After I wrote Superior versus Civilized, which mentions that for millennia the Chinese considered everyone outside of the Middle Kingdom a barbarian, the subject stuck in my head.
Why?
As I researched the “Superior versus Civilized” post, I ran into Blogs where Westerners were calling the Chinese barbarians for a variety of reasons.
In this post, I will focus on the opinion I discovered in one Blog.
Warning, the images in this video are graphic and bloody.
The Blog, Animal Abuse in China, attempts building a case that the Chinese are barbarians in these words, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be determined by the way it treats its animal. China tortures animals while little children laugh and cheer. Help the animals who cannot help themselves from this horrific life of torture. Thousands die daily from torture! WE MUST PUT THE SPOTLIGHT ON CHINA!!”
However, if that opinion were true and China was guilty, then most nations are also guilty.
Watch the three YouTube videos to see what I mean.
Warning, the images in this video are graphic and bloody.
Many people in most countries are animal lovers but still eat meat, and there is a lot of pain and suffering that takes place from feed lot to a sanitary package in a super market.
I don’t eat meat, but I’m not an animal lover. I don’t hate animals either. I’ve been a vegan since 1981. Imagine all the animals that didn’t suffer, because I stopped eating meat for health reasons.
Warning, the images in this video are graphic and bloody.
Let’s refer back to that opinion where it says, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be determined by the way it treats its animals.”
If true, America and all Western nations are filled with barbarians. Passing laws won’t change the behavior of people you might consider to be barbarians—wherever they live. New laws just means more people who get caught go to prison, and the United States already has more people locked up than any nation on the planet.
If you don’t believe that, study what happened in America during Prohibition(1920 – 1933). Just click on the link and look at what the charts reveal.
I’m going to borrow an “edited” quote attributed to Jesus Christ—who never wrote anything down—that says, Let the nation that has no guilt cast the first stone.
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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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In the West, Pliny’s Natural History encyclopedia (77 – 79 A.D.) was a massive compilation of practical information on medicine and on the natural world. The first institutions in Europe that were considered universities were established in Italy, France, Spain and England in the late 11th and 12th centuries A.D., and public education has been a development of the last 150 to 200 years.
In contrast, many Chinese scholars believe the history of education in China can be traced back as far as the 16th century B.C. during the late Xia Dynasty (1523-1027 B.C.). Throughout this period, education was the privilege of the elites. China Education Center.com
It was during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), that China’s first public education system was established, so it should not come as a surprise that the origins of China’s first encyclopedias can be traced to the late Han Dynasty. The biggest Chinese historiographic work of antiquity was written during this period, and Chinese calligraphy developed into an art.
Then, 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.
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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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The first time I read about China’s singing crickets was in “Empress Orchid” by Anchee Min. Retired concubines spent time carving gourds where these crickets lived to entertain empresses, emperors and princes.
Then I learned about China’s fighting critics from a comment left on this Blog, and there was a link included.
While writing this post, I Googled the subject. In Gardening4us.com, Catherine Dougherty tells us, “cricket culture in China dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618 – 906 AD).”
She says, “It was during this time the crickets first became respected for their powerful ability to ‘sing’ and a cult formed to capture and cage them. And in the Sung Dynasty (960 – 1276 AD)… cricket fighting became popular.”
In TrueUp.net, Kim says, “The Chinese consider the cricket to be a metaphor for summer and courage…”
In addition, Pacific Pest Inc. says, “Crickets are popular pets and are considered good luck in some countries; in China, crickets are sometimes kept in cages, and various species of crickets are a part of people’s diets … and are considered delicacies of high cuisine in places like Mexico and China.” Soon, the United States may be added to this list—Exo, a U.S. company, is producing protein bars from cricket flower. Exo says, “After cleaning the crickets, we dry them to remove the moisture and mill them into fine flour. The result is slightly nutty tasting flour that is high in protein and micronutrients.”
Then from Home Made in China, we learn from Gogovivi, who is based in Qingdao, North China that, “Summer used to mean picking berries in the yard and making jam, canning green beans, going to the farmer’s market, BBQs, lawn mowing, hiking, swimming. Now my whole family looks forward to the arrival of singing crickets.”
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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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When I saw the film Mao’s Last Dancer—unlike most U.S. citizens—I went with two people who grew up in China and survived the Cultural Revolution.
As we left the theater, my Chinese friends made these comments. “Great movie. Well done. It shows what China went through. If American audiences don’t see this movie because the lead is Chinese, they don’t want to learn about China.”
The evidence seems to support this thinking because Mao’s Last Dancer only earned $4.8 million from the box office in the U.S. while earning almost $17.5 million in theaters outside the U.S. Maybe the distributor had something to do with the results, because the film at its widest release was only in 137 theaters. In fact, we had to drive more than thirty miles to see it, because in the film’s first week, it was only in 33 theaters.
However, for the first showing of the day, it was a nice audience—several hundred at least.
Mao’s Last Dancer was a great but misleading title. When the dancer, Li Cunxin defected to the U.S. in 1981, Mao had been dead six years. How could he be Mao’s last dancer? In addition, there are ballet troupes all over China—even today—including Beijing where Li learned ballet.
The Huffington Post review said the movie was middlebrow and rises above the pack if only by a little. The film critic was Marshall Fine, and I disagreed with him.
If Fine knew more about China’s history, he might understand why I disagree.
When Li was a child, China was in the middle of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a form of national (or collective) madness that lasted about a decade and was ended by Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death in 1976
Mao’s Last Dancer does a subtle but good job showing what rural life was like during the Cultural Revolution and afterward as attitudes started to change in China.
The movie also shows how tough the Chinese are when it comes to education. Working to gain an education is serious business in China—even today. What you see while Li and the other children are learning ballet reveals the Chinese mindset.
The New York Times review was kinder but still off the mark. Mike Hale, writing for the Times, said, “Mao’s Last Dancer is a story of a young and flexible Chinese man who comes to America, where he’s seduced by disco, creative freedom and a honey-haired Houston virgin–”
Can anyone blame young Li for being seduced by a glitzy party country build on debt while the early 1980’s China is a drab, colorless place just emerging from its shell? At the time, China’s metamorphosis was just beginning.
If Li had gone home to China and married the Chinese ballerina he was courting, today he would be living a lifestyle similar to what he saw in America. China has changed that much.
What took the U.S. more than a century to achieve, China accomplished in the thirty years since 1981. In fact, I was disappointed that there wasn’t a scene near the end showing one of China’s modern cities that compares to the Houston Li saw when he first arrived in the U.S.
Hall’s conclusion was wrong. Mao’s Last Dancer is not “strenuously brainless”. If Hall knew more about China, he would understand why my two Chinese friends believed the movie was worth seeing for its story and its educational value.
It seems that the Amazon reviewers of the film for Mao’s Last Dancer might agree with me because 133 of the 170 reviews have 5-stars. The average for the film was also 4.6 of 5. The book had 215 reviews for another average of 4.6 stars, and there were 156, 5-star reviews.
In the previous video, Li Cunxin mentions the poverty and hunger he knew as a child under Mao’s leadership of China.
However, while true, it would be misleading to think that conditions were better before Mao. Under Mao—even with the purges, the Great Famine (1959 – 1961) and the Cultural Revolution—the quality of life for the average Chinese improved steadily, if slowly, and the strongest evidence of that is life expectancy. Life expectancy was only 36.5 years in 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was founded, and the population was 400 million. In 1976, when Mao died, life expectancy had increased by 20 years to 56.5 with a population of 700 million. Today, life expectancy is 73.3 years with a population that is more than 1.3 billion.
In fact [China is known as the land of famines—Between 108 BC and 1911 AD, there were no fewer than 1,828 famines in China, or one nearly every year in one province or another. However, the famines varied greatly in severity.], throughout most of Chinese history the majority of Chinese have lived in poverty. As the hundreds of famines that have killed millions of Chinese attest, Chinese poverty has often been absolute, i.e., lacking the very material resources needed to sustain life and maintain health. … The PRC is the first Chinese government [in China’s long history] to attempt systematically to reduce both inequality and poverty. Griffith University, Australia. Poverty by David C. Schak
The Word Bank says, “Between 1981 and 2001, the proportion of population living in poverty in China fell from 53 percent to just eight percent.”
Be aware that China’s critics are always quick to cherry pick any facts that will make the PRC look bad without history or context.
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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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I’ve heard that it was Confucianism that caused China to fall victim to Western Imperialism in the 19th century, and the reason Mao started the Cultural Revolution his last decade was to correct this imperfection.
However, I believe that the collective culture created in China by Emperor Han Wudi (156-87 BCE)— considered one of the most influential emperors in Chinese history—is the reason that China’s civilization survived for thousands of years without suffering the fate of Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
The problem is not from Confucianism but a flaw in the way an element of Confucianism has been interpreted over the centuries. In fact, this flaw is buried so deep in the Chinese psyche that Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward and the tragic Cultural Revolution were not stopped because of it.
There were powerful individuals in the Communist Party who did not agree with what Mao was doing but did not speak out when they could have. Some of those individuals even suffered during the Cultural Revolution but still kept silent due to the power of piety.
It wasn’t until after Mao’s death that those same people acted and Deng Xiaoping came to power stopping the madness of the Cultural Revolution.
To criticize an elder in China—even when that individual is power hungry, senile or maybe a bit crazy—is considered similar to Christian heresy during the Spanish Inquisition. Piety means elders must be treated with respect as if they can do no wrong. Is there a way to find a balance and fulfil the duty of filial piety?
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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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