Snopes.com verifies rumors and myths about many things including China. Although the list of rumors of China was long, I’ll list just five.
1. A claim that the U.S. government agreed to allow China to exercise “eminent domain” as collateral for American debt is FALSE. China may not take land, buildings, factories and entire cities inside the USA to satisfy the financial obligations of the US government.
2. The rumor that Costco warehouse club stores are owned by China is FALSE. Maybe Wal-Mart started this one. However, there are Wal-Mart stores in China. Costco isn’t in China yet.
3. As crazy as the 2010-midterm elections were, I didn’t hear this lie to discredit Democrats and President Obama claiming that the Obama administration was selling the blueprints for the B-2 Stealth Bomber to China in exchange for debt relief. Snopes found this rumor was FALSE.
The interesting thing about Snopes.com is if possible it provides links to the origin of the lie/myth. If you check on a rumor or myth, read all of the Snopes.com explanation.
4. Since there have been so many complaints of food exported to the US from China being tainted, know that the “Mandarin Menace” was proven FALSE by Snopes.com. Pesticide used on mandarin oranges imported from China was “not” causing allergic reactions among U.S. consumers.
Snopes could find no reports or officially used warning to support the claim that a new pesticide being used in China is causing a pattern of allergic reactions among U.S. consumers.
Then some people want to believe the myths and lies.
5. The belief that fortune cookies originated in China is also FALSE. By World War II, fortune cookies were being offered in Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and from there the practice spread to the rest of the country.
In fact, no one knows who invented the fortune cookie but it did not start in China and in all my trips to China since 1999, I have never seen a fortune cookie in any of the restaurants I’ve eaten in from Xian to Guilin.
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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Another reason that China’s government does not want the Pope to rule over China’s Catholics is because of the Catholic Church’s political meddling and bloody history.
In 1088, Pope Urban II was responsible for launching the First Crusade to rescue the Holy Land from the Turks.
In 1147, King Louis VII was enlisted by Bernard of Clairvaux, a French abbot in the Catholic Church, to lead the Second Crusade.
Pope Gregory VIII proclaimed the Third Crusade in 1188.
During the Fourth Crusade in 1202, European Christians sacked Constantinople, a Christian city in Turkey.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Church waged war against the Christian Cather religious sect in the Languedoc region of France and in other parts of Europe. The last known Cathar leader was executed in 1321.
Then there were the four Inquisitions from 1184 to 1860 along with the religious wars that followed the reformation.
Protestants and Catholics shed each other’s blood in national wars and in civil wars from 1562 to 1648.
Then there is the fact that the Pope issues edicts for his followers and some of them go against Chinese law such as the one-child policy designed to control the growth of China’s population.
In addition, China has never had a religion that dominated its culture as in the West and the Middle East.
Moreover, if you are one of those people that believes the Church has changed its evil ways consider how it has shielded priests accused of molesting children or the money laundering by the Vatican’s bank.
Although Chinese believe in heaven and God, most do not believe n God and heaven the same as Christianity and Islam do.
In China, the people are raised to honor the ancestors and obey the central government’s laws not the laws and edicts of a religion.
Catholics in China are free to worship but not free to have the Pope be their spiritual and political ruler since the Pope often issues edicts that influence political beliefs leading to civil unrest and more pressure on China to change.
In fact, China is often depicted as an atheist nation, which is far from the truth.
In China, it is believed by many that Heaven is said to see, hear and watch over all men (sounds like God to me). Heaven is affected by man’s doings, and having personality, is happy and angry with them. Heaven blesses those who please it and sends calamities upon those who offend it.
Heaven was also believed to transcend all other spirits and gods, with Confucius asserting, “He who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray.”
If anything, most Chinese are guilty of being Deists (as many of America’s Founding Fathers were) or nonreligious since they do not belong to or believe in religions.
Since both Christian and Islamic sects believe they must convert nonbelievers, it must be frustrating to the Catholic Pope that he cannot have freedom to convert as many as possible in China.
It is obvious that the Catholic Church and other world religions want China to change its culture to accept religion as the rest of the world does.
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.
What happened in China between the Communists and Nationalists during the revolution isn’t the reason China is blocking the Pope from having the same level of control of China’s Catholics that he has over the rest of the world’s Catholics.
The Vatican is a sovereign nation. Of 195 countries in the world, three are not members of the UN and the Vatican City/The Holy See is one of those three nations.
The independent papal state of less than 1,000 people chose not to join the UN.
Instead, the Vatican is a Permanent Observer in the UN and the Holy See enjoys, among other things, the right to participate in the general debate of the General Assembly; the right of reply; the right to have its communications issued and circulated directly as official documents of the UN assembly; and the right to co-sponsor draft resolutions and decisions that make reference to the Holy See. Source: Holy See Mission.org
The Vatican is listed as the smallest nation with the smallest population on the globe, yet the Pope rules over about a billion Catholics scattered throughout the world as if he were a world leader and they were the citizens of his nation.
In fact, since nations have banks, the Associated Press recently reported that the Vatican’s bank was mired in a laundering scandal.
The Pope is elected for life by the Church’s bishops as if he were a religious dictator. The Pope decides if it is wrong to divorce, have abortions, etc. He even prescribes dietary laws such as only eating fish on Friday.
Allowing the Pope to lead China’s Catholics would be the same as letting the US President lead all American expatriates living and working in China regardless of China’s laws.
In Part 3, we shall see how the Catholic Church waged war against all who threatened its existence.
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.
The Economist’s December 11 issue wrote about The party versus the pope. “The Communist Party is trying to tighten its control of the Catholic Church in China. Some of its members, as well as the Vatican, are fuming.”
The Economist says, “China forced its Catholic church to cut ties with the Vatican in 1951, two years after the party seized power.”
Interesting language.
If the Communists “seized power”, in China, then United States revolutionaries seized power in America from the British Empire in 1776 and French revolutionaries seized power from the King of France in 1799.
However, there was no revolution in China between the Communists and the Nationalists. The Communist Party did not sieze power since Dr. Sun Yat-sen formed a coalition between the Communist Party and the Nationalists (KMT) to build China’s first republic with a two party system.
When Sun Yat-sen died unexpectedly in 1925, it wasn’t the Communist Party that broke the republic’s two-party system and plunged China into a Civil War that lasted until 1949. Chang Kai-shek’s KMT army fired the first shots slaughtering thousands of communists in southern China then Shanghai.
The Communist Party had no choice but to fight since it was clear that Chang Kai-shek, a converted Christian, was going to have all the communists hunted down and killed.
The Civil War between the two political parties of Sun Yat-sen’s republic lasted for more than twenty years. The facts do not support The Economists’ claim that the Communist Party “seized control”.
In fact, the Communist Party won China’s Civil War as the North did in America’s Civil War in 1865.
In Part 2, we shall see how the Catholic Church is not a religion but a religious nation with almost one billion members and the pope is a Christian dictator elected for life.
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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.
I’m sure that most Americans (as well educated as they are, and I’m being sarcastic) think all democracies are the same.
They aren’t.
The World Atlas lists 192 countries on the globe and according to Made in Democracies.org, there are 58 democracies. If correct, that means 134 countries are not democracies. This list excludes countries that claim they are democracies but are sanctioned tax havens for secret bank accounts or allow child prostitution.
If you read the entry for Democracy at Wikipedia, you will discover there are many different types of democracies.
The smallest category may be for “liberal democracy” where elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive. Even liberal democracies are divided into categories.
The United States is labeled as a federal republic along with India, Germany and Brazil.
The United Kingdom is listed as a constitutional monarchy along with Japan, Canada and Spain.
The biggest difference between China and most democracies is that China’s republic has one political party, which controls the state-owned media. Yet there are city and regional media in China that often publish opinions that do not appear in the national media. In addition, China’s Blogosphere is very active when it comes to expression and opinions.
In the US, six huge corporations own most of the so-called free media and an American corporation owns only one. Foreign corporations own the other five.
In America, freedom of the press means that conservative talk radio may manipulate public opinion and influence voters through lies and exaggeration, which it often does. We just saw that happen in the 2010 election.
This video explains how America became a democracy dominated by religion.
In America, corporate lobbyists or special interest groups such as Evangelical Christians may influence elected officials to vote on bills that may not benefit the majority of the population such as confusing debates over abortion, global warming and the recent American health bill.
In China, the only way to influence a government official is by bribing him or her. If caught, that official may end up going to prison or face execution, which seldom happens in the US where bribed officials often go unpunished.
Today, China is a one party republic, which is what the United States was under its first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams. In China, only Communist Party members may vote as part of a consensus and there are more than 70 million Party members.
In the American Republic created by the Founding Fathers in 1776, only white men that owned property were allowed to vote, which was about 10% of the population.
Critics of China claim that China’s 1982 Constitution allows for freedom of speech and religion. However, the truth is that there are limits on freedom of speech and religion that we never hear about from the Western media or politicians.
The US Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
TheChinese Constitution says, “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration…”
Nowhere does it say in the Chinese Constitution, “the Party will make no law prohibiting the “free exercise of freedom of speech or of the press” as it does in the US Constitution.
In fact, the same article that says “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief” also says, “No one may make use of religion to engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state.”
The Chinese Constitution also says, “The exercise by citizens of the People’s Republic of China of their freedoms and rights may not infringe upon the interests of the state…” and “they must not commit acts detrimental to the security, honour and interests of the motherland.”
That is why the Tibetan Dalai Lama lives in exile in India, the Falun Gong religious cult was banned in China in 1999 and Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, is in jail. They all refuse to abide by the 1982 Chinese Constitution.
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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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