The Flaws of Democracy and Humanitarianism – Part 1/7

December 13, 2010

A Western activist Blog, Left Coast Voices, posted a piece about Liu Xiabo, a leader of the Chinese democracy movement, who won the latest Nobel Peace Prize.

The host of this Blog, Alon Shalev, has an impressive resume in activism. Shalev campaigned for the anti-apartheid movement, the release of Jews from the Soviet Union and the burgeoning green movement.

Today, he is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Hillel Foundation—an eighty year old nonprofit.

Hillel helps students find a balance in being distinctively Jewish and universally human by encouraging them to pursue tzedek (social justice), tikkun olam (repairing the world) and Jewish learning, and to support Israel and global Jewish peoplehood.

Similar to Hillel’s goals, Shalev’s novels highlight social injustices and individual empowerment.

I’ve read Shalev’s The Accidental Activist, and I cheered for his heroes to beat the evil oil conglomerate. Since I don’t want to spoil the story, I won’t say what happens.

Incidentally, The Accidental Activist is based loosely on a real court case that took place in England.

In his Left Coast Voices post about Liu Xiabo, Shalev says, “I have news for you, Chinese Communist Party: freedom is addictive, and it ain’t that bad.”

I agree that freedom “ain’t that bad”, but the Chinese (contrary to public opinion in the West) enjoy many of the same freedoms people in the West enjoy with a few exceptions, which I will deal with in part 7.

This, of course, is Shalev’s response to China locking up Liu Xiabo for 11 years.

Discover what really happened at the “so-called democracy” movement that did not take place at the Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989.

In fact, there was no popular, organized democracy movement in China and there never has been. Only a few thousand people in today’s China, such as Liu Xiabo, want to import the Noble Peace Prize, Christian influenced, Western Humanitarianism style of democracy to 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

The Qing – China’s Last Dynasty – Part 3/3

December 12, 2010

The last travelogue segment takes us on a tour of the Qiao family’s grand courtyard and residence located in Jinzhong, a prefecture in the center of Shanxi Province. Today, this prefecture is home to more than 2.5 million people.

The Qiao family complex shows the blending of the mansion’s practical functions, artistic design and ancient architectural techniques to create complex art in a simple plan.

The details show the glamour of China’s ancient residential house culture in northern China. Each engraving in the mansion is detailed artwork telling a story of life’s philosophy.

The narrator takes us on a tour of a Qiao family courtyard made famous by Zhang Yimou when he directed Raise the Red Lantern. Zhang Yimou won two awards for this 1991 film at the Venice Film Festival.

Raise the Red Lantern also turned the Qiao family’s mansion into a popular tourist attraction. The mansion covers 8,000 square meters (almost 10,000 square yards) of land with 313 rooms.

For security reasons, the roofs are connected.

To build family mansions of this size and scope takes generations of successful businessmen working together as a collective family unit.

However, if a family loses its moral compass, the fortune and land were often lost over time.

These mansions also represent the feudal culture of ancient China.

The last of the three mansions covered in this travelogue was the Chang Mansion, which demonstrates the poetry of a Chinese garden.

Large families such as the Changs built elaborate mansions and gardens. However, the mansions and gardens were built according to rules and guidelines.

Shaanxi province is considered a treasure trove of ancient Chinese architecture.

There are 106 family compounds similar to the four in this travelogue and some date to before the Sung Dynasty (960 to 1276 AD) representing about 70% of China’s surviving ancient wood built architecture.

Return to China’s Last Dynasty – Part 2 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.

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.

1 Comment | China, Chinese arts and music, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Confucianism, cultural differences, environment, family values, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Comparing Stimulus Packages

December 12, 2010

I read an informative and fascinating post by John Ross at Key Trends in the World Economy comparing how China and the US handled the 2008 global financial crises.

Ross has an impressive resume and knows what he is talking about.

It appears that Ross was one of the few voices that predicted China would recover faster than the US. 

Most conservative Western economists kept predicting the US would recover faster than China.  As it turned out, this was a wishful fantasy.

Three years later, the results show that Ross was correct. Between 2008 to 2010, China’s GDP grew more than 30% while US results were dismal.

While Ross provides much graphic evidence to support why this happened, it is his conclusion that sums up America’s failure to compete and grow its GDP that points out possible flaws in Western economic freewheeling theories that base too much trust in the private sector with little government control.

Ross says that the strengthening of political trends in the US led by such as the ‘Tea Party’ and the consolidation of right-wing Republican control of the House of Representatives may mean the US economy will continue to be hobbled in comparison to China’s GDP growth.

Ross feels that only if the US were to turn to a program of direct state intervention to boost new investment would the US benefit, which is what happened in China.

Instead of learning from the past, stubborn US conservatives appear to be repeating the same mistakes that caused the 2008 global financial crises.

Learn more at Building Things and Going Places

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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.

4 Comments | America, American culture, business, capitalism, China, Chinese Culture, economy, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Qing – China’s Last Dynasty – Part 2/3

December 12, 2010

This segment of the travelogue takes us to the Wong family compound in Lingshi county, Shanxi province. The Wong mansion offers another example of China’s ancient collective culture.

Twenty-seven generations of the Wong family lived in this mansion for 680 years.

To build the mansion and the wall that protects it took more than fifty years.

The narrator points out that the buildings and gardens are well arranged (according to feng shui) and adapted to the geographical conditions.

Three architectural complexes were part of the Wong family compound completed during the Qing Dynasty. This included the Red Gate Fort and an ancestral temple. The area covered 45,000 square meters (almost 54 thousand square yards).

Although the narrator in the video doesn’t mention this, for more than two millennia the Chinese raised their children to follow the Chinese ethical and moral system based on the family and Confucius’s Five Great Relationships.

1. between ruler and subject
2. father and son
3. husband and wife
4. elder and younger brother
5. friend and friend

Instead of being taught from a church pulpit, these values are part of child rearing.

Of the five relationships, in each pair, one role was superior and one inferior; one role led and the other followed. Yet each involved mutual obligations and responsibilities.

When most children married, the newlyweds lived with the groom’s family. Failure to properly fulfill one’s role according to this Chinese ethical and moral system could lead to the end of the relationship.

In fact, when the ruler didn’t fulfill his role, bloody rebellions often gave rise to new dynasties after a period of chaos and violence that in some cases lasted decades or centuries.

China’s history is also littered with failed rebellions often citing the Mandate of Heaven as the right to rebel and challenge the ruling dynasty.

During the Qing Dynasty, there were several failed rebellions. The bloodiest was the Taiping Rebellion, which lasted more than a decade with more than twenty million killed.

Continued in The Qing – China’s Last Dynasty – Part 3 or return to China’s Last Dynasty – 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.

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.

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

Was Miley Cyrus—alias Hanna Montana—Banned in China?

December 11, 2010

What got this post started was a media blitz this morning on the Blogosphere and in the traditional media that Miley Cyrus, now 18, was smoking herbal “Salvia” fumes from a bong.

Curious what herbal “Salvia” was, I Googled the topic and discovered seemly bogus claims that Miley was banned from China early in 2009 when she was still 16.

I discovered that Miley Cyrus Online.co.uk (billed as the “ultimate fan site” for gossip) said in February 2009, that Cyrus had been banned in China due to a photograph showing her pulling her eyes back into an Asian slant.

To verify this, I searched Reuters, United Press International and Associated Press and came up with nothing to support the fan-site claim.

However, the BBC News did report, “The Organization of Chinese Americans criticized Cyrus for setting ‘a terrible example for her young fans’.”


Miley Cyrus singing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”

Then I discovered in March 2010, that Cyrus was featured in the China Daily, which is the English version of Xinhua, the state owned media giant in China.

If Cyrus had been banned in China, I doubt the China Daily would feature her a year later.

However, I did learn that “Salvia” comes from the deep roots of the Chinese sage plant and has been used for centuries in China as a salve on damaged, diseased or injured body tissues and is best known for its ability to promote circulation in the capillary beds or the microcirculation system. 

Nowhere did this information say one should smoke Salvia to achieve these benefits. After all, inhaling smoke into one’s lungs is not a good idea because it causes damage to the sensitive lining of the lungs and increases cancer risk.

Then I learned from NPR.org that “Salvia” is a powerful and legal hallucinogenic herb that is gaining popularity among teenagers and young adults…. Legislation to make it a controlled substance has failed twice in (in the US) Congress.

If Cyrus were smoking Salvia, what she was doing wasn’t illegal in California. If you want to learn where not to smoke Salvia visit Sage Wisdom.org.

As for celebrities banned in China, such as Brad Pitt, the Dalai Lama, Martin Scorsese, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere (no surprise there), and singer Mjork, check out Elephant Journal.com.

It seems there may be some truth to what Cyrus said, “I definitely feel like the press (and the Blogosphere rumor mill) is trying to make me out as the new ‘bad girl’!” Source:  BBC

Discover more about Chinese Herbalism

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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, crime, media | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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