Even though he’s been dead since 1976 and his politics were swept away decades ago as if they were dust to be replaced with a Chinese socialist form of capitalism, there must be a reason for the Western media keeping Mao Zedong alive.
In fact, The Economist is doing its share to keep this ghost in the mind of a Western audience.
The answer might be to feed another kind of monster. The Economist for May 28 published Boundlessly loyal to the great monster to feed the Sinophobia mob’s fears of China and probably to boost sales.
To achieve this, The Economist left out a few facts and threw truth into the flaming maw of a Western fire-breathing dragon.
The only thing worth repeating was a quote from Mao Yushi (no relation to the Mao that died in 1976). Mao Yushi says it is time to end the “idolization” and “superstition” surrounding Mao Zedong and assess him as an ordinary man.
Although this may be a good suggestion, it will not be that easy to make happen. Too many people in China think of Mao as the George Washington of China and the man that liberated China from feudal landlords and the brutal upper class supported Nationalist dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek.
In fact, most of Mao’s mistakes were made during the last decade of his 83 years during the Cultural Revolution, where he flipped society upside down by putting adolescents and those that were mostly illiterate and living in severe poverty in charge of the country while demoting the educated and middle class to the lowest socio-economic status level after stripping their wealth and privileges away.
Many of the people that Mao liberated from feudalism also know that Mao had a softer heart and was a different person long before he ruled China. Discover Mao Zedong, the poet
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.
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.
I feel compelled to write about a one-star review that appeared recently of Tom Carter’s China: Portrait of a People.
In fact, as I write this post, Carter’s book has had 100 reviews. Eighty-eight earned five stars and eleven four-star reviews. There is only one one-star review.
My wife is Chinese and was born in Shanghai (discover the modern city) during Mao’s Great Leap Forward then was sent to a labor camp as a teen during The Cultural Revolution. When she first saw the photos in Tom Carter’s book, she said he is the first and only photojournalist to capture the heart and soul of China.
What she was talking about was the rural Chinese who have always been the invisible heart and soul of China. If it weren’t for those same rural Chinese, Mao and the Communist Party would have never won China’s Civil War.
Lin says, “Ignorance of all American who think that these photos show the reality China, you don’t know the truth. Tom Carter pictures can only show that poor farmers and rural areas. He ignoring the majority of China’s middle class and developed districts in urban life intentionally. We have a modern apartment and a beautiful new car and stylish clothes. Why Tom Carter just want to show the barefeet farmers and the minorities? His pictures make you believe we Chinese all are swarthy skin and the tooth is not good and make our homes in the mountains area. China’s economy has grown rapidly. The United States owes a debt to total billions of dollars to China. China will soon become a superpower in the world! Han people will lead Asia and then the world. So, do not believe that this book is shows the real China! Tom Carter in a planned way only want to show you the poor! I upload his video got from the Youku website so yourself can see his photos is not the good. Do not by this book I suggest!”
Lin claims that the majority of Chinese belong to the emerging middle class. Lin is wrong. China has a few decades to go until more than a billion people join the modern middle class lifestyle.
Even China’s leaders have admitted that China is not as developed as America or Europe and that China will never rival American super power status. The best China may attain is a regional military super power and a global economic super power.
It is a fact that China is modernizing at a pace never before seen in history and more than three hundred million Chinese now live in urban cities similar to Shanghai and Beijing and belongs to China’s middle class. However, that leaves about 1.2 billion people that have not yet joined that middle class and 800 million of those people still live as Carter shows us in his photos.
If China accomplishes its goal to modernize most of China and lift the majority of Chinese into the middle class, the world that Tom Carter captured with his photos will vanish. Our only reminder of that China will be his book.
What Lin’s one-star review really reveals is a shame among some Chinese that should not exist. China should be proud of its rural peasants because they have always been the backbone of China and those people deserve their moment in the sun or between the covers of China: Portrait of a People
When I visit China, I want to escape America for a few weeks but realize that I cannot escape the Golden Arches of McDonalds, or Starbucks, Pizza Hut and KFC, which is the worst thing China could adopt from America. In addition, China has also inherited the obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer that come with this fast food, middle class, and motorcar culture invented in the West.
Some of America’s history captured in photos and song.
In addition, I’ve complained that China has no artist comparable to America’s Charles Russell or Bev Doolittle — great artists that captured the heart and soul of the America that existed before Europe and the industrial revolution arrived to fill the air with poison.
However, Tom Carter’s photos capture some of that world in China that will soon be lost. After China has paved over its past, without Tom Carter’s photos we would never know what that world was like.
Therefore, I ask the Xuemin Lins of China, “What is it you have against Tom Carter capturing what is fast disappearing as China becomes another middle class, smog choked clone of Los Angeles, London, Paris and New York?”
I prefer the China where people are practicing Tai Chi in the early morning fog.
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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.
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.
It wasn’t that long ago (May 17) that I wrote about a Chicken Little-Henny Penny predicting a real estate bubble bursting in China and wrecking its economy as it did in the US in 2008.
Then a friend recently sent me another link to another “sky is falling” piece. This time, the “want-to-happen” bad news came from Jeff Cox, a staff writer for CNBC.
Cox wrote, “China’s economy is showing real signs of weakening, particularly in real estate, and even could tip into a recession, hedge fund manager Jim Chanos told CNBC.”
I’m surprised that Cox looked under a Hedge Fund rock to find a quote predicting a bad economic future for China.
Basically, Hedge Fund managers do two things: they use small amounts of money, or leverage, to promise large amounts of stocks or commodities. Secondly, they all say they will deliver this stock or commodity at a particular point in time. In that sense, hedge fund managers are trying to time the market, which some would say is very difficult if not impossible to do unless they manage to manipulate the market in some way or have a crystal ball.
Using other sources, we discover a few facts that tell us Cox should have left that quote under the Hedge Fund rock where he found it and called someone else.
Discover how many Chinese buy real estate.
First on May 5, Jason Simpkins writing for Seeking
Alpha says, “Yes there are probably pockets of bubbles in China and in the real estate market, but against that backdrop you have 500 million people expected to move into Chinese cities by 2020. That means the number of people expected to move into cities is almost double the population of the United States,” said Money Morning Chief Investment Strategest Keith Fitz-Gerald. “So in the context of China’s explosive growth, what we’re looking at are some moderate setbacks over an extended period of high growth.”
Third, China’s real estate investment accounts for roughly 11% of its GDP, and from Chris Oliver writing for Marketwatchon May 18, we discovered that “New home prices rose across leading Chinese cities in April, even as many key cities saw the pace of appreciation and sales volume cool, according to official data Wednesday.…Of 70 cities tracked in the survey, 56 reported gains in new home prices.”
“So, I think that it should be clear by now, that there is no generalized price or quantity bubble in the Chinese residential real estate market,” Kostohryz wrote, “Home prices have actually been getting substantially more affordable in China in the past decade relative to income levels.”
To learn more, I recommend reading what Simpkins, Kostohyrz and Oliver wrote on this topic. The links have been provided.
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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.
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.
There are sound economic reasons why jobs are vanishing in the US.
Economically speaking, to remain competitive, manufacturing companies must reduce their overhead, and lower product cost to the consumer.
The problem with lost jobs in the US is the politics, which stirs up a storm of ignorance when the blame is put in the wrong place. Due to politics, when jobs in the US are farmed out to foreign workers, American workers scream bloody murder and blame China, India or Japan.
Then recently, I read a piece from the Daily Ticker “Made in America”: The Comeback that revealed (without meaning to) the real reason so many jobs have been lost and may never come back even if China, India and Japan vanished tomorrow.
The Daily Ticker said, “Since 1972, U.S. manufacturing output has risen nearly 2.5 times, according to Boston Consulting Group (BCG)…. However, U.S. manufacturing employment has fallen nearly 25% in the same period.”
If American manufacturing output has risen nearly 250% since the 1970s, and the population only increased by 50%, why has manufacturing employment fallen nearly 25%?
The answer is “automation”. If you want to learn more, watch the two embedded videos.
In addition, today 80% of the work force in the U.S. is employed in the service sector. This sector, like manufacturing, is threatened by not only cheap labor overseas but automation technology as well.
Even if the manufacturing sector were to increase in the United States, human labor would still be replaced by automation technology.
Soon, there will be only the wealthy and the machines that serve and pamper them. The rest of of us will be obsolete. What do you think will happen to the unemployed then?
Instead of getting angry at workers in other countries, shoot a machine. Then after cooling down, discover the reasons low and/or unskilled labor jobs have gone overseas or have been automated.
One of those reasons is the three kinds of illiteracy.
Low and/or unskilled jobs that do not require literacy are easy to move overseas where there are hundreds of millions living in severe poverty willing to work for much less than most workers in the US.
“The United States Department of Education estimates that functional illiteracy, incompetence in such basic functions as reading, writing, and mathematics, plagues 24 million Americans. Thirteen percent of American seventeen-year-olds are illiterate, according to a recent issue of Time; the estimate for minority youth is an astonishing forty percent.
Then there is cultural illiteracy — “To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world.”
The third is moral illiteracy. “In generations past, parents were more diligent in passing on their principles and values to their children and were assisted by churches and schools which emphasized religious and moral education. In recent years, in contrast, our society has become increasingly secular and the curriculum of the public schools has been denuded of almost all ethical content.” Source: Reformed.org
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.
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.
It looks as ifChina’s space program will fuel humanity’s next trip to the moon and beyond. The Middle Kingdom has everything needed to succeed. Why is this?
China is turning out more engineers from its universities than the United States is, and China has the technology and industry to support an active, growing space program.
China isn’t crippled by the deficit (debt) the US has.
China’s nine-man Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s top ruling body, are engineers instead of lawyers or businessmen like in America.
In the last few years, China has sent men into space and conducted space walks. There is a strong chance that in a few more years, there will be Chinese space stations orbiting the earth with footprints on the moon that were not made by Americans.
In fact, China plans to send a lunar probe with a rover to the moon in 2013. Source: The Next Big Future
My wife and I were in China in 2008 when one of the space walks took place, and it was big news filling TV screens and splashing headlines across newspapers. It was easy to sense the pride.
The excitement was equal to the time Americans walked on the moon decades ago. Now, America’s space program is limping along—almost a cripple.
To send supplies to the international space station, the world (except China) depends on Russia.
Thehonor China lost during the 19th and early 20th centuries to the bully tactics of aggressive Western powers and Japan during World War II is being reclaimed.
For more than two thousand years, China was a regional super power. They have achieved that status again.
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.
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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