Ugg Boots – Where they come from

December 4, 2010

I bought a pair of Ugg boots a few years back at Big 5 for less than $30 to keep my feet warm.

I didn’t consider where the boots were made, and I never intended wearing them to go shopping or outside. Since I work at home and save money by leaving the heat off on cold days, my feet get cold so it made sense to wear a pair. (I just Googled Big 5 and saw Uggs on sale for $39 a pair).

Uggs do not appear designed for outdoors, yet I see many young American women looking sharp shopping in Ugg boots. It seems to be the latest fad.

Curious, I did a bit of research to learn more about this popular fad.

I learned from Business Gather.com “Make no mistake about it: Ugg boots are not just for girls. Sure, they may look cute and snuggly, but with football quarterback Tom Brady on board as the brand’s new spokesperson, Ugg boots are poised to attract hoards of manly men all around the world.”

Then I wanted to know where Ugg boots came from and what it costs to make a pair.

I discovered this video on YouTube of a factory in China where the material and labor come together to make Uggs. The conclusion of the description below the video says, “These boots are the most cheap and excellent quality boots in the world.”

The New York Times recently reported “The salaries of factory workers in China are still low compared to those in the United States and Europe: the hourly wage in southern China is only about 75 cents an hour.”

Chinese factory workers often work overtime as long as sixteen hours a day for six days weeks.

However, in 2009, the US federal minimum hourly wage was $7.25, which pays about $15,000 a year for a full time job not counting hidden benefits, which don’t exist in China.

In China, the Ugg factory workers in that video are probably earning less than $3,700 (US) annually and working twice the hours to keep those Ugg prices down so American women and men may buy a cheap pair to look stylish while shopping.


This is a video explaining how to detect fake Ugg boots

After I watched this video, I checked the Ugg boots I bought from Big 5.  They were fake. Does that mean they weren’t made in China?

Who makes a profit from the real Ugg boots? Deckers Outdoor Corporation holds the Ugg trademark in more than 100 countries worldwide and reported sales of 689 million US dollars under the Ugg brand in 2008 and sales were up in 2009. Source: Source: Wiki.Ugg Boots

How many Americans would be willing to pay four or five times the price for a pair of Ugg boots so those low paying minimum wage jobs would come to the US?

Then, how many Americans are willing to work for the federal minimum wage without benefits? Not many since there are about eleven million illegal aliens in the US working those jobs.

So, if you live in the US, next time you hear political ads or someone bashing China for stealing jobs from Americans, look in a mirror.

Update:  After I wrote this post and up-loaded it, The Walking Company sent me an e-mail advertising “Zealand” slippers (another “Ugg” type product) on sale at 70% off.  Instead of paying $65 a pair, I paid less than $20. I stocked up and bought four pair and was surprised when the shipment arrived to discover that the “Zealand” product line is made in China instead of New Zealand.

Discover The India, China battle to eliminate poverty and illiteracy

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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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7 Comments | America, business, capitalism, China, cultural differences, economy | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Floating Population Going Home

December 4, 2010

When Mao died in 1976 and China changed direction from revolutionary Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party wrote a new Constitution in 1982 and set out to reinvent China. 

This did not happen in an instant and more than three decades later China is still changing.

In 1953, when China had its first modern census, it was revealed that China had a population of 583 million. By 1982, the population had almost doubled to a billion. Source: Columbia University

The poverty rate in China in 1982 was 64% of the population. By 2004, that rate had declined to 10%, which means about 500 million people left poverty behind during this period.

The World Bank says poverty refers to people whose income is less than $1.25 per day.

For three decades, most of the economic development took place in the cities. Deng Xiaoping said that a better life would eventually reach almost everyone but some would have to wait longer for it to happen.

Last year, China shifted the focus on economic development to rural China.

No one knows the exact number of migrant workers. However, estimates run from 200 to 300 million.

These people represent the largest migration in human history—three times the number of people who immigrated to America from Europe over an entire century.

As in the US, migrant workers in China and around the world are often required to work longer hours for lower pay than the law requires. Yet, most still earn more than from where they came from.

For example, when my wife first came to the US from China, her first job was in a restaurant where she waited on tables for no pay. She earned only the tips customers left behind.

Back in China, the migrants work in factories, construction, restaurants, beauty salons, housework, childcare, and brothels. Some work in the recycling industry.

In 2010, China set goals and started projects to extend electricity, roads and railroads into rural China to improve lifestyles there.

These modern improvements in rural China have already created jobs closer to remote villages and migrant workers are returning home to find jobs that pay the same as distant urban cities.

 A government survey of migrant workers in 2009 found the number returning home had increased by 8.2% from the previous year and now accounts for almost half of the total migrant population.

To discover more about China’s migrant workers see China’s Stick People

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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 » | America, China, Communism, economy, environment | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The New Year Migration in China

December 4, 2010

We visited China and traveled during one of China’s national holidays in 2008. 

My sister and her youngest daughter went with us. 

Both are evangelical Christians and mentioned they didn’t believe in China’s one-child policy. I heard this more than once but after they arrived in China and experienced that migration, both became quiet about the one-child policy.

It was so crowded at times, it was as if we were swimming through a thick sea of people.

After that, I said the next trip to China would not be during any of China’s national holidays.

In fact, to deal with this migration, inhabitat.com says, “China has released a massive rail development program, which will expand the high-speed rail service to 42 more high-speed lines by 2012.”

This Al Jazeera report is about China’s annual New Year Migration of 2010. For readers who haven’t been to China, this may be your only chance to experience a taste of what it is like to live in a country with more than 1.3 billion people.

Tony Birtley of Al Jazeera, reports from a train heading south from Beijing to Hebei province.

Birtley says, “Welcome to the Chinese New Year and to the world’s biggest annual migration.… There’s something like 2,000 people on this train and you can hardly move.”

The rail system in China barely managed to move the average 220 million people traveling home to celebrate the Chinese New Year with family.

It is possible that a passenger will have to stand for a trip of 16 to 48 hours to reach their destination.

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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, Chinese Culture, cultural differences, family values, tourism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Building Things and Going Places

December 3, 2010

I discovered this time-lapse video at zerohedge.com of a fifteen-story hotel being built in a few days in Changsha, a city in south-central China.

While watching, I thought of all that China has accomplished in more than two-thousand years that no other country or civilization has achieved.

There’s the amazing miracle the world has witnessed since the early 1980s as China rebuilt and reinvented itself from a medieval kingdom to a modern nation with the only maglev line in the world.

It is obvious that the Chinese don’t give up easily once they start something.

After all, the Chinese spent more than two thousand years building the Great Wall and about a thousand years building the Grand Canal.

The largest palace on the earth, the Forbidden City, is in Beijing and was built more than five hundred years ago. 

The first emperor of China had a tomb and a Terra Cotta army built that makes the pyramids of Egypt seem insignificant.

Then there was the great fleet commanded by Admiral Zheng He during the Ming Dynasty.

In recent years, the Chinese announced they are going to build a space station, since the West won’t share theirs with China.

China has also said they are planning to build a colony on the moon, mine for rare earth metals and send a Chinese expedition to Mars within a few decades.

The Chinese recently proposed building a bullet train from Beijing to London while building thousands of kilometers of rail for bullet trains in China.  America doesn’t have one bullet train yet.

Does anyone doubt the Chinese won’t accomplish these tasks once they have announced the goals?

No wonder the Western democracies want China to have a Western style democratic government.

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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 | business, China, economy | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Stealing China’s History and Leaving Guilt Behind

December 3, 2010

I’m writing about Dunhuang China, a documentary.  Dunhuang is located in northwest China in Gansu province.

The video is in Mandarin but there are English subtitles competent enough to understand what the lovely host and the experts on the panels are saying about the meaning and history of Dunhuang’s Buddhist hand-carved grottos.

Dunhuang was located at the beginning of the ancient Silk Road and was first built during the early Han Dynasty (206 BC -219 AD).

Trade caravans came to Dunhuang from Europe, the Roman Empire, Persia, and India. Dunhuang was also the city the caravans left on the long trek west from China.

Dunhuang became a multicultural city that prospered during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 906 AD).

Over centuries, Buddhist grottos/caves were carved from the cliffs of Dunhuang and a monastery was built in this remote location.

About a thousand years ago, the site was sealed and abandoned to the shifting sands of the desert.

Then in the late 18th century, a Buddhist monk accidently rediscovered the library cave where thousands of priceless Buddhist books had been stored for millennia.

It’s as if a Tang Emperor saw the future and realized to save some of China’s history, it would have to be hidden in a remote, desolate location.

The documentary leaves a strong impression that China treasures what is left of the wall and ceiling paintings that captures centuries of Chinese history.

Many Chinese feel guilt at allowing some paintings to be cut away from the walls along with ancient Buddhist texts that were looted in the early 1900s by charlatans and thieves from Japan, England, France, Russia, Germany and the United States.

The documentary goes into detail of who these thieves were.

For decades now, a few scholars have sacrificed and struggled to study and preserve what’s left.

In October 2010, Tele Times International reported that PCCW Limited was awarded a contract by the Dunhuang Academy China to provide a digital theater system at the Dunhuang Mogao Caves Visitor Center. The plans call for four digital theaters.

Crystal Inks.com says, “Dunhuang has 492 caves, with 45,000 square meters of frescos, 2, 415 painted statues and five wooden-structured caves. The Mogao Grottoes contain priceless paintings, sculptures, some 50,000 Buddhist scriptures, historical documents, textiles, and other relics that first stunned the world in the early 1900s.”

Discover more at  A Millennia of History at a Silk Road Oasis

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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 Culture, Chinese history, cultural differences, history | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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