A mutual preference for baby boys

August 22, 2011

Imagine what it would be like to live in the United States if the population was China’s 1,339,724,852, which is 4.3 times the population of the US.

According to the US Bureau of Transit Statistics, there were 255,917,664 vehicles registered for use on the highways in the
US in 2008.

Multiply that number by 4.3 and we might have more than 1 billion vehicles on US roads today if our population matched China’s.

What would your commute to work look like if you lived in a city such as Los Angeles, New York or Chicago, but there were four times as many vehicles on the roads?

At this point, as a reader, you may be wondering what the significance of this post’s title is, which was influenced from an article, Americans Like Baby Boys Best, written by Stephanie Pappas for “Live Science”.

Pappas wrote, “If they (US families) were only allowed to have one child, more Americans would prefer it be a boy rather than a girl, a new survey finds.”

For China, providing enough food has always been a challenge since China’s arable land covers about 15% of total land area, but China’s 300 million farmers today rank first in worldwide farm output. Source: Agriculture in China (Wikipedia).

America, on the other hand, is blessed with farmland covering about 41% of total land area. Source: USDA

Between 108 BC and 1911 AD, there were no fewer than 1,828 major famines in China. In fact, four of those famines happened between 1810 and 1849 killing about 45 million. Source: List of famines (Wikipedia)

Then between 1959 to 1961, during The Great Chinese Famine (according to Chinese government statistics) about 15 million died while unofficial estimates of scholars puts the toll between 20 to 43 million that may have starved to death.

However, the United States has never suffered a famine. If people in the US go hungry, it is not because there isn’t enough food. It is because those people live in poverty and do not have enough money to buy food.

When Americans criticize China’s one-child policy, remember, China has survived about 1,800 major famines in the last 2,000 years and five of those famines killed 88 million.

However, the US and China do seem to have one thing in common. Most Chinese also prefer baby boys to girls. Have you ever watched a child starve?

To discover more facts about China’s one-child policy, visit One Child, The One-Child Tragedy, Exemptions in China’s ‘one-child policy’, Reversing China’s “one-child” Policy, and Avoiding 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.

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, China, Chinese food, Chinese history, cultural differences, environment, family values, food, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Waking the Unconscious Demon Within

August 21, 2011

Recently, I wrote a post about Mao and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), and provided “overwhelming” evidence that Mao may have suffered from CPTSD. The reason I first thought of this is that I have lived with PTSD since I served in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine. I am no stranger to this malady, and I know I am capable of barbaric behavior under the right circumstances.

Now, more evidence suggests that this demon becomes more difficult to manage as we age.

PTSD Forum had a post about the Dragon Brain – The Dark Side of the Lizard Brain, which along with a study at Stanford forty years ago may offer more insight of how Mao, starting out as a young sensitive poet and activist for the poor, was responsible for decisions later in his life that led to the failed Great Leap Forward then The Cultural Revolution.

The PTSD Forum says, “The down side (of PTSD) is a tendency to be more critical … to sense a threat where none may exist, or to sense a bigger threat than actually appears.”

Anxiety Insights.info says,” Post-traumatic stress, a condition that can cause patients to feel physical pain on remembering a traumatic event, is known to have a number of effects on the mind and body.”

In addition, PTSD may get worse as we grow older. In a comment on Veterans Benefits Network, Patrick428 says, “As we grow older there is a tendency to have less control of our frustrations and we anger more easily… This is why I say PTSD is much more problematic at an older age than was at a younger age.”

I suspect there may be a link between PTSD and a piece that I read in the July/August 2011 Stanford magazine — Six Days on the Dark Side -The Menace Within.

Forty years ago professor Phil Zimbardo (retired 2007) of Stanford’s psychology department conducted an experiment that was meant to run for twelve days but was stopped after six.  What the Stanford Prison Experiment (PSE) revealed was that ordinary college students were capable of doing terrible things under the right/wrong circumstances (like what happened at Abu Ghraib where Iraqi prisoners were abused and tortured by U.S. troops).

In fact, in the last decade, after the revelations of abuses committed by U.S. military and intelligence personal at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the SPE provided lessons in how good people placed in adverse conditions can act barbarically.

After Mao’s death and during Deng Xiaoping’s Beijing Spring, it was the collective consensus in China that Mao liberated China and was a good ruler 70% of the time. It may be difficult for many in the West to accept that Mao liberated most of the people of China from a worse life, but he did.

Now we may look back in hindsight and see that Mao was a product of his environment. He was not only the leader of the  People’s Republic of China, but he was also making decisions (mostly during the last decade of his life) influenced not only by CPTSD but also what SPE revealed about how good people placed in adverse conditions can act barbarically.

That does not make him a monster. It makes him the victim of an environment he had little control over at a young age, and if you want to discover what that environment was, I suggest reading Mao and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the links provided that reveals some of his life.

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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.

1 Comment | China, Chinese history, Chinese men, Communism, disabilities, history, military | 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 2/2

August 17, 2011

Since The Opium War by Julia Lovell will not be released until September 2011, I do not know if Ms. Lovell will provide a balance in what she writes.

However, we could find citizens of any country willing “for a fee of course” to sell out their government and people. Why should some Chinese be any different, or are the Chinese judged by a different standard?

It will be interesting if Lovell mentions the Taiping Rebellion, which was one of the bloodiest civil wars in history between the Manchu dominated Qing Dynasty and millions of Christian, Han Chinese rebels led by Hong Xiuquan.

The Taipings had three goals: defeat and replace the Manchu rulers of China, rid China of Opium, and spread Christianity.

It is estimated that The Taiping Rebellion (1845 – 1864) saw about 20 million Chinese killed and the Taipings were not the only Chinese rebelling against the Manchu rulers of China.

For an example of some people willing to do anything “for a fee of course”, a United Nations publication of 1998, “Economic and Social Consequences of Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking,” says,”With estimates of $100 billion to $110 billion for heroin, $110 billion to $130 billion for cocaine, $75 billion for cannabis and $60 billion for synthetic drugs, the probable global figure for the total illicit drug industry would be approximately $360 billion. Given the conservative bias in some of the estimates for individual substances, a turnover of around $400 billion per annum is considered realistic.” Source: World Statistics Updated in Real Time

In addition, in the American media, we often hear of the Mexican and Columbian Drug Cartels but seldom do we hear that if it were not for Americans doing the same thing that some Chinese did during the Opium Wars, it would be difficult and/or impossible to sell illegal drugs to Americans.

In the US, distribution and the sale of drugs are mostly conducted by extremely violent, nationally affiliated American street gangs.

Justice.gov says, “Street gangs, outlaw motorcycle gangs, and prison gangs are the primary distributors of illegal drugs on the streets of the United States. Gangs also smuggle drugs into the United States and produce and transport drugs within the country.

“There are at least 21,500 gangs and more than 731,000 active gang members in the United States. Gangs conduct criminal activity in all 50 states and U.S. territories.”

Just because some Chinese cooperated and worked with the British, French and Americans (among other countries) that were selling illegal drugs to the Chinese people during the Opium Wars, that doesn’t mean that all Chinese were guilty. I hope Ms. Lovell makes that clear.

Return to or start with Spinning a Web – 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.

15 Comments | America, China, Chinese history, crime, history, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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