Doing Mankind a Favor – Part 1/2

August 23, 2011

Recently, I learned something new from a comment left by Xiaohu Liu for a post called China’s Goals for going Green.

Liu wrote, “More likely China will go more nuclear before it goes green … (there are) two types of nuclear technology that could revolutionized the world as much as the steam power or petrol power did in the 19th and 20th century.”

Until Liu left that comment, I was unaware of the types of nuclear power China is developing.

The (UK) Telegraph says, “Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium.”

I discovered the Chinese are investing millions in research into reactors powered by thorium, a metal, supporters say, that is as common as lead (which means it would be cheap and easy to find), and one, which, despite some concerns, would lead to power plants with fewer safety issues as well as other benefits.

“Thorium-based reactors certainly have advantages,” says Wang Kan, leader of the Tsinghua University Thorium Research Team. “The energy release from Thorium is greater than from Uranium, the by-products from using Thorium are less toxic than from Uranium, and it’s much harder to make weapons from those by-products.”

However, China was not the first nation to research the use of Thorium. In the late 1940s, US physicists were exploring the use of thorium as fuel to generate power but dangerous and dirty uranium won since the US and the USSR were fighting the Cold War and building thousands of nuclear weapons.

Continued on August 24, 2011 in Doing Mankind a Favor – 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. 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.

3 Comments | America, capitalism, China, Communism, economy, environment, government, military, military spending, politics, science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Wage Thieves in the Private Sector

August 20, 2011

Tom Carter, the author of China: Portrait of a People, sent me a link to a forum on political and social change in China that I found interesting. The forum was published in the Boston Review.

One in particular that I agreed with was China’s Other Revolution by Edward S. Steinfeld.

Steinfeld points out that “patterns of inequity are unfortunately not unique to the Chinese experience”, and then he makes a strong point when he writes, “One need look no further than the United States and Western Europe for developmental histories replete with exploitation, abuse, violence, and environmental degradation.”

By coincidence, the same day Carter sent me the link to this forum in the Boston Review, I read Wage theft a scourge for low-income workers by John Coté, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle.

It seems while many Americans and the Western media often criticize China for exploitation of migrants, low-skilled wage laborers, and the rural poor, the same practice is alive and well in the United States.

Coté writes, “It’s part of a national scourge known as wage theft. More than two-thirds of low-wage workers (in the United States) reported some type of pay-related law violation…”

The piece Coté wrote for SFGate was on two pages and ends with six facts.  One says, “$56.4 million is stolen every week from (low-wage) workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.”

In addition, Poverty News reports, “Low-wage workers in the United States are gripped by increasing financial insecurity as they inch along an economic tightrope made riskier by pervasive job losses and rising prices. Many struggle to pay for life’s basics—housing, food and health care—and most report having virtually no financial cushion should they stumble.”

How many Americans are considered low-wage workers?

According to the Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston College, “The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2008, 39.8 million people (13.2 percent of the U.S. population) lived at or below the Federal Poverty Level (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2009).”


When it comes to poverty, America ranks 3rd worst among developed nations.

If two-thirds of these low-wage workers (and there may be more) in the U.S. are being cheated, that is about 26 million people that are not being paid what they earned.

It seems to me that the American media, the nation’s leaders and most Americans should focus on solving these types of problems in the U.S. before criticizing other countries.

Discover more from The India, China battle to eliminate poverty and illiteracy

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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.

6 Comments | America, business, capitalism, China, Chinese middle class, Chinese minorities, economy, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Building China too Fast and the Struggle to Slow Down

August 18, 2011

Andrew Thomas of Aljazeera English reported from Chuzhou, China July 13, 2011.  He tells us about real estate agents in Beijing canvassing the traffic during rush hour, which happens to be most hours in China’s capital.

In the U.S., we might see homeless people going car to car offering to clean windows for a dollar but in China, the odds are those people going car to car will be real estate agents handing out flyers urging people to buy homes.

During most of the day, one can get around Beijing faster on foot or using the subways than driving a car or taking a taxi, which usually results in sitting dead in traffic breathing fumes from other cars.

Thomas reports that the real-estate agents will do just about anything to sell apartments hitting the market. The reason is that the Chinese are building more new apartments than any country on earth.

In Chuzhou, three hours from Shanghai, Thomas takes us on a tour of what he calls an “unremarkable town” and says this level of housing development is happening all over China.

Thomas says, between 2009 and 2010, there was a 41% rise in housing construction as prices soared. He then questions if Chinese speculators are driving this housing bubble.

In addition, he says China’s electricity authority, last year, reported that over 65 million homes use no power because they are standing empty as prices keep going up.

Thomas says China’s government is worried and wants to avoid a real estate bubble bursting so they have raised interest rates and increased the minimum down payment people must pay for second homes.

Stephen Joske of the Economist Intelligence Unit says, “We are not looking at a bubble burst resembling anything like what’s happened in the U.S.—probably a short correction.”

Therefore, for economists in the West that keep predicting China’s housing bubble will burst and slow China’s growth, think again.

As for aspiring home buyers, many in China are waiting to see what happens and are hoping prices go down. Thomas says a price drop could hurt many overseas markets that depend on China’s growth and development.

If a real estate bubble bursts in China, the odds are that the shock waves will be felt worse outside China in countries still recovering from the 2008 global financial crises caused by the private banking and financial sector in the United States, and Thomas explains why that may happen.

The reason for this speculation may be the central government’s plans to move a few hundred million more rural Chinese into newly built urban cities and new homes in older cities as China transitions from an economy dependent on exports to one driven by middle class consumption.

These property speculators are betting on the future.

Discover more from The “What if” Housing Bubble 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 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.

7 Comments | business, capitalism, China, Chinese middle class, economy, environment, government | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Spinning a Web – Part 1/2

August 16, 2011

Is Julia Lovell spinning a web to deceive about the First Opium War (1839 to 1842)?

ACN Newswire posted a press release recently announcing the pending publication of The Opium War by Julia Lovell (available September 2011).

Lovell’s reason for writing this book was to “see whether things really were as black and white as the Chinese textbooks seem to say it was.”

“Seem!” Doesn’t Lovell know what the Chinese textbooks say?

If you check to see who runs ACN Newswire, you will discover it is an associate company of Japan Corporation News K.K., which may mean nothing or everything when it comes to a nonfiction book that aims to make the Chinese look as guilty as the British regarding the Opium Wars.

Julia Lovell says, “It wasn’t a clear-cut story of innocent Chinese on the one hand, and the British invaders on the other.”


British author Julia Lovell talks about writing her book.

“But even if you look at the time, what’s going on during the time of the war itself, the Chinese are supplying the British, they are navigating for the British, they are spying for the British, for a fee of course, so there is an extraordinary pragmatism,” Lovell says in the ACN Newswire press release. “They don’t necessarily feel the loyalty to the idea of the Chinese imperial centre or the emperor or anything else, they will go with where the smart money is. And the British couldn’t have won the war without this assistance.”

There are two key phrases of Lovell’s proving her theory is more complicated than she makes it sound. The first phrase says, “for a fee of course” and the second, “They didn’t necessarily feel loyalty to the idea of the Chinese imperial center or the emperor or anything else…”

In fact, little is “clear-cut” about the Opium Wars. Since the Qing Dynasty was not ruled by the Han Chinese (which represents 90% of the population), but was ruled by a brutal Manchu minority, many Han Chinese probably felt little or no loyalty to the Qing emperor.

Continued on August 16, 2011 in Spinning a Web – 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. 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.

6 Comments | capitalism, China, Chinese history, crime, economy, history, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Punishing Food Fraud in China – Part 2/2

August 15, 2011

If you read Part 1 of this two part series, you may be thinking it isn’t safe to eat in China.

However, Wall Street Journal.com says, “Struggles with food safety are not a specifically Chinese problem. Many countries, including the U.S. and Japan, have gone through similar growing pains in the food industry, says Wu Ming, a professor at Beijing University’s school of public health.”

Professor Ming is correct. Down to Earth.org reports, “Every day in the US about 200,000 people become sick, 900 are hospitalized and 14 die (that’s more than 5,000 annually) due to food borne illnesses (and few if any are punished for these deaths). According to the Center for Disease Control, about one quarter of the American population suffers from food poisoning each year.”


New U.S. Laws for food safety cover all food except meat, poultry and some egg products and there are other exceptions too.

If you believe China is not doing anything about food safety, think again. I Googled total arrests in China over food safety and the result was more than 1.5 million hits.  The first one mentioned 191 officials (in 2010 — meaning government employees) that were punished for failing to do their duty in food safety,” and some were sent to prison.

The second hit mentioned 774 (in 2007) arrested in China over food safety.

In addition, Sustainable Business Forum.com says, “Unlike the U.S., China arrests Food Safety Violators.”

Helena Bottemiller of Food Safety News.com recently reported, “Current statutes (in the U.S.) do not provide sufficient criminal sanctions for those who knowingly violate our food safety laws,” said Leahy, who has become an outspoken advocate of food safety reform. “Knowingly distributing adulterated food is merely a misdemeanor right now, and the Sentencing Commission has found that it generally does not result in jail time.”

In conclusion, if you are in the food industry in China and want to take short cuts regarding food safety to boost profits while possibly killing people along the way, the U.S. is a safer place to commit murder. In China, you might go to jail or even be executed.

What does that say about America?

Return to or start with Punishing Food Fraud in China – 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. 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.

2 Comments | America, business, capitalism, China, Chinese food, crime, economy, environment, food, government, health care, legal system, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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