China and South Korea Discovers the Power of the Talmud

May 5, 2011


According to Jewish tradition, the Torah was revealed to Moses more than thirty-three hundred years ago during the time of China’s Shang Dynasty (1766 – 1122 B.C.).

In fact, the Talmud is an organic interpretation through discussion and debate of what the Torah means and teaches.

In most of Asia, the perception of Jews as expert moneymakers does not have the religion-based antagonism that often accompanies the same stereotype elsewhere in the world. While both Christians and Muslims have persecuted Jews for religious reasons, China has not done this.

Instead, South Korea and China respect what may be learned from the wisdom of Judaism.

The Muqata says, “Close to 50 million people live in South Korea, and everyone learns Gemara (Talmud) in school.’We tried to understand why the Jews are geniuses, and we came to the conclusion that it is because they study Talmud,’ said the Korean ambassador to Israel.”

“In my country we also focus on family values,” The South Korean Ambassador said. “The (Jewish) respect for adults, respect and appreciation for the elderly parallels the high esteem in my country for the elderly.”

Another significant issue is the respect for education. In the Jewish tradition, parents have a duty to teach their children and devote lots of attention to it.

For South Korean parents, their children’s education is also a top priority.

How valuable is education to Jewish tradition?

Torah.org says, “Maimonides (1135 – 1204 C.E.) in his great code of Jewish law has an entire section devoted to teaching, teachers, students and the concept of knowledge and education. The basic value is that teachers are to be respected and given honor.

“One should rise before one’s teacher, speak respectfully to one’s teacher, and treat one’s teacher with greater probity than even one’s parent. The Talmud teaches, “parents bring a child into this world but a teacher can bring a child into the World to Come” – into a world of spirit, creativity, ideas and self-worth and ultimate immortality.

In fact, “the Talmud itself attributes to God, so to speak, the attribute of being a teacher – “He Who teaches Torah to His people Israel.” Even mortal teachers are viewed in Judaism as being engaged in holy work.”

These ancient Jewish values have also found a home in China.

Newsweek reported, “The apparent affection for Jewishness has led to a surprising trend in publishing over the last few years: books purporting to reveal the business secrets of the Talmud that capitalize on the widespread impression among Chinese that attributes of Judaism lead to success in the financial arts.”

Newsweek says, “Titles such as Crack the Talmud: 101 Jewish Business Rules, The Illustrated Jewish Wisdom Book, and Know All of the Money-Making Stories of the Talmud share the shelves with stories of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.”

“The admiration for Judaism stems from a history that goes beyond business,” Newsweek continues. “About half of the dozen or so Westerners active in Mao Zedong’s China were Jewish, and that also led to increased interest in Jewish culture among Chinese intellectuals, says Xu Xin, professor of Jewish studies at Nanjing University.

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

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Founding of China’s Republic – a Movie Review

May 4, 2011

The Founding of a Republic was produced to coincide with the 60th anniversary (in 2009) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) winning the Civil War in October 1949. I first saw this movie March 2011.

The film has the largest number of Chinese movie stars in one movie. Many of the top stars were invited to star as leads, supporting characters, or to appear in cameos, such as internationally well known Jackie Chan and Jet Li, whom appear briefly in the film.

The film covers the period between 1946 and October 1949 — well before the infamous failed Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), which are the events most people in the West identify with Mao.

There is seldom any mention in the West of how Mao won the hearts and minds of the hundreds of millions of Chinese that supported the CCP, while distrusting and spurning the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). This film (regardless of any propaganda that may exist) provides a glimpse of how Mao accomplished this feat.

The mild dose of propaganda that does appear in the film is nothing compared to the propagandized, anti-bourgeois PRC movies of the early 1950s or 60s.

It was because of how Mao won the Civil War (1926 to 1949 with a pause during a portion of World War II) that despite the deep collective scars left by the catastrophes of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, that he retains a strong measure of popular affection in China to this day.

In fact, many born in China prior to the 1980s still consider Mao to be China’s George Washington.

Directors Huang Jianxin and Han Sanping provide glimpses into the key moments during the final stages of the Chinese Civil War and the film was not just glorified propaganda since the Communists are given only one third of the screen time.

More time was given to people like Zhang Lan and Li Jishen, and key members of the China Democratic League. Until I watched this film, I only knew of the KMT and the CCP. I didn’t know there were other Chinese political parties involved.

In addition, Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-Kuo, who later guided Taiwan’s government to become a multi-party democracy (the first direct presidential election was held in 1996 eight years after Ching-Kuo’s death), are not demonized but are played as characters trapped between their responsibilities towards their country and pleasing political factions in the KMT.

The film suggests that the KMT lost because of the political agendas of these factions within the KMT, and not because of the power of the Communists, which was unexpected in a pro-Communist film.

After all, in war there are few if any saints and politics are more complex than most people ever know.

I urge everyone interested in modern Chinese history to see this film especially students in Chinese history classes and/or those majoring in East Asian studies. People that cannot understand Mandarin will be pleased that the movie has English subtitles.

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

5 Comments | China, Chinese history, Communism, history, Taiwan | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Throw No Stones

May 3, 2011


More than two billion Christians believe Jesus Christ was the son of God and is God.

About 13 million Jews see Christ differently. Some Jewish scholars note that though Jesus may have used the phrase “my Father in Heaven” (cf. Lord’s Prayer), this common poetic Jewish expression may have been misinterpreted as literal.

In fact, Rabbi Jacob Emden considered Jesus a righteous man, who brought the light of faith and morality to the world, but not as a Messiah.

One and a half billion Muslims, on the other hand, see Jesus as a savior and a reformist. Mission Islam says, “Jesus is known to the Muslims as ‘Issa – this is the name for Jesus that we have been given in our scriptures.

“To Muslims, Jesus – or ‘Issa – is a savior, a reformist, the Messiah (the anointed one), the ‘Word of God’. He was elevated to heaven. He could cure the ill, raise the dead, fashion inanimate objects and blow life into them, all by the Will of God.

“We believe that the one who disbelieves in Jesus is not a Muslim, because the person who disbelieves in one of the prophets disbelieves in all of them. So Muslims believe in Jesus and in his message. His message was one with all the other messengers. In the Qur’an, it is said that God never sent a messenger to mankind except that he was sent with one warning: Worship Allah alone.”

There are even atheists that recognize Jesus Christ as an important historical person. In Atheists for Jesus, we learn that Ken Schei has a goal to rescue Jesus from the Religious Right then from the Bible.

Schei says, “I have come to have a great deal of respect for the teachings of Jesus. My respect for Jesus is not based on the Cross, but rather on the Mount—not on His death and supposed resurrection, but on His teachings as exemplified by the Sermon on the Mount.”

Now that I have established the wide variety of people and beliefs that recognize the importance of Jesus, John 8:7 in the New Testament says, “So when they continued asking him (Jesus), he lifted up himself, and said unto them, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’.”

With John 8:7 in mind, what are we to say of critics that continue to cast stones at Amy Chua, the Tiger Mother.

At Amazon.com, in some of the one-star reviews, critics often cast brutal stones heavy with opinions at Amy Chua accusing her of child abuse, being a narcissist, a psychopath, a liar and a backstabber all because Chua spent hours each week with her daughters setting high expectations and following through sometimes using insults and threats to achieve her parenting goals.

China is another example of critics casting stones, and the Western media often casts these stones at China without telling the whole story.

One example of a “stone thrower” is an anonymous Blogger that writes Understanding China, One Blog at a Time—An American in China. This Blogger mostly writes criticisms of China such as the most recent one, “Irrational Chinese and Crazy Nationalism”.

This anonymous Blogger often judges all of China based on his or her personal experiences while living and working there and this Blogger has attracted fans with similar opinions that enjoy criticizing China without much evidence and/or understanding of China, its people and its history to support those opinions.

Would Jesus Christ have approved of these individuals that so easily cast stones?  If He were here today, what would He say?

Discover In Defense of Tiger Mothers Everywhere

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

2 Comments | America, American culture, China, Christianity, cultural differences, family values, history, Islam, parenting, religion | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Recognizing Good Parenting — Part 8/8

May 2, 2011

Against all odds, since the 1960s, the average Asian-Americans parent (including Chinese-Americans) held on to traditional parenting methods more in line with the Old Testament and old-world values.

Why is this?

Nicholas D. Kristof, writing for the New York Times, says, “Perhaps as a legacy of Confucianism, its citizens have shown a passion for education and self-improvement — along with remarkable capacity for discipline and hard work, what the Chinese call “chi ku,” or “eating bitterness”.

In Time magazine, Amy Chua said, “‘I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too.’ The tiger-mother approach isn’t an ethnicity but a philosophy: expect the best from your children, and don’t settle for anything less.”

Where does all this lead?

Well, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Asian-American adults are much more likely to have bachelor’s degrees than whites or blacks.

In 2003, 49.8% of Asian-Americans over age 25 had bachelor’s degrees, compared to 27.6% of whites and 17.3% of blacks.

Also according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2008 Asian-Americans had per-capita incomes of $30,292, whites had per-capita incomes of $28,502, and blacks had per-capita incomes of $18,406.

For thousands of years starting well before the birth of Jesus Christ, old word values, as defined by the Old Testament, guided parents and there was a reason for that.

There’s an old saying that there is “nothing new under the sun”.

Some will argue that were no jet planes, cell phones, laptop computers, fax machines, and mp3 players during ancient times.

However, the saying that “nothing is new under the sun” refers to the intangibles of life as defined by human behavior, not specific inventions and gadgets. The reason why most parents around the globe (such as Amy Chua) still raises children using old-world values was that time proved those methods worked best while rejecting what didn’t work.

In the 1960s, when the “average” American parent rejected those old-world parenting values for the soft, self-esteem building approach to parenting, they turned their backs on what worked best for millennia.

Return to Recognizing Good Parenting – Part 7 or start with 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.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

This post first appeared on March 26, 2011, at Crazy Normal, a blog about education, parenting and coming of age.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Recognizing Good Parenting — Part 7/8

May 1, 2011

About a year ago, Business Insider.com published, “It’s Official, Asian-American Students Work Way Harder to Become More Educated Than Everyone Else” then went on to say Asian-American students take far more Advanced Placement (AP) classes during high school than most other Americans.

To verify this, I used the Academic Performance Index (API) in California to rank and compare four high schools.

Although Chinese are the largest Asian minority in the US, they are not listed separately but are included with other Asian-Americans, which are Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese and Koreans.

Today there are about 14 million Asians in the US. As a group, Asian-Americans outperform all other racial groups academically.

At Rowland Unified School District’s Nogales High School, 76% of the student population is listed as Hispanic and 11% as Filipino. The Filipino/Asian students averaged 790 on the API while the Hispanic students averaged 627

At Oakland High School, three ethnic groups were listed. African Americans make up 26% of the student population with an API average of 517; Asians are 53% of students with an API of 667 and Hispanics are 16% of the student population with an API of 519.

At Los Lomas High School, 74% of the student population is white with an API average of 851 while the 11% Asian population averages 861.

At Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, 53% of the students are white with an API average of 895. Asians make up 32% of students and average 921 on the API.

Education.com says that Asian-American students generally fare better than other racial minority groups in respect to grade point averages, standardized test scores, or even numbers of high school, bachelor, and advanced degrees obtained compared to other racial minorities (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003; U.S. Census Bureau, 2003).

Continued on May 2, 2011 in Recognizing Good Parenting – Part 8 or return to Part 6

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

This post first appeared on March 25, 2011, at Crazy Normal, a blog about education, parenting and coming of age.

Leave a Comment » | America, China, cultural differences, family values, parenting | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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