Harbin’s Winter Wonderland

January 5, 2011

Casey Chan of Gizmodo posted A Winter Wonderland in China with two photos of The Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, which is located in Northeast China where the average winter temperature is a (minus) – 16.8 degrees Celsius.  The Festival is held in January.

Wikipedia says the annual Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival has been held since 1963. 

However, it was interrupted for a few years during the Cultural Revolution until it resumed in 1985.  Mao died in 1976, and it took time for China’s economic engine to build momentum. The fact that the festival resumed in 1985 is a sign of the changes taking place in China.

In the Comment section of Chan’s Gizmodo post, Adam wrote, “China is awesome when it comes to giant decorations and celebrations (just remember the Olympics!), but the people there still have an extremely low quality of life. Why, if they can do some things so well, do they fail at others?”

Sega8800 replied to Adam,” How do you know their life is low quality?”

Adam’s answer was a Wikipedia  link to a post of a 1994 book, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. The couple that wrote the book spent five year in China (1988 to 1993) as journalists for the New York Times.

I laughed.

The material for this book is over 17 years old. Time did not stand still. During those years, China transformed itself by rebuilding the old cities while building more than a hundred new ones.

In fact, the standard of living in China has skyrocketed as the middle class expands and grows. Last year, Chinese bought more new cars than Americans did.

Even the lifestyle of peasants in rural China improved and will continue to do so as China extends electricity to rural China, subsidizes appliances for the rural Chinese, builds new roads, airports and railroads, etc.

The embedded videos with this post are of Harbin and previous festivals.

Learn of China’s Spring Festival, which comes in February.

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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

China Moving – Part 1/2

January 4, 2011

To put this topic in perspective, I’ll start by talking about poverty in the United States.

Business Insider says that 45 million Americans lived in poverty in 2009, which saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.

U.S. household participation in the food stamp program has increased 20.28% since last year, and in June, the number of Americans on food stamps surpassed 41 million for the first time.

One of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.

More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the U.S. government health care program designed principally to help the poor, and 20% of children now live in poverty.

The poverty in China you will now read and/or see is not unique. Poverty is a global challenge.

In fact, the World Bank says the poverty rate in China fell from 85% in 1981 to 15.9% in 2005, while in India, 421 million live in poverty.

In this 2007 video, Al Jazeera reported that 150 million people left rural China to find jobs in the country’s rapidly growing cities.

On the outskirts of Shanghai is an illegal shantytown built by migrant laborers. Most migrant laborers are farmers who left their land to find work in the city.

The migrants in this Al Jazeera report collect debris from construction sites, which they sell to recycling centers. Even though these workers earn little, it is more than double what they earned at home.

However, the narrator “does not” mention that on the farm, there may not be much money to buy luxury goods but the home they lived in was rent-free and as farmers, they grew enough food to feed themselves.

The World Bank says that one percent of the world’s population survives by collecting valuable trash and debris as the men depicted in the Al Jazeera video do to earn enough money to survive.

Trash collecting represents the first tenuous step to escape the poverty of rural China.

Professor Shi Ming-zheng, Director of NYU in Shanghai, says the urban people have mixed feelings about the millions of migrant workers flooding into the city to improve their lives.

He says, “On one hand, the urban people feel the migrants are necessary to provide cheap labor. On the other hand, they also despise them because they come from uneducated, poor rural backgrounds.”

For most migrant labors, the only hope for the future is with the children and education is the key.

In fact, China’s government sees the importance of raising the education levels of children so they become useful people for China.

But, according to Al Jazeera, of China’s 20 million migrant children less than half attend school.

Part 2 of “China Moving” will focus on what happens in the countryside when so many people left to find work in the cities.

Learn more about The Urban-Rural Divide in China.

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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

Sex, Sex, Sex as Reported by “The China Law Blog”

January 3, 2011

The China Law Blog posted a piece in August 2009 that I became aware of recently titled “A Western Woman in China….Sex, Sex, Sex????!!!!

Dan of The China Law Blog mentions a post at Gina in Shanghai, another Blog. He summarizes Gina’s post with “Chinese view Western women to be like the women in “Sex in the city”.

Then he finishes his brief post with a question “How do you feel about attitudes toward sex in China?”

Actually, I don’t think I have an opinion on that topic.

After all, how others behave or think is not my problem to carry around like a burden, as Gina seems to be doing.


Does this episode of “Sexy Beijing” hosted by Sufei support the “Sex in the City” Stereotype Gina is talking about?

Then I clicked on the link that took me to Gina in Shanghai to read her longer post.

I discovered that Gina is from Palo Alto in the US, which isn’t far from where I live in the East Bay.

Reading her post, I sensed her frustration but also saw her inability to accept others for who they are and what they believe. From what I’ve learned, 85% of an individual’s personality is formed by the environment he or she grew up in and only 15% comes from genetics.

In fact, the multitude of environments in China are very different from the US, where most people grow up as if they live in a jar expecting the rest of the world outside the jar to learn how to act and think like them as if all Americans were the same–isn’t that a reverse stereotype?

In her conclusion, Gina wrote, “There are frustrations with the way we are treated differently, and that the way we look comes associated with really heavy assumptions about our personality, our behavior, our way of life, and even our country…”

When I finished reading Gina’s post, I thought how Americans do the same thing to the Chinese—stereotype them with heavy assumptions about their personalities, their behavior, their way of life and even their country.

Most of those assumptions are supported by American politicians and the Western media and of course maybe individuals such as Gina when she says, “At first, I found these statements funny, but this quickly became something that made me incredibly angry and defensive. As a woman who is quite proud of my independence and my personal choices, I hated being pigeonholed into this ‘morally degenerate’ category. But it seemed like a losing battle…”

That poses a question—is there a double standard when it comes to sex or is it because women and men are different genetically and they grow up in different individual environments?

Shatter your stereotype of China (if you have one) and learn about China’s Sexual Revolution

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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

Greenpeace China

January 2, 2011

If China is a totalitarian country without much freedom as critics such as Liu Xiaobo claim, why is Greenpeace thriving there without harassment from China’s central government?

Then, if democracies are so desirable, why did Japan send two Greenpeace activists to jail for one year after exposing widespread corruption in the Japanese government’s Southern Ocean whaling programme?

Even though the US remains the world’s worst number one CO2 polluter, during the Bush administration, warnings from government scientists were ignored as if climate change wasn’t happening.

While in China, efforts to combat climate change demonstrate that China’s government acknowledges the challenge as well as the responsibility of China to tackle them.


Listen to Greenpeace China’s Tom Wang in Tianjin calmly being honest about China’s pollution challenges.

In fact, Greenpeace China has offices in Hong Kong (opened 1997), Beijing and Guangzhou (opened in 2002) and is the largest non-governmental organization (NGO) in the People’s Republic of China.

Then in 2006, Greenpeace China was the only NGO to be consulted on an early draft of renewable energy law by China’s National People’s Congress.

Has the US government consulted with Greenpeace?

China has also allowed two Greenpeace expeditions to China’s Himalayan region in 2006 and 2007 where evidence was discovered of the dramatic retreat of glaciers, which was reported in National Geographic Magazine.

One Greenpeace China campaign focused on stopping Monsanto, a US-headquartered biotechnology giant, from patenting a Chinese indigenous soybean variety.

Earlier campaigns in China focused on food, agriculture and electronic waste while highlighting the dangers of PVC in children’s toys.

Today, Greenpeace China runs five major campaigns focused on climate, energy, food and agriculture, water pollution and a campaign on air pollution focused on Hong Kong only.

I admit finding this information about Greenpeace China surprised me because all I’ve heard in the Western media of Greenpeace is that they are a gang of dangerous activists doing crazy things to get attention.

Until reading about Greenpeace in China, I didn’t know what a positive force this NGO was for cleaning the environment.

Now I want to know why the US isn’t doing more.

Discover Where All that Pollution Came From

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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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

New Year’s Recap

January 1, 2011

There’s much about China that I did not know when we started this journey on January 28, 2010. 

We visited China’s early dynasties (the Xia, Shang and Zhou) before Qin Shi Huangdi became the first emperor and unified China.

Then we visited the Han, Tang, Sung, Ming and Qing Dynasties while learning of the chaos and anarchy between the dynasties.

We met Confucius and Wu Zetian, China’s only woman emperor during the Tang Dynasty.

We discovered China’s music, art and opera while meeting one of China’s national treasures, Mao Wei-Tao.

Learning about the 19th century Opium Wars started by the British and French opened my eyes to evils I had not known of.

What shocked me most was how the West forced China to allow Christian missionaries into China along with opium.

One reader challenged me in a comment saying that couldn’t be true then didn’t respond when I provided links to the evidence that missionaries and opium were included in the same treaty, which forced the emperor to accept against his will.

Then I sat spellbound as I joined Mao and the Communists on the Long March where more than 80,000 started out and about 6,000 survived — the only choice was to fight or die.

Along the way, I learned that Sun Yat-sen was the father of China’s republic and how Chiang Kai-shek started the Civil War in 1925 when he ordered his army to slaughter the Chinese Communists.

I didn’t know that the Communist and Nationalist Parties were the two political parties of China’s first republic and how it was the US supported Nationalists that fired the first shot that shattered Sun Yat-sen’s dream for China.

After the Communists won the Civil War in 1949, I saw the suffering and death from Mao’s mistakes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976.

Then we learned how Deng Xiaoping saved China from the Revolutionary Maoists and launched the Capitalist Revolution, which led to the Tiananmen Square incident then China’s Sexual Revolution.

And there was my continued attempt to explain China’s Collective Culture. One comment basically said, “Yea, sure!” as if there were no such thing as cultural differences such as this.

We also were introduced to other Blogs about China such as the China Law Blog.

Of course, with more than a thousand posts in a year, what I have mentioned here is but a small part of the 2010 journey of China.

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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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