China Reaching for Stealth and Aircraft Carriers

March 16, 2011

I read about China’s J-20 Stealth Fighter at the Huffington Post. Sinophobes seem to be all a Twitter saying, “The J-20 would pose the greatest immediate threat to Taiwan and undermine the Taiwan air force’s advantages.”

However, the US is currently the only country in the world with operational stealth fighters and bombers, and China is years away from deploying stealth aircraft.

As for China’s aircraft carrier, in April 2009 CCTV reported that China wanted an aircraft carrier and would eventually build their own.

China Business asks, “Will China’s future aircraft carriers be a threat to other nations?”

In fact, China’s first aircraft carrier is a very old, used Russian-made aircraft carrier and may be operational by 2012.

Wu Huayang, Deputy Political Commissar of the PLA Navy, says China has the economic and technological capacity to build its own aircraft carriers. Western military experts believe that China will eventually build five.

Liang Guanglie, China’s Defense Minister, says, “China will not be the only major country without an aircraft carrier to protect the country’s maritime security.”

Even Japan has an aircraft carrier, its first since World War 2.  It was launched in 2009.  In fact, Japan is planning to build six-light carriers. Sounds sinister to me. No wonder China wants stealth and aircraft carriers after what the Japanese did to China in World War 2.

An outdated list at Wiki shows that the US has 67 aircraft carriers with 11 in service and the United Kingdom has 40 with two in service.  India has two with one in service. Even Thailand has a light aircraft carrier.

For stealth, the US has the F-117 Nighthawk (about 64 were built), the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber (20 are active), the F-22 Raptor (168 built and 187 planned) and the R-35 Lightning II (13 test flight aircraft).

Discover When the Generals Laughed

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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.

1 Comment | America, China, military spending, politics, Taiwan | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Running With a tank full of Enthusiasm

March 15, 2011

In 2007, Al Jazeera reported about Jang Hway-min, an eight year old runner in China, who completed running 3,500 kilometers (almost 2,176 miles) in fifty-five days.

Jang Hway-min ran a distance each day equal to one-and-a-half marathons. Her diet was milk, honey and raw eggs (yuck!)

When Paul Allen, the reporter, interviewed her, she said, “I like running. Running makes me happy.”

Her father followed her on a motorized bicycle.

However, similar to the debate concerning Amy Chua’s extreme parenting methods in the United States, Chinese Blogs and editorials in the media criticized the father for child abuse.

Hmm, I wonder how the average soft American parent would react to learn that this happened in the land where “Tough Love” is considered the norm.

Jang Hway-min’s father said, “I am not worried about her health. She is always healthy and never says her legs hurt or that she is tired after running fifty kilometers (31 mile) a day.”

Then in December 2010, The China Post in Taipei, Taiwan reported on a six-year-old marathon runner, Wu Chun-hao, who completed a 42-kilometer marathon (26 miles).

The China Post said, “According to local media reports, the six siblings initially entered the race for fun; they soon grew bored at the constant running and in the final 10-km stretch, little Wu complained of aching knees and broke into tears, which were still running down his face when he crossed the finish line.

“When asked whether it was fun, Wu shook his head. However, asked if he would do it again, the boy bravely replied in the affirmative.

“Breaking records appear to run in the family. Last year’s youngest runner was Wu’s older brother Wu Cheng-en; his sisters, 8-year-old Wu Hui-hsin also became the event’s youngest female marathon runner Sunday.”

Where were the cries of child abuse this time?

Discover Ma Yan’s Story

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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.

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

Why Blaming China is Wrong

March 14, 2011

It wasn’t until I finished reading Jonathan Fahey’s piece for the Associated Press of a new drilling method opening vast oil fields in the US that I discovered more evidence of how wrong many Americans are of China.

North Americans that blame China for lost jobs react from “ignorance” and “anger” — not facts.

Most are incapable of understanding the complexity of America’s suffering economy and are unwilling to sacrifice so the US can compete globally in manufacturing.

Unable and/or unwilling to understand, these people need a scapegoat so politicians running for office give them one — China.

The clue came when Fahey wrote, “At today’s oil prices of roughly $90 per barrel, slashing imports that much would save the U.S. $175 billion a year. Last year, when oil averaged $78 per barrel, the U.S. sent $260 billion overseas for crude, accounting for nearly half the country’s $500 billion trade deficit.”

What happens in China is not the reason for lost US jobs.

In fact, most of what China earns in global trade from exports is spent in other nations such as Australia, Pakistan, Brazil, Myanmar and South Africa until Chinese exports and imports are about even.

That $260 billion the US spent for imported oil that added to the deficit revealed the truth. Many in the US are unwilling to sacrifice for the good of the country.

However, as the Amy Chua Tiger Mother debate reveals, the real culprit of the trade deficit in the US is illiteracy caused by the average parent focused on the child’s daily fun instead of his or her education and the work it takes to earn it.

Begin to Read.com says, “Many of the USA ills are directly related to illiteracy.” Then the site provides a few statistics to make its point.


“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury

  • Literacy is learned. Parents who cannot read or write pass along illiteracy. (Did you notice there was no mention of teachers getting the blame? As long as parents blame someone or something else, illiteracy in the US will not improve.)
  • One child in four in the US grows up not knowing how to read.
  • Forty-three percent of adults at Level 1 literacy skills live in poverty compared to only 4% of those at Level 5
  • Three of four food stamp recipients perform in the lowest two literacy levels
  • Ninety percent of welfare recipients are high school dropouts—according to NumberOf.net, there are about 50 million Americans collecting some form of welfare.
  • Over 70% of the more than two million inmates in America’s prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level.

According to literacy fast facts from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), literacy is defined as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”

Studies say that about 13% of the adult population was at or above proficient in literacy. Since there are about 230 million adults in America that means only 30 million are proficient.

A CBS report on The Future of Jobs in America said, “Education has to be the final part of the strategy for job growth.”

Illiteracy is America’s “real” culprit and it is not the fault of China or America’s teachers. It is the fault of parents and middle-class Americans unwilling to sacrifice by changing spending and lifestyle habits.

Until most Americans face the facts, nothing is going to change. It is only going to get worse until there is no one left to blame but the face in the mirror. By then, it may be too late.

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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

Western Minds may have it Wrong about China Building Empty Cities

March 13, 2011

World Net Daily quoted Patrick Chovanec, an expatriate and business teacher at Tsinghua University in Beijing, saying, “Who wants to be the mayor who reports that he didn’t get 8 percent GDP growth this year? Nobody wants to come forward with that. Therefore, the incentives in the system are to build. And if that’s the easiest way to achieve growth, then you build.”

What Mr. Chovanec is referring to is China building empty cities by the dozens then connecting them with expressways.

Although Mr. Chovanec has an impressive resume, I’m sure China’s leaders did not confide in him, which explains why he may be wrong.

In fact, what World Net Daily doesn’t mention is in the last thirty years China had the largest migration in recorded history of almost 300 million people moving from rural to urban China as it became an export nation resulting in the expansion of China’s urban industries.

The People’s Daily wrote in 2003, China was encouraging the migration of between 300 to 500 million people from rural areas to towns and cities by 2020, a transformation that Beijing hopes will help drive growth but which will also fundamentally alter the economy of the world’s most populous nation.

“A country where most of the population is in poor or remote villages will not be a modern and developed nation,” said Wang Mengkui, minister at the State Council’s Development Research Centre. “Our urbanization rate [of 39 per cent now is equivalent only to that of the UK in the 1850s, that of the US in 1911 and that of Japan in 1950.”

Wang Mengkui says, “I think our urbanization rate should reach 55-60 per cent of the population by 2020.”

Where do Mr. Chovanec and World Net Daily think China is going to house all those people as they move from rural to urban China?

Unlike democracies, where chaos, lobbyists and political agendas lead to mostly short-term decisions without planning for the future as in America’s case regarding the HUGE federal deficit and what I wrote about in India Falling Short, China’s leaders tend to plan long-term goals that benefit the most people.

China’s leaders have demonstrated for millennia (not just China’s Communist Party) that China’s collective culture often plans decades and centuries into the future, which explains the success of projects such as the Great Wall and the Grand Canal, which took centuries to complete.

This same long-term thinking led to modern, empty towns being built in Tibet years ago that are now filling with Tibetan nomads  (I wrote of this in an earlier post) that suddenly found the grass they depended on to feed their herds gone due to global warming ending a lifestyle that had survived for centuries.

China’s leaders — being scientists and engineers instead of economists such as Mr. Chovanec — studied the potential future and planned for it, which is a benefit of being an autocratic one-party republic instead of a chaotic democracy that depends on short-term goals and quarterly profits to guide the decisions of accountants and lawyers.

What China is doing by building these empty cities, roads and railways is getting ready for the future.

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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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5 Comments | business, China, cultural differences, economy, environment, government | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Learning from the Qianlong Emperor at the Met

March 12, 2011

I’ve written of the Qianlong Emperor before. He was one of China’s greatest rulers. During the 18th century, this devout Buddhist was a contemporary of France’s Louis XV, Catherine the Great of Russia and George Washington in America. At the time, he ruled the most powerful, wealthiest country on earth.

In the Qianlong Emperor and Google, I wrote if Google had read what the Qianlong Emperor (1736-1796) wrote in his famous letter to King George the III in 1793 — when China was strong enough to resist external influence — it might understand why China reacted the way it did when Google refused to censor its search engine.

In fact, the Chinese make decisions based on a cultural foundation that many in the West do not understand.

However, we may learn much of China if we pay attention to its history. Although China has changed a lot as it modernizes, the Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist foundation that makes the Chinese unique still exists.

In The Economist’s February 5 issue, Paradise on earth, we learn more of the Chinese and how they honor their ancestors.

The Economist says, “Unwilling to challenge the record of the longest-serving Chinese monarch (his beloved grandfather, the Kangxi emperor) who ruled for 61 years, Qianlong vowed to remain no more than six decades on the throne.”  The Qianlong Emperor kept his word and retired several years before his death.

The Economist’s piece was about The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City, which is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until May 1.  It said, “This exhibition may be the only chance to have a good look at its treasures.”

The Met Museum of Art curator Mike Hearn (in the embedded YouTube video) says, “This exhibition’s real purpose is to teach us more about what is great about China and what we can understand about China. We will then be able to use (this knowledge) in our lives…politically as well as culturally…to recognize both China’s greatness and its potential as a partner.”

Discover China’s Greatest Emperors

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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.

Leave a Comment » | Buddhism, Buddhist, China, Chinese arts and music, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Confucianism, cultural differences, family values, history, Taoism | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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