious beliefs and organizations, most notably those influenced by Christian theology and ethics, helped to create modern humanitarianism in the early nineteenth century and have shaped its expanding scale, scope, and significance ever since.”

At Helium.com, I learned that “Humanitarianism” is the belief that the person was the most important aspect of society, and that it was important to value the individual over the group.

However, in Asia, especially China and North Korea, the group is valued above the individual. After all, China and North Korea along with other Asian nations are collective cultures.

This means that the West’s concept of “Humanitarianism” may not work in most of Asia.

Here’s what a definition for “Humanitarianism” in Asia might say—The belief that the group is the most important aspect of society and that it is important to value the group over the individual.

It this definition is correct, it would explain the death sentence rate in China and harsh punishments for individuals that threaten “Collective Humanitarianism”.

In fact, the real risk to the survival of humanity may be when Westerners take their beliefs to the extreme resulting in “Armed Humanitarianism”.

Top Feed News says, “Armed Humanitarians (by Nathan Hodge) traces how the concepts of nation-building came into vogue, and how, evangelized through think tanks, government seminars, and the press, this new doctrine took root inside the Pentagon and the State Department. Following this extraordinary experiment in armed social work as it plays out from Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa and Haiti…”

The Huffington Post says, “Nathan Hodge is no neophyte on security issues. He has reported from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and a number of other countries in the Middle East and former Soviet Union. For years he blogged on Wired magazine’s well known Danger Room blog and now reports on the defense industry for the Wall Street Journal.”

What happens if the West influences China to leave Confucian collectivism behind and to embrace the West’s humanitarian beliefs as flawed as they may have become?

Maybe an individualist, humanitarian China would become America’s partner in “Armed Humanitarianism” and divide the globe into a pie chart eventually leading to a third world war between China and the US to see who eats the whole pie.

Then hundreds of millions will die and the earth’s environment would be devastated to protect the rights of the individual.

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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.

Leave a Comment » | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, Confucianism, cultural differences, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Enough, Already!

December 2, 2010

Christopher Bodeen of the Associated Press reported that a Chinese father was punished for food safety activism.

The AP wasn’t the only Western media to go ballistic with this story.

Amnesty International jumped in along with BBC News, Forbes, and CBS News among others. 

In the West, this type of story sells newspapers and boosts ratings for the five and ten o’clock news.

Be assured, this story will be “milked” for all it is worth.

The father of a three-year old child that was sickened by melamine-tainted milk, Zhao Lianhai, was convicted and sentenced Wednesday to 2 1/2 years in prison for inciting social disorder (in China), his lawyer said.

Bodeen’s lead in the AP piece was a masterpiece to appeal to Western anger. “A father who organized a support group for other parents whose children were sickened in one of China’s worst food safety scandals was convicted and sentenced…”

However, if you grew up in a Western culture and are capable of not seeing red, I suggest you read the rest of Bodeen’s piece before you start shouting. 

It also helps to understand how the Mandate of Heaven has affected Chinese civilization for more than two thousand years. Chinese history is filled with bloody rebellions and insurrections that were allowed to get out of hand.

In China, it is often better to make a mistake by throwing someone in jail than risking another Cultural Revolution or Taiping Rebellion where an estimated fifty million died.

What the government did sounds more like “Enough Already!”  The guy just wouldn’t get the hint and had to be hit upside the head.

After all, the event happened in 2008. Lianhai has had almost three years to protest before the government sent him to jail to shut him up.
 
In fact, there was a trial for the people behind the tainted milk and justice was served.
 
Three people got the death penalty.
 
The general manager and chair woman of Sanlu, the company at the heart of the scandal, was given a life sentence.
 

Dozens of officials, dairy executives and farmers were punished for allowing the contamination to take place.

When this type of tainted food scandal happens in the US, few go to prison and sometimes there is no justice even in court.

What China should do is free Linahai and send him and his family to the US where he can protest all he wants about tainted American food.

In fact, we need Linahai here.

Sarah Francis at MomsRising.org says that each year in the U.S., more than 76 million people get sick and more than 5,000 die from food-borne diseases.

The problem is that there are so many people protesting in the US, few listen unless you belong to the Tea Party.

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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. 

Leave a Comment » | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese food, cultural differences, food, legal system, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Selfish, Narcissistic Children

December 1, 2010

A friend forwarded a link to me of Dr. Mark J. Perry’s China’s Single-Child Adults Too Selfish for Marriage?

It appears that the question mark indicates Dr. Perry is asking a question of his virtual audience. Here’s my answer.

Dr. Perry sites an NPR All Things Considered report by Louisa Lim’s Lightning Divorces Strike China’s ME Generation.

Lim says Beijing has the highest divorce rate nationwide, with 39 percent of all marriages ending in a split.

One Beijing woman, Cheng, tells Lim of her six-month marriage that ended as fast as it started. She blamed the divorce on belonging to the generation of spoiled singletons, known as the post-1980s generation.

One answer may explain the change in China’s divorce rate is that eight years ago, a married couple needed permission from their work unit to divorce. Today, couples have the freedom to divorce without asking.

However, Dr. Perry, a professor of economics and finance in the US, seems to think that the upsurge in China’s divorce rate is because of the selfish and narcissistic generation of spoiled one-child children in China.

My question is how does China’s one-child generation compare to the US’s self-esteem generations?

A study by the Pew Research Center, in association with Time magazine says that 44% of Americans age 18 to 29 say marriage is obsolete. Forty-one percent of the next age group (30 to 49) says the same thing. Source: Washington Post

This pretty much covers America’s self-esteem generations since that method of child rearing began in the late 1960s.

Data from a US Census report says about 50% of first marriages in the US for men under age 45 may end in divorce.

In fact, China National News reports that one in five marriages in China ends in divorce — that’s 20%.

The interesting fact is that there has always been exemptions in China’s one-child policy, and the rules are changing all the time.

China’s 56 minorities, which adds up to more than one hundred million people, have no restrictions to the number of children a family may have and many rural Chinese may have two children due to the need for more hands on the farm.

Recently, due to changes in demographics, married couples in Shanghai that grew up as one-child, may have two children, and anyone in China may have more if he or she can afford to pay the fine, which means many of China’s rich and famous have started a trend by having an average of three.

It appears that China may easily reverse any damage the one-child policy may have caused in much of urban China, but the US seems stuck in “self-esteem” mode no matter what research shows us about the trend to grow up as a selfish narcissist when raised this way.

In 2001, the New York Times reported there were three withering studies of self-esteem released in the United States, all of which had the same central message: people with high self-esteem pose a greater threat to those around them than people with low self-esteem and feeling bad about yourself is not the cause of our country’s biggest, most expensive social problems.

Discover how some Avoid China’s “one-child” Policy

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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.

Leave a Comment » | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, cultural differences, family values, parenting | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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