I was aware that China was planting trees but I had no idea how many until I read The Great Tree Survey in the May 2011 National Geographic Magazine, which said, “Huge tree-planting programs, especially in China, reduced the net loss of (global) forest even further.”
This triggered my curiosity so I did some “digging” [pun intended].
I already knew from posts I’ve written comparing China to India, China had reduced poverty more than any county on earth while poverty is increasing in countries such as the US and not changing much in India.
The Guardian in the UK reported, “China’s Great Green Wall was launched in 1978… The (Chinese) government has tightened logging restrictions and increased reforestation efforts, including aerial seeding of remote areas.
China planted about 60 billion trees in the last three decades.
“If the plan is completed as scheduled in 2050, trees will cover over 400 million hectares (about one billion acres) or 42% of China’s landmass…”
By comparison, US forests cover about one-third of the nation, which is currently about 747 million acres down by 300 million acres since the mid-1600s. Source: National Atlas.gov
In 2009, Xinhua News Agencyreported, “China would spend 60 billion yuan (8.77 billion US dollars) annually on its greening or tree planting campaigns….”
According to Worldwatch.org, “Nourishing China’s Forests is creating millions of Green jobs.”
New research from the Worldwatch Institute shows that over the next 10 years…planting forests (in China) where there were none could lead to the creation of more than 1 million “green jobs” in 2020 alone. If indirect employment opportunities in related sectors are also included, China’s investment in its forestry sector could generate as many as 2.5 million green jobs in 2020.
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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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Is China shifting gears to avoid the Japanese Syndrome, which is what happened to Japan in the 1990s and was known as the Lost Decade? American economist Paul Krugmanhas described Japan’s Lost Decade as a liquidity trap, in which consumers and firms saved too much overall, causing the economy to slow too much.
In addition, on November 13, 2009, The Economist said, in The Dragon still roars, “Some analysts claim that China today looks ominously like Japan in the late 1980s… Banks’ non-performing loans will surely rise in 2010, and unless the government tightens monetary policy it will store up future problems which could harm economic growth.”
However, on April 10, 2011, Lianting Tu reported for CNBCthat China is “Taking a cue from the larger economy, which is looking to make the transition from quantity to quality, China’s four biggest banks have decided to slow down growth and focus instead on better profit margins.”
What Lianting means is China’s banks are not loaning as much money, are making better loans and charging higher interest rates, which boosts profits.
She also writes, “Non-Performing Loans are a Non-Issue” in China. She says, “For the four major Chinese banks, the average non-performing loan, or NPL, ratio dropped to around 1.1 percent in 2010 from 2 percent in 2009 and is expected to decline further this year, compared with 20 percent in 1990 and around 5 percent only 3 years ago.”
Compared to the United States, China is in good shape. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, total non-performing loans in the US flew from less than 2% in 2007 to almost 6% in 2010—the opposite of China, which has been reducing non-performing loans.
A Chinese friend said most loans get paid off because in China when a loan is made, entire working families cosign, which may be another benefit of a collective culture instead of one based on individualism. In China, mostly everyone in an extended family has to lose jobs and income to default on a loan.
In fact, in the US, bankruptcy cases filed in federal court for the 12-month period ending September 30, 2010 totaled 1,596,355, up 13.9 percent over the same period in 2009. In 2007, before the 64 trillion dollar global financial crises caused by greed from Goldman Sachs, Wall Street and much of the US banking system, the bankruptcies were about 50% less. Source: Bankruptcy Action.com
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.
No, this is not about looks or Botox or face-lifting creams or hairstyles, or tanning salons, or the desire to have a rounder, paler moon face—the standard of beauty to most Chinese.
What I am writing about is the meaning of “face” to the Chinese
Dr. Martha Lee wrote, “Nobody ever said what you do with those who have ‘disgraced’ the family name by getting divorced.” Dr. Lee was writing of the ‘hongbao’ dilemma.
In China, if you do something that is considered a disgrace, like getting divorced, that may be considered a “loss of face” for everyone in the family.
“The ‘face’ is psychological and not physiological. Interesting as the Chinese physiological face is, the psychological ‘face’ makes a still more fascinating study. It is not a face that can be washed or shaved, but a ‘face’ that can be ‘granted’ and ‘lost’ and ‘fought for’ and ‘presented as a gift’.”
When our daughter was a pre-teen, we went on weekend hikes in the hills behind our home. The end of the hike was a large park across the street from the La Puente Mall. On one fateful day, when she was nine or ten, she was the first to discover a dead man. She came running back with a shocked look.
It turned out the dead man was an architect from Taiwan and his company had gone broke. His “loss of face” for failing had driven him to take an extension cord from his mother’s house, find a suitable tree in an isolated portion of that park, and hang himself.
He was dead when we reached him.
Do not stereotype. The meaning of “face” may vary between Chinese. It depends on the balance between Confucianism and Daoism along with factors like Buddhism or belief in the Christian, Islamic or Jewish God.
“Face” is why most Chinese mothers ride their children hard to do well in school while telling everyone they know that their kid is stupid and/or lazy and has no chance to succeed.
Chinese mothers may often tell their children the same thing. However, if the child is accepted to a prestigious university, that Chinese mother has now earned bragging rights and “gained much face” for the job she did as a mother
To get a better idea, I recommend reading Amy Tan‘s “The Joy Luck Club” or watching the movie.
We had a house full of my wife’s Chinese friends over for dinner. After eating, the children gathered in our downstairs TV room to watch a movie. They picked “The Joy Luck Club“, and during one scene, when the Chinese mother was acting very Chinese, all the children looked at each other, nodded ‘yes’ and laughed ironically. Since my wife is Chinese, I knew why they reacted that way. They all had Chinese mothers.
“Face” is why the Chinese businessman will take great risks or take only a few risks and if given a chance may steal another person blind—that is if they believe they can get away with it. If they are caught and it is against the law, that is a “loss of face”—one reason for suicide.
Most Chinese men will wait until they are successful before they let others know. If they fail, it’s possible no one will hear about it beyond the family unit.
“Face” is why Chinese men often work twelve to sixteen hour days, seven days a week earning small but saving large. The Chinese will do without luxuries and save to pay for their child’s university education. Chinese women will work just as hard.
Studies in today’s China show that the average family saves/spends a third of its income for a child’s education.
Regaining “face” may be one reason why Mao reoccupied Tibet for China in 1949. Look closely, and you may discover that even Taiwan claims Tibet for the same reason.
The other reason may have been tactical—to control the high ground as Israel controls the Golan Heights.
Having control over the Tibetan plateau was one of the tactical reasons Britain convinced the Dalai Lama to declare freedom from China in 1912.
“Face” may be why China’s leaders get so angry over Taiwan. As long as Taiwan is not ruled by the mainland, it may be seen as a “loss of face”.
It’s why the Chinese want to walk on the moon and reach the other planets before anyone else. In China, “face” is universal to most of the population and different for each person.
For the Chinese, taking risks is no stranger. It’s probably the reason the Chinese invented paper, the crossbow, the compass, the stirrup, developed a cure for scurvy, the printing press, gunpowder, and built multi-stage rockets centuries before anyone in the West did.
China’s list of revolutionary inventions is longer than this. Many of these inventions eventually appeared in the West where Westerners took credit for them.
Now you know the truth.
In “What the Chinese Want even More than Oil or Gold“, the focus was on Chinese gambling and about illegal lotteries going legal and national. Since I married into a Chinese family, I understand what the author of this piece was saying, but the topic is more complex than that.
To learn more, I suggest you read the Investoralist, “Where Curious Minds Meet”. The Investorilist piece says that gambling is China’s Achilles heel.
I disagree.
I believe it is risk taking that brought China to greatness in the past. It’s when most Chinese stopped taking risks that China lost its spot as a regional superpower. It’s all about ‘face’. Take a risk and win but make a mistake and get caught, you “lose face” and maybe your life too, which may explain many of the suicides in countries such as China, Japan and Korea.
This revised and edited post first appeared as a four-part series starting February 17, 2010 at Chinese “Face” – Part 1
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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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The Chicken Little-Henny Penny story is a fable about a chicken that believes the world is ending. The phrase “The sky is falling!” features prominently in the story and is now a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.
Chicken Little’s warnings or predictions of calamity, especially without justification, dates from 1895.
Because of this, the tale has become politicized and one example appeared on ZeroHedge.com when Tyler Durdensubmitted this post, “Chinese Real Estate Bubble Pops: Beijing Real Estate Prices Plunge 27% In One Month”.
Durden writes, “Prices of new homes in China’s capital plunged 26.7% month-on-month in March, the Beijing News reported Tuesday, citing data from the city’s Housing and Urban-Rural Development Commission.”
Durden says, “IF” the pummeling in the Beijing real estate market shifts to other cities not only is the Chinese tightening regime over, but the SHCOMP (?) in the next few weeks could get very interesting as people understand the world’s biggest marginal bubble has popped.”
“IF” I had a dollar for every time I’ve read a “Sky is Falling” prediction of China’s economy, I’d take my wife out to dinner, shopping at Nordstrom’s and a movie on the weekend.
China’s real estate market only represents about 15% of China’s GDP while in America, that number is more than 70% of GDP, which explains why America is in the cellar with its economy and China is still growing but just slower.
Meanwhile, Tory Capital.comreports “China’s First Quarter 2011 GDP Rises 9.7 Percent,” while Mostly Economics.com compares that to the US annual rate of 3.1%.
A better, possibly more informed comparison between China and America’s economies may be found at Heritage.org where Derek Scissors, Ph.D. writes, “Its (China) raw population means that the PRC will likely pass the U.S. at some point after a resumption of market reform.”
However, Scissors says for that to happen, “The 2012 Communist Party Congress (must) nullify actions by the 2002 Party Congress and restore Deng Xiaoping’s economic model—this would enable roughly two more decades of rapid growth, perhaps in the 7 percent to 8 percent range, then gently decreasing to the 5 percent to 6 percent range over time. China would then surpass the U.S.” as the world’s largest economy.
Back to Durden’s Chicken Little-Henny Penny statement. The drop in “new housing prices” in Beijing may be a response to complaints from the people that prices were out of reach of many. Instead of a bubble bursting, the Party may have let some air out so it would not explode as it did in the US in 2008.
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.
When foreign businesses such as Home Depot or Wal-Mart open for business in China, knowing the market and consumer is a good idea.
Most Chinese consumers have a different perspective than most Western shoppers when it comes to spending money. The average Chinese consumer born before 1980 prefers to pay cash and buy the best quality for the lowest price.
There’s also a difference in spending habits between younger Chinese born after 1980. Evidence suggests that younger Chinese have caught the credit card virus and are running up debt similar to the average American consumer.
Schmitz talks to Raymond Chou, the CEO of Home Depot operations in China. When asked about closing five stores, Chou indicated this is not a sign of failure and said, “(Home Depot) has closed stores to focus on China’s lesser-known cities where much of the country’s real estate development is booming.”
One criticism Schmitz writes of is the fact that many of Home Depot’s products are made in China and may be bought for less from Chinese merchants.
However, one Chinese contractor says he shops at Home Depot because “It’s easy to exchange and return goods… and (he) knows the materials (at Home Depot) are safe and not fake.”
If this scheme will succeed remains to be seen. Wal-Mart has faced slowing business in the United States, is struggling in Japan and failed in Germany and South Korea.
Wal-Mart’s biggest challenge is to overcome its habit of fighting unions and paying low wages, which forces many workers to rely on local welfare and public-health programs. This isn’t welcome in some markets and is the reason why Wal-Mart left Germany.
For the same reasons, Wal-Mart, which is allergic to unions and paying workers a living wage, is facing a Chinese government that is strengthening worker protections and rights to organize/join labor unions.
Last summer, Wal-Mart was forced to allow its Chinese workers to join a union for the first time.
To understand the Walton family, Bizmarts.com reported, “As Sam Walton explained in his 1992 autobiography, Made in America, he didn’t believe in giving ‘any undeserving stranger a free ride’. Nor did he believe in being generous with company profits.”
Forbes reported that the Walton family was worth about 90 billion dollars or 18 billion each.
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 it then follow directions.
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