According to the History of Feng Shui, also known as Kanyu, the practice of Feng Shui began in the Western Han dynasty around the third century BC.
Feng Shui is an ancient Chinese belief that the laws of astronomy and geography may be applied aesthetically to improve the positive energy (chi) that surrounds our daily lives.
Feng Shui is also big business today.
In Asia, Feng Shui consultants charge astronomical fees to corporations who retain them to advise on architectural design, building location, interior decorations and grand-opening dates.
No matter how small, no business or shop in Eastern Asia would dare debut without having first consulted extensively with a Feng Shui practitioner.
Even on Amazon, there are literally hundreds of books written by Feng Shui “experts” seeking to capitalize on the resurgence of middle-class trends co-opting Feng Shui.
Ironically, one of the major themes of Feng Shui is in removing clutter, yet the endless piles of Feng Shui books that keep appearing on the literary market seems only to contribute to the clutter.
Detractors, however, have branded Feng Shui everything from an “occult superstition” to “new-age psychobabble.”
After all (they say), how could something as banal as the position of your bed and the color of a candle have any relation to the safety and welfare of a human being?
During the Cultural Revolution, Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong took his revulsion of Feng Shui one-step further during the 1970s by having the teenage Red Guard persecute Chinese citizens who dared follow this “old, evil ideology”.
Regardless of your beliefs, the fact is that it cannot hurt – and might help – your daily happiness and comfort by following at least the most basic principles of Feng Shui at your home and office.
If, perchance, the southeast part of your house were truly the Wealth Sector, as Feng Shui suggests, then why would you not want to keep it spotless and free of clutter?
If jars of coins around the house really do symbolize abundance and can attract wealth, then how hard would it be to fill some up with your old pocket change?
I bought a pair of Ugg boots a few years back at Big 5 for less than $30 to keep my feet warm.
I didn’t consider where the boots were made, and I never intended wearing them to go shopping or outside. Since I work at home and save money by leaving the heat off on cold days, my feet get cold so it made sense to wear a pair.
Uggs don’t appear designed for outdoors, yet I see many young American women looking sharp shopping in Ugg boots. It seems to be a fad that isn’t going away, and I wanted to know where Ugg boots came from and what it cost to make a pair.
I discovered the previous video on YouTube of a factory in China where the material and labor come together to make Uggs. The conclusion of the description below the video says, “These boots are the most cheap and excellent quality boots in the world.”
TheNew York Times recently reported “The salaries of factory workers in China are still low compared to those in the United States and Europe: the hourly wage in southern China is only about $1.19 (15.2 RMB) per hour.” Chinese factory workers often work overtime as long as sixteen hours a day six days a week—and many Chinese are not complaining because they work long hours. Why? They want those extra hours to earn more.
For a comparison, the US federal minimum hourly wage is $7.25, which pays about $15,000 a year for a full time job not counting overtime or hidden benefits if there are any.
By the way, Numbeo.com reports that consumer prices in the United States are more than 46% higher than in China. In fact, restaurant prices in the US are more than 75% higher than in China.
In China, the Ugg factory workers in that video are probably earning less than $3,700 (US) annually and working twice the hours to keep those Ugg prices down so American women and men could buy a cheap pair to look stylish while shopping.
This is a video explaining how to detect fake Ugg boots
After I watched this video, I checked the Ugg boots I bought from Big 5, and discovered they were fake. Does that mean they weren’t made in China?
Who makes a profit from the real Ugg boots? Deckers Outdoor Corporation holds the Ugg trademark in more than 100 countries worldwide and reported sales of $689 million US dollars under the Ugg brand in 2008 and sales were up in 2009. Source: Source: Wiki.Ugg Boots
How many Americans would be willing to pay four or five times the price for a pair of Ugg boots so those low paying minimum wage jobs could come to the US?
Then, how many Americans are willing to work for the federal minimum wage without benefits? Not many since there are more than eleven million illegal aliens in the US working those jobs.
So, if you live in the US, next time you hear political ads or someone bashing China for stealing jobs from Americans, look in a mirror.
The Walking Company sent me an e-mail advertising “Zealand” slippers (another “Ugg” style product) on sale at 70% off. Instead of paying almost $65 a pair (not counting the sales tax), I paid less than $20, bought four pair and discovered when the shipment arrived that the “Zealand” product line was made in China instead of New Zealand. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone because even most Ugg shoes are produced in China.
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Lloyd Lofthouseis the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.
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Poverty causes people to take risks in an effort to improve the quality of life, and China still has millions of poor people, but not by U.S. standards where many who live in poverty often drive cars and have TVs but still don’t have enough to buy food or pay rent.
However, contrary to a belief caused by malicious rumors in the West, the Communist Party is not responsible for causing poverty in China and has been working hard since the early 1980s to end it.
The Guardian.co.uk says, “The report, by authors from the China Institute for Reform and Development and other think tanks, describes the nation’s (China) progress over the past 30 years of reform as a miracle in the history of poverty reduction.”
It wasn’t always this way. For instance, in 1949, most of the Chinese still lived in an environment similar to Europe’s middle ages, and even today, to escape poverty, some Chinese will immigrate illegally to the US, and the reason so many do this is because there is a myth in China that America and/or Canada are “Gold Mountain”.
There is also a documentary called Golden Ventureabout the US immigration crises, but “The first major waves of Chinese immigrants came to the U.S. after hearing of the “Golden Mountain” or “Gum Sana” during California’s Gold Rush in 1848.”
What these desperate Chinese didn’t know is that The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality in the United States reports: “The official poverty rate increased from 12.5 percent in 2007 to 15 percent in 2012 (more than 47 million total), and the child poverty rate increased from 18 percent in 2007 to 21.8 percent in 2012 (more than 16 million).”
What does the United Nations say of China? “Both national and international indicators show that China has already achieved the goal of halving the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015 set by the UN as one of eight Millennium Development Goals. Remaining poverty is however becoming increasingly difficult to address, as the rural poor are now concentrated in remote regions with difficult natural conditions.”
In addition, Global Issues says, “China also accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in poverty. Excluding China, (global) poverty fell only by around 10%” while poverty increased in the United States.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.
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China’s longest lasting dynasties survived due to one or more great emperors.
After China was unified by Qin Shi Huangdi (221 – 207 BC), there were only five dynasties that survived for long periods: the Han, Tang, Sung, Ming, and Qing Dynasties.
Although China’s civilization survived, the country’s history is rampant with rebellions, palace coups, corruption among palace officials, and insurrections. Between the five longest dynasties, the country usually fell apart into warring regions as it did after 1911.
The most successful emperors managed to stabilize the country while leading wisely as the Communist Party has done since 1976.
Emperor Han Wudi (ruled 141 – 87 B.C.) of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 219 A.D.) was fifteen when he first sat on the throne.
Wudi is considered one of the greatest emperors in China’s history. He expanded the borders, opened the early Silk Road, developed the economy, and established state monopolies on salt, liquor and rice.
After the Han Dynasty collapsed, China fell apart for almost 400 years before the Tang Dynasty was established (618 -906). The Tang Dynasty was blessed with several powerful emperors.
The first was Emperor Tang Taizong, who ruled from 627-649.
According to historical records, Wu Zetain (624 to 705 AD), China’s only woman emperor, also ruled wisely.
Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, Zetain’s grandson, ruled longer (712 – 756) than any Tang emperor (43 years) and the dynasty prospered during the first half of his reign but declined after the Anshi Rebellion (755 – 763).
After the Tang dynasty fell, there would be a short period of about 60 years before the Sung Dynasty reestablished order and unified the country again.
The second emperor of the Sung Dynasty, Sung Taizong (ruled 976 – 997) unified China after defeating the Northern Han Dynasty. The third emperor, Sung Zhenzong (ruled 997-1022) also deserves credit for maintaining stability.
The Sung Dynasty then declined until a revival by Sung Ningzong, who ruled from 1194 to 1224 AD. After he died, the dynasty limped along until Kublai Khan defeated the last emperor in 1279.
After conquering all of China, Kublai Khan founded the Mongol, Yuan Dynasty (1277-1367). Not long after Kublai died, his dynasty was swept away when in 1368, a peasant rebellion defeated the Yuan Dynasty and drove the Mongols out of China followed by the Ming Dynasty (1271 – 1368) that’s known for rebuilding, strengthening and extending the Great Wall among a list of other accomplishments.
Historical records show that under the third Ming Emperor, Ming Chengzu (ruled 1403 – 1424), China was prosperous.
After Chengzu, the dynasty would decline until 1567 when Emperor Ming Muzong reversed the decline.
His son, Emperor Ming Shenzong, also ruled wisely from 1573 to 1620.
After Shenzong’s death, the Ming Dynasty quickly declined and was replaced by the Qing Dynasty in 1644.
The Opium Wars started by England and France and the Taiping Rebellion led by a Christian convert in the 19th century would contribute to the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.
The Qing Dynasty was fortunate to have three powerful, consecutive emperors: Emperor Kangxi (1661 – 1722), Yongzhen (1722-1735) and Qianlong (1735-1796). Under these three leaders, for one-hundred-and-thirty-five years, China remained strong and prosperous.
After the corrupt Qing Dynasty was swept aside in 1911 by a rebellion led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, China fell apart and warlords fought to see who’d rule China.
When Sun Yat-sen died, the republic he was building in southern China fell apart when Chiang Kai-shek broke the coalition that Sun Yat-sen had formed between the Nationalist and Communist Parties. Mao’s famousLong March shows how the Communists survived.
Then Japan invaded, and China would be engulfed in war and rebellion until 1945 when World War II ended. After World War II, the rebellion between the Nationalist and Communists ended in a victory for the Communists in 1949.
This victory was made possible because the Communists were supported by China’s peasants that hated, despised and distrusted the Nationalist Party, which represented China’s ruling elite.
The Communists gained the support of the peasants by treating the peasants with respect and promising reforms that would end the suffering.
Then Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution contributed to more suffering.
However, since the early 1980s, the Communist Party has been working to fulfill the promises made during the revolution, and the lifestyles of China’s people has been steadily improving.
There are many impatient voices in the West and a few in China that are not happy with the speed of China’s reforms or how the Party has handled them.
However, China has modernized and improved lifestyles starting in the early 1980s at a pace that has never been seen before in recorded world history.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.
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Chris Devonshire-Ellis wrote a convincing piece at China Briefing back in October 2010 that India‘s economic growth would speed past China in the near future. It seems that many in the West are convinced that democracies are superior to countries ruled by authoritarian governments.
Chris said, “It (India’s) growth rate could overtake China’s by 2013… Some economists think India will grow faster than any other large country over the next 25 years.”
However, several years later, we discover that Chris was wrong. In February 2014, the BBC reported, “India’s economy growth slower than expected.” During the four years starting with 2010 through 2013, China’s GDP grew from $4.99 Trillion to $8.23 Trillion compared to India’s growth from $1.365 Trillion in 2010 to $1.8417 Trillion by the end of 2013.
The foundation of this prediction was based on India being a democracy “where entrepreneurs are all furiously doing their own thing” while China is a culture of secrecy and censorship. Chris mentions a few of China’s other flaws too, which China is working to overcome.
What Chris doesn’t mention is the fact that economic development in India follows socialist policies including state-ownership of many sectors—something China learned long ago doesn’t work, and then there’s the difference in poverty and illiteracy between India and China.
India and China both became independent about the same time—China in 1949 and India in 1947 and due to Chairman Mao’s policies, China suffered horribly from 1949 to 1976 and progress was slow. Than Mao died and China changed dramatically.
India, on the other hand, has had more than 60 years to solve its problems and hasn’t made much progress primarily because it is a democracy often mired in political partisanship and corruption. India is actually rated more corrupt than China but we don’t hear much about that.
Let’s see what each has accomplished in reducing illiteracy and poverty.
The World Bank says, “That China’s record of poverty reduction and growth is enviable. Between 1981 and 2004 the fraction of the population consuming less than a dollar-a-day fell from 65% to 10% and more than half a billion people were lifted out of poverty.”
For India, the World Bank reports: “poverty remains a major challenge. According to the revised official poverty line, 37.2% of the population (about 410 million people remains poor, making India home to one-third of the World’s poor people.” UNICEF shows the poverty in India to be 42%.
World Bank studies also established the direct and functional relationship between literacy and productivity on the one hand and literacy and the overall quality of human life on the other.
India’s literacy rate was about 12% when the British left in 1947. Today, literacy is 68%.
When Mao died in 1976 after a decade of suffering through twenty-seven years of mostly wrong-headed reforms ending with the Cultural Revolution, less than 20% of the people were literate, but today literacy is more than 93% with a goal to reach 99% soon.
As for India succeeding, MeriNews.com says, “At a time when we (India) are poised on the threshold of becoming a superpower, the rampant malnutrition and prevalence of anemic children and women to the extent of 48 per cent of the population is a definitive indicator that we have failed as a democracy in ensuring the fundamental requirements of our citizens.”
It appears that China—with censorship, secrecy and its one party government with a capitalist, market, consumer driven economy—has done a much better job of taking care of its people. India, on the other hand, has six national political parties and 54 political parties at the state level. Considering that America has two national political parties that can’t agree on much of anything, it’s a wonder that India gets anything accomplished.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.
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A guest post by Tom Carter
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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