The Next Super Power

April 30, 2010

On April 24, I attended a panel at the 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The topic was “China: The Next Superpower?” The experts were Richard Baum, author of China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom; Zachary Karabell, Superfusion, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, China in the 21st Century.

Baum is an expert on politics; Karabell on money/economics, and Wasserstrom on history.

Wasserstrom said that China is not the older country. The PRC was sixty-years old while the United States was more than two hundred, and that the Communist and American Revolutions rejected colonialism then both expanded into other countries and territories to become world powers.

Baum added that the cultural differences are significant starting with Confucianism, which expresses collective rights instead of individual rights as in America.

Karabell mentioned that there was a lot of misunderstanding and ignorance between the United States and China. For one thing, China’s trade with the world is about even between exports and imports and what China buys from the United States keeps many Americans working.

Learn about Human Rights the Chinese 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 iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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

China’s Grand Canal

April 30, 2010

An example of how hard the Chinese work stands in the Great Wall of China and the Grand Canal. To understand the significance, we will look at the Suez and Panama Canals first as a comparison.

China’s Grand Canal

In the 19th century, the French built a canal 100 miles across the Isthmus of Suez. When it opened, the Suez Canal was only 25 feet deep, 72 feet wide at the bottom and 200 to 300 feet wide at the surface. About 20,000 ships use the canal each year. Source: History.com

The Panama Canal was started in 1881 by the French but ended a failure. The Americans finished the canal between 1904 – 1914. The canal was 51-miles long.  Today, it handles over 12,000 ships a year. Source: The Panama Canal

When I was in grade school, we learned about the Panama Canal in glowing terms. I’m sure the French and British brag about the Suez Canal in their textbooks too.

Until my first trip to China in 1999, I had never heard of the Grand Canal, which is the oldest and longest man-made canal in the world at more than a thousand miles from Beijing to Hangzhou south of Shanghai.

China’s Grand Canal

The construction started almost five hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ and was completed centuries later.  The canal is still in use today.  To finish it, the Pound lock was invented in the 10th century during the Song Dynasty. There are 24 locks and about 60 bridges.  Source: Wikipedia

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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.

Honorable Mentions in General Fiction
2012 San Francisco Book Festival
2012 New York Book Festival
2012 London Book Festival
2009 Los Angeles Book Festival
2009 Hollywood Book Festival

Finalist in Fiction & Literature – Historical Fiction
The National “Best Books 2010” Awards

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

4 Comments | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

One Step from the Global Gold Medal

April 30, 2010

Globally, China’s buying power has increased to the number two spot. Source: World Bank

Salary gaps still existed. In Beijing, people working in industries such as securities, banking and air transport obtained more than 100,000 yuan (14,245 U.S. dollars). While workers in the textile and agriculture industries had less than 20,000 yuan (2,849 U.S. dollars). source: Sina.com

Olympic Medal

An argument could be made that Americans earn more.  However, “The average annual income of Chinese farmers hit a record 5,000 yuan (732 dollars) this year as increased demand for migrant workers saw more money sent back to rural areas, state media reported Monday. Source” France 24 International News.” Source: France 24

With 1.3 billion people, a slight increase in earnings means more spending. China’s GDP to overtake U.S. by early 2020s, says analyst. Mainland to become world’s largest in about a decade, says Deutsche Bank. Source: Market Watch

See “Deng Xiaoping’s 20/20 Vision” http://wp.me/pN4pY-2o

 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Labor Laws

April 29, 2010

The “China Law Blog” compared China’s employment laws to those of the United States. Reading this post was a revelation, because I did not know that Chinese workers had more job protection than U.S. workers did.  I wondered how this came about.

The reason came about due to the transition from state controlled to private owned businesses.  Since 1978, when China implemented its open-door policy, the country went from no privately owned small businesses to more than 10 million small to medium-sized private enterprises that represent about 90 percent of all businesses.

Waiting for a bus after a day’s work.

Prior to this transition, state workers didn’t have to worry about a job. Once the transition began, significant numbers of workers started losing jobs. Since China’s constitution says the government’s role is to serve the people, the government changed the laws to make it more difficult to fire a worker offering better job protection.

“China’s employment law system is quite different from the U.S. The main difference is that the U.S. is an employment at will system, which means you can terminate employees at any time for pretty much any reason. China’s system is the opposite. The Chinese system is a contract employment system. … An employee can only be terminated for cause and cause must be clearly proved. … This whole situation makes the employment relationship and the employment documents much more adversarial than is customary in the U.S.” Source: China Law Blog

Discover China’s Health Care During Mao’s Time

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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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4 Comments | business, China, Chinese Culture, legal system | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Power of Debate in China

April 29, 2010

“The news triggered a heated debate that was played out all over the Chinese-language media and on the Internet. Eventually, the government backed down, and it’s been left up to industry groups to figure out new guidelines.” Source: Gr-r-r-r! Why I hate China’s e-bikes

This quote from Adrienne Mong, an NBC News Producer, caught my eye. Gasp! Is this evidence from a Western Media source that the people of China have a voice and use it? I hope Adrienne doesn’t lose her job for this slip.

This sounds like America where public debates often have an impact on public policy even if that impact is negative since the majority rules—well, in theory, since in America the majority is often ignored while we constantly hear from “loud” minorities. Take the Tea Bag people, who represent less than 15% of the population, as an example. I wish they’d shut up.

Every time I’ve been in China, we walk, take taxis or use the subways.  We don’t bike, but I have admired the electric bikes.  This is the first I’ve heard of an e-bike without lights.

bicycle and an Audi 80 collide in China

Considering that America loses about 45,000 people a year to highway deaths and, according to Adrienne Mong, China loses twice that with almost five times the population, I’m surprised the numbers for road kill in China are not higher. Many of the drivers in China are crazy. The busy streets look more like an NFL game in the Super Bowl. I’ve often observed that red lights are ignored and crossing any street and sometimes even using sidewalks is risky.

Also see, Where Did All that Pollution Come From?

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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, China, Chinese Culture, environment, government, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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