It’s all About Iron

September 16, 2010

Take a look at China Page.com and see the photos of modern cities in China. Since 1980, China has rebuilt most of its established cities and added hundreds more. 

In 2004, the BBC News said, “The biggest mass migration in the history of the world is under way in China, and it is creating what some are calling the second industrial revolution.… A massive building boom umparallelled anywhere is taking place ­– last year, half the concrete used in construction around the world was poured into China’s cities.”

Concrete isn’t the only product China needs.  Iron and steel are also needed.

China is buying iron ore from around the world. In 2009, India exported 106 million tons. A July 2010 Reuters piece says, “Chinese steel producers are increasingly turning to Australia’s magnetite iron ore sector, pouring in funds to explore and develop mines once considered uneconomic…”

In 2006, China was the number one producer with 820 million metric tons of iron ore and still imported 52% from other countries like Australia (470 metric tons), India (150) and Brazil (250).  Source: Wikipedia

See Holding a Vital Key to Humanity’s Future

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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. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Homeless

September 16, 2010

The East Asia Forum (EAF) reported September 1, 2010, on the impact of the global financial crises on China’s migrant workers.

It turns out that the impact wasn’t as significant as first thought in 2009 as most laid-off workers went home to the rural, collective village farms.

Two years after the world economy collapsed, the EAF was surprised to discover that migrants who stayed in the cities suffered very little.

Instead, workers who stayed in the cities continued to work while about 15 million migrants, about 10% of the workforce, went back to the farm, where they had already worked on average 52% of the year helping grow the food China eats.

The EAF suggested that small landholders, since most Chinese in rural China cannot own or sell the land they farm, should be allowed to sell their land and that China should move toward a universal welfare system.

Huh?

In America, which has a universal welfare system, when a worker loses his or her job, he or she collects unemployment benefits until those benefits run out. The next choice is to become a homeless beggar.

A report on PBS says that since 2007 there has been a 12% increase in homelessness and that about 2.3 to 3.5 million people in the U.S. experience homelessness.

The suggestion from the EAF that China must allow rural peasants to sell the land they farm is wrong.

As long as those farms exist, few people have to go homeless in China. Being a poor peasant farmer may not offer many choices in life, but it has to be better than sleeping in an alley in Shanghai and going hungry.

It was difficult to discover how many homeless people there are in China.  It appears that most who are homeless lost their homes through floods, earthquakes and other acts of nature and live in tent cities while the government has new homes built.

See China’s Stick People

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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. 

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1 Comment | America, American culture, capitalism, China, Chinese Culture, Communism, cultural differences, family values | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Chery

September 15, 2010

After you saw the title, I’ll bet you were thinking of something else. Sorry to disappoint you.

Chery Automotive in China builds and develops electric cars.  Chery is working in a joint venture with BenQ, a company in Taiwan, to develop lithium-ion battery technology

Auto Blog Green says Chery’s line of EVs are not strong sellers, yet Chery continues to build and develop electric vehicles anyway. 

Do they know something we don’t? 

After all, China’s central government could announce that all gas and diesel powered cars must be replaced with electric.

Critics in the West would complain but the air in China would be cleaner, which should make environmentalist’s happy.

Chery industries appears to be taking quality and safety seriously too.

Chery’s collision and safety laboratory has been identified as Asia’s largest and can fulfill collision tests at different angles while testing airbag and restraint systems. Source: Chery International

How are the Chinese at building cars?

Sho Minekawa, president of joint venture Guangzhou Honda Automobile Co., says that in-house quality tests show that the China-made Accord is actually superior to the one made in the U.S. Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

Look out, Detroit. The Chinese are coming.

See China’s Future Lock on your Next Auto Repair

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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 this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Poverty and China’s Peasant farmers – Part 3/3

September 12, 2010

In rural China, the peasants do not earn much money.  They live in what the West calls poverty, but they have a home and a roof over their heads.  They are not homeless and seldom are hungry as the poor in India, which is touted as the largest democracy on the earth.

The peasant farmers in China grow most of the food they eat and sell what they do not need as the Amish do today in America and as 90% of Americans did before the Industrial Revolution.

If Chinese peasants, go to school, eat a nutritious diet and have access to basic medical care as China’s central government has promised, health will improve and life spans may surpass urban China where the air pollution is bad.

China is extending the electric grid and improving public transportation so rural China will have access to the same luxuries that urban people have. Before 1980, rural Chinese lived as most Americans did before the Industrial Revolution.

For thousands of years, the backbone of China has always been the peasant farmers and their collective lifestyle. What will happen to China if they all join the consumer oriented middle class?

Rural America must have been a collective culture before the Industrial Revolution. Consumerism and credit cards changed most Americans, except the Amish, into an individualistic culture where “I” is more important than “We”. 

The Amish are still a collective culture with free will to leave and become a modern American consumer. Why don’t they?

See Climbing the Dragon’s Back

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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 this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Global Blood Suckers

September 8, 2010

It looks like Goldman Sachs & Co is under attack from the two most powerful countries on the earth.

Recently, the SEC in the United States penalized the Wall Street firm $550 million to settle civil fraud charges.

Meanwhile, in China, a book called the Goldman Sachs Conspiracy has been published and is selling well.

“The nearly 300-page, highly dramatized account covers much of the same ground as a widely cited piece by Matt Taibbi last year in the Rolling Stone magazine that portrayed the Wall Street institution as a ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.’ ” Source: The Huffington Post

The Young Turks reported that Golden Sachs conspired with John Paulson, who made $3.7 billion dollars in profits when the global economy collapsed and bought into Bank of America with some of that money becoming the bank’s fourth largest investor.

According to the Young Turks, Goldman Sachs set up clients, who lost billions while Sachs made billions from the clients’ losses. 

The Young Turks read one email from a Goldman Sachs’s employee, who calls himself the Fabulous Fab. “The whole building is about to collapse anytime now. Only potential survivor, the Fabulous Fab, standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without understanding all the implications of those monstrosities.”

The Young Turks say that there will be more court cases to follow the SEC case. Maybe China will also take a few Sachs employees to court using some of Sun Tzu’s strategies and put that well-known death penalty to use.

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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. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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