China’s Changing Face – Farmers’ Friend the Organic Way – Part 2/3

August 29, 2010

The members of “Farmers’ Friend” decided to work with the poorest peasants near Liuzhou City in Guangxi Province. 

The village they selected was Nashe, a three-hour drive from the city that was far from the urban pollution.

The president of “Farmers’ Friend”, Zhou Jinzhang, talked to the senior caption of Nashe, Wei Xiuqing.

It wasn’t easy convincing Wei that organic farming could be profitable for everyone. To encourage the peasants, “Farmers’ Friend” agreed to be responsible for any economic losses.

With this guarantee, Wei agreed to work with “Farmers’ Friend” to set up the duck-rice system.

The ducks would eat the insects and pesticides would no longer be needed. 

Soon after starting the project, there were problems. Some of the ducks died from pesticides used by other farmers.

“Farmers’ Friend” also brought in experts to help create better pig breeding programs. The result was that the urban people enjoyed healthier food and the peasants earned more income.

Now Wei has a dream to become prosperous enough through organic farming to attract the young people who left to work in urban factories to return home to the village.

See Deng Xiaoping’s 20/20 Vision

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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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China’s Changing Face – Farmers’ Friend the Organic Way – Part 1/3

August 29, 2010

China uses more pesticides than any other country. 

To prove a point, Greenpeace conducted an experiment and sent 45 samples of fruits and vegetables from rural Chinese peasant farmers to an independent laboratory to find out how serious the problem was.

Five of the samples had no pesticides on them. The other 40 samples had 50 different kinds of pesticide on them.  Source: Greenpeace

This video is about a group called “Farmers’ Friend”, professional urbanites from Liuzhou City in Guangxi Province, who wanted to have healthier food to eat that was pesticide free. 

To achieve this, these Chinese professionals connected with peasants in rural China with goals to encourage organic farming that would offer higher incomes to the peasants and healthier food to urban people.

“Farmers’ Friend” wanted to work with the poorest peasants in the poorest rural areas.

Since 1980, hundreds of millions of rural people had moved to urban China to work in factories. This resulted in demands on peasant farmers to grow more food to feed the country, which results in heavy pesticide and chemical fertilizer use.

In 2006, the central government announced a policy of urban support for rural development. However, by then, “Farmers’ Friend” had already taken its first step in 2005 to encourage organic farming in rural areas.

See Women in Science & Business

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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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The “What If” Housing Bubble in China

August 29, 2010

Charles Hugh Smith writes for the Daily Finance and claims that China’s Housing Bubble Will End Badly.

That’s not going to happen for several reasons. The first reason is that China’s economy does not depend on the housing market to survive. Most people in China still don’t own their homes even in the cities.

In the US, housing loans to GDP were 79% but in China, that number is about 15%, which means real estate in China doesn’t prop up the economy.

Let’s look at one fictional individual who loses his job in China and can’t make his mortgage payment.

If he always lived in the city and has family (even distant relations), he will move in with them and rent his home to make the payments. The family may even pitch in so he doesn’t lose the home.

If that fictional Chinese man came to the city to work from a village, he returns home.  The peasants in rural China don’t have to worry about losing those homes.  In fact, it’s as if China had two economies: rural and urban.

If the government needs to develop the land the peasant’s home sits on, a new home is provided. More than seven hundred million Chinese live in villages owned by collectives and the central government. Those peasants don’t have a mortgage payment, pay rent or property tax.

Even in urban China, people only pay property tax once when they buy the home they live in.  Property tax for your home isn’t an annual burden as in the US.

Another factor is that the average savings rate in China is 40% and the wealthiest Chinese own about 40% of urban real estate.

See Betting Against China’s Housing Market

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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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Dead Zones

August 28, 2010

In the 2010, July/August Smithsonian magazine, there is an interesting piece about Jellyfish: The Next King of the Sea.

You may be asking what jellyfish has to do with China. Before I’m done, I will make that connection.

The piece mentions about 500 coastal, ocean “dead zones” around the world that have been so depleted of oxygen due to manmade pollution that the acidity level of the oceans is rising and threatening most of the life there.

Imagine the oceans without turtles, whales or porpoises and no more salmon suppers.

The Smithsonian says few sea creatures survive in these “dead zones” but the jellyfish does. A map in the magazine shows that the east coast of the U.S.A. and the Gulf Coast are thick with “dead zones”.

Europe is also dense with “dead zones” and so are Southern Japan and the tip of South Korea.

However, what’s surprising is how few dead zones there are along China’s coast.

The reason for that may be the fact that China started to industrialize in the 1980s, but Europe and America started polluting more than a century earlier than China, which I mentioned in Where Did All that Pollution Come From.

 Maybe China will realize that they still have time to save the oceans along their shores and do something before they have as many “dead zones” as the US and Europe.

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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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China’s Got Talent Too

August 28, 2010

There is America’s Got Talent and most of us know who Susan Boyle is from Britain’s Got Talent.

Now, from China comes an inspiration. Liu Wei lost both his arms when he was 10 after touching a high-voltage wire during a game of hide-and-seek.

At 23, on China’s Got Talent, he stunned people across China and brought tears to some when he played piano with his toes.

Many in the West may not be aware of how much China has changed.

China’s Got Talent is a British-owned Chinese reality show screened by Dragon TV in Shanghai.  It features performers of all types and ages competing for a performing contract with Fremantle Media and Sony Music Entertainment. Source: Cultural China

See Impressions of Liu Sanjie

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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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