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. 

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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”

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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.


Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck – Ambassadors of Good Will

September 10, 2010

 Imagine a diplomat in China who will influence future generations to love America and see it as a peaceful fun nation to be friends with.  That’s what is happening and Walt Disney is doing it.

The Financial Times says that Disney Publishing Worldwide is opening English language schools in China and plans to have 148 schools in the country by 2015 earning well over $100 million.

The curriculum features Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, the Little Mermaid and other Disney characters.

Enrolling children in this privately funded Disney language school is not cheap. It costs between $1,800 and $2,200 annually depending on which publication you read.

The Economist in Middle Kingdom meets Magic Kingdom pegged the price at $1,800, and says, “(Disney) has ten schools in Shanghai, five in Beijing and plans to double that number in the next year, slowly extending from China’s two largest cities to surrounding areas.”

I’ve written before about how important an education is to Chinese parents so it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Disney isn’t having problems finding students.  The challenge is to find enough qualified teachers.  Each classroom has “a local and a Western instructor.” 

Disney’s language schools are where the West truly meets the East without the bully tactics of real politicans.

See Teaching English in the Middle Kingdom

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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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Translating “We Do Chicken Right”

September 9, 2010

中學老師把 KFC 肯德基店裏的廣告 A middle school English teacher in China asked her students to translate China’s Kentucky Fried Chicken advertisement “We do chicken right”, and she received twenty-eight different translated answers.

Please keep in mind that the word “chicken” also means “prostitute” in modern Chinese slang depending on context.

[ We do chicken right!](烹雞專家)     發給學生練習翻譯,結果有以下答案:

Here is what the students wrote:

1. 我們做雞是對的!                    It’s correct that we be prostitutes,

2. 我們就是做雞的!                    We are cut out to be prostitutes.

3. 我們有做雞的權利!               We have the right to be prostitutes.

4. 我們只做雞的右半邊!           We want only be the right side of a chicken.

5. 我們只作右邊的雞!               We want to be chickens on the right side

6. 我們可以做雞,對吧?           We can choose to be prostitutes, right?

7. 我們行使了雞的權利!           We perform a chicken’s right.

8. 我們主張雞權!                        We call for chicken’s rights.

9. 我們還是做雞好!                    It’s better that we be prostitutes.

10. 做雞有理!                               It makes sense to be prostitutes.

11. 我們讓雞向右看齊!             Let’s ask the chickens to look right.

12. 我們只做正確的雞!             We only want to be the correct chickens.

13. 我們肯定是雞!                      We are prostitutes–no doubt.

14. 只有我們可以做雞!             We are the only one who could be prostitutes.

15. 向右看!有雞!                      Look at your right, there are chickens.

16. 我們要對雞好!                      We must be kind to chickens.

17. 我們願意雞好!                      We wish chickens all our best.

18. 我們的材料是正宗的雞肉! We use real chickens.

19. 我們公正的做雞!                 We must feel justified to be prostitutes.

20. 我們做雞正點耶∼∼               Time is right to prostitute.

21. 我們只做正版的雞!             We only want to be original prostitutes.

22. 我們做雞做的很正確!        To be prostitutes is to be correct.

23. 我們正在做雞好不好?        We’re making chickens – will that be okay?

24. 我們一定要把雞打成右派!We must turn the chickens into rightists.

25. 我們做的是右派的雞!        We are right-winged prostitutes.

26. 我們只做右撇子雞!            We are right-handed prostitutes.

27. 我們做雞最專業!                We are professional prostitutes.

28. 我們叫雞有理!                    The chickens and prostitutes are always correct.

China is a tonal language. There are four tones for each Chinese written symbol.  Each tone has a different meaning. Say something in the wrong tone, and you could insult someone.

Sir Robert Hart, the main character in the “Concubine Saga”, knew the importance of translating English into Chinese properly. Translation mistakes turn into insults that end in bad feelings that may lead to war.

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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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Changing Names

September 9, 2010

It was suggested in a Reuters news piece that because of 200 people, China should change hundreds of millions of computer keyboards.

Let’s examine the logic behind this suggestion, which I see as another example of Western meddling in China.

Due to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the U.S. bends over backwards and spends billions to make bathrooms and sidewalks usable for people who may be blind or use wheel chairs.

This happened in an individualist culture that puts the individual above the whole. To improve one life, twenty may be ruined or sacrificed—even the national debt may be increased.

The Braille Institute reports that there are 15 million blind and visually impaired people in the United States. That’s about 5% of the population.  What did it cost the U.S. to add that chirping noise to crosswalks for that segment of the population?

In my life, I’ve seen less than a handful of blind people with red tipped canes walking on sidewalks let alone crossing intersections.

Then according to AskJan.org, there are an estimated 1.4 million wheelchair users in the United States—that’s less than half-a-percent of the population, yet America spent billions converting sidewalks so there are ramps for wheelchairs to roll down to cross streets.

At the high school where I taught, there was one wheelchair bound teacher, who worked there for a few years.

He complained that there were no handicapped restrooms near his classroom. He had to go too far to pee.

The school district, because of the law, had no choice and spent about $30,000 to convert the nearest teacher’s restroom. A few years later, that handicapped teacher left the high school to work elsewhere.

One example I found estimated that providing free paratransit service to people with disabilities in Illinois would cost between 141.5 and 202.9 million. That’s one state of fifty and one service, which doesn’t include crosswalk conversions. Source: Transportation Research Board

Now, those values that have contributed to America’s national debt have cropped up in a Reuters piece that says about 200 villagers in Eastern China are being “forced by the country’s unbending bureaucracy” to change their family name as the character is so rare it cannot be typed.

How many millions or billions would it cost to add a symbol to the Chinese language and replace all those keyboards so 200 out of 1.3 billion would be able to spell their last name as they have for centuries? Aren’t there better things to do with that money?

See China Bashing

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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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