Poverty and China’s Peasant farmers – Part 3/3

September 12, 2010

In rural China, the peasants do not earn much money.  They live in what the West calls poverty, but they have a home and a roof over their heads.  They are not homeless and seldom are hungry as the poor in India, which is touted as the largest democracy on the earth.

The peasant farmers in China grow most of the food they eat and sell what they do not need as the Amish do today in America and as 90% of Americans did before the Industrial Revolution.

If Chinese peasants, go to school, eat a nutritious diet and have access to basic medical care as China’s central government has promised, health will improve and life spans may surpass urban China where the air pollution is bad.

China is extending the electric grid and improving public transportation so rural China will have access to the same luxuries that urban people have. Before 1980, rural Chinese lived as most Americans did before the Industrial Revolution.

For thousands of years, the backbone of China has always been the peasant farmers and their collective lifestyle. What will happen to China if they all join the consumer oriented middle class?

Rural America must have been a collective culture before the Industrial Revolution. Consumerism and credit cards changed most Americans, except the Amish, into an individualistic culture where “I” is more important than “We”. 

The Amish are still a collective culture with free will to leave and become a modern American consumer. Why don’t they?

See Climbing the Dragon’s Back

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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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Poverty and China’s Peasant farmers – Part 2/3

September 11, 2010

Before the industrial revolution, there was no public education as it exists today and few could read and write.  Due to poor nutrition and living conditions, people didn’t live long.

However, there is nothing wrong with the rural peasant farmer lifestyle.  Who needs money to survive when you grow your own food and make all the things you need?

With a small community of family and close neighbors that work together for survival, what else is needed?

For example, there are the Amish in America, who live as people did before the Industrial Revolution. The Amish choose to live a simple life based on their religious beliefs.

The Amish seriously follow the Biblical commands to separate themselves from frivolous material things that many take for granted and can’t live without.

In addition, the Amish don’t have electricity and do not drive cars.

Why doesn’t the media report on how deprived the Amish are as they report on the poor, peasant farmers in China?

Does this mean the Amish are poor and live in poverty because they don’t have consumer products like computers, iPads or iPods, and expensive cars or trucks and all the other junk that we cannot eat?

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. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Poverty and China’s Peasant Farmers – Part 1/3

September 11, 2010

If you read about China, you may have heard that hundreds of millions live below the poverty level.  After all, many peasant farmers in rural China do not earn much money.

Are they poor?  Are they starving?  Are they homeless?

How do we measure poverty in an industrialized, electronic, virtual Internet nation? The answer is that poverty is measured by the lack of money and/or credit.

In the above video, the narrator says that the way people lived in America before the Industrial Revolution was different from the way we live today.  Nine out of ten people in rural areas.

There was a large, mostly poor lower class, a small rich upper class and not much of a middle class.

Rural people raised most of their food on small farms. They didn’t have to leave home each day to work at a job in a town or city. There were families and small village communities that depended on each other in a collective lifestyle.

Back then, there were no electric lights, no movies, no telephones, no recorded music and no cars (and not much pollution).

Ordinary people used their hands to make most of the things they needed. 

The world was quiet because there were no noisy machines.  The pace of life was slower.

See China’s Changing Face – Farmers’ Friend the Organic Way

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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 this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Imperial Encyclopedia from the Sung Dynasty

September 11, 2010

In 986 A.D., a Sung Dynasty emperor ordered that an encyclopedia be written.

This ancient encyclopedia is known as the Four Great Books of Song (宋四大书), which was compiled by Li Fang (925 – 996 A.D.) and other scholars during the Sung Dynasty (960–1279 A.D.).

The last book (Cefu Yuangui) was finished during the 11th century. The four encyclopedias were published with the intent to collect all known knowledge of the time. Source: History Cultural China

There were one thousand scrolls with 2,200 biographical entries.

This ancient example of the literary world printed about a thousand years ago was commissioned by Vice Primer Zhou Bida (Sung Dynasty), who had a group of scholars proof read the original copy of the encyclopedia before block printing it. 

Surviving copies are kept in China’s national library. Bookworms, who over the years fed on the paper, scarred the original encyclopedias.

Although there are textual errors, the work is still valuable for historical research.

See China’s Three “Journeys to the West”

_______________

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 this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China and India’s Mutual Collectivism and History – Part 2/2

September 10, 2010

Unlike India, China’s one party political system allows for quick decisions that often benefit the country.

Another important factor to remember is that China is still a collectivist nation as India is.

Due to this fact, China and India have more in common than India and America.

It does not matter that India is considered the world’s largest democracy, because to counter that, India also has a large bureaucracy that makes it difficult to get things done.

However, in India, the bureaucracy has a reputation for being tremendously arrogant. It is a truism that Indian bureaucrats are generally smug and supercilious… source: Open India

Indian bureaucracy has often been criticized for being cumbersome and stretching procedures to sanction projects. Source: Meri News

Unlike India, China’s one party political system allows for quick decisions that often benefit the country.

Another important factor to remember is that China is still a collectivist nation as India is.

Due to this fact, China and India have more in common than India and America.

It does not matter that India is considered the world’s largest democracy, because to counter that, India also has a large bureaucracy that makes it difficult to get things done.

However, in India, the bureaucracy has a reputation for being tremendously arrogant. It is a truism that Indian bureaucrats are generally smug and supercilious… source: Open India

Indian bureaucracy has often been criticized for being cumbersome and stretching procedures to sanction projects. Source: Meri News

A friend, Tom Carter, while shooting his next book in India, discovered that it was easier to travel and stay in China than India.

A study of Individualist and collectivist orientations across occupational groups in India by Anjali Ghosh where he refers to a study by Sinha & Verma (1994) … that master’s-level students express more idiocentric (individualist) orientations than allocentric (collectivist) due to Western influence, immediate life concerns and exposure to mass media.

However, Verma & Triandis (1999) observed that Indian students were more vertical collectivist than U.S. students were.

Another fact is that China and India both have ancient civilizations more than 5,000 years old and they are next-door neighbors as Canada and the US are.

See The Collective Culture versus Individualism or return to China and India’s Mutual Collectivism and Shared History – Part 1

A friend, Tom Carter, while shooting his next book in India, discovered that it was easier to travel and stay in China than India.

A study of Individualist and collectivist orientations across occupational groups in India by Anjali Ghosh where he refers to a study by Sinha & Verma (1994) … that master’s-level students express more idiocentric (individualist) orientations than allocentric (collectivist) due to Western influence, immediate life concerns and exposure to mass media.

However, Verma & Triandis (1999) observed that Indian students were more vertical collectivist than U.S. students were.

Another fact is that China and India both have ancient civilizations more than 5,000 years old and they are next-door neighbors as Canada and the US are.

See The Collective Culture versus Individualism or return to China and India’s Mutual Collectivism and Shared History – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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