What Makes China Different

December 4, 2019

One major difference is that most Chinese have NOT been seriously influenced by the politics and religious beliefs of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The major influences of Chinese Culture come from Confucian and Taoist thought.

In fact, the former prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew thought that Western-style democracy is incompatible with Confucianism and that the latter constitutes a much more coherent ideological basis for a well-ordered Asian society than Western notions of individual liberty.

Confucianism and Taoism appeared in China almost nine hundred years before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. It would take another three centuries before Christianity and Islam reached China, more than twelve hundred years after the 5th century BC when Confucian and Taoist thought was introduced to China.

The Jews arrived much later. Most scholars agree that a Jewish community existed in Kaifeng, China since the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127 AD), though some date their arrival to the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD), or earlier.

Buddhism arrived during the Han Dynasty, but by then China was already deeply Confucian and Taoist. Both have philosophies that focus on harmony and social order in society. Although Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism all mention harmony, too, the violence and wars caused by these religions have painted a wide bloody scar through history that continues today. You might be shocked to discover that Buddhists can be violent, too. If you are interested, I suggest you read A Short History of Violent Buddhism to learn more.

Confucius and many of his contemporaries were concerned about the state of turmoil, competition, and warfare between the feudal states. They sought philosophical and practical solutions to the problems of government — solutions that, they hoped, would lead to a restoration of unity and stability. – Columbia.edu

Taoism (also known as Daoism) is a Chinese philosophy attributed to Lao Tzu (c. 500 BCE) which contributed to the folk religion of the people primarily in the rural areas of China. Taoism focuses on the present – heaven and hell exist in how you connect to the present moment. On the other hand, Christianity teaches that heaven or hell happens after death.

Classroom.com says, “Taoism and Islam are very different in many ways. Religious Taoism is polytheistic, worshiping no single, omnipotent god, and instead venerating a pantheon of gods, many of whom have functional titles and roles. The Taoist classic text is the ‘Tao Te Ching.’ ‘Tao’ means, roughly, ‘the Way,’ and refers to both the ordering principle of the universe and to the gentle seeking of accommodation with it. … Islam says there is only one God, Allah.”

China like Singapore legally allows five religions, but only 200 million Chinese (14 percent of China’s population of 1.4 billion) practice Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism.

According to Religion in China – By the Numbers, there are 44 million Christians and 20 million Muslims in China today. Combined, Islam and Christianity represent less than five percent of China’s population compared to the United States with the largest Christian population in the world, about 75 percent of its 320 million people.

The most widespread religion in China is a combination of Buddhism, Chinese folklore, Taoism and Confucianism. It is estimated that 800,000,000 Chinese follow this tradition that retains traces of its ancestral Neolithic belief system including the veneration of the Sun, Moon, Earth, Heaven and various stars, as well as communication with animals. Folk religion in China has been practiced alongside Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism by Chinese people for thousands of years.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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Why does Frank Dikötter keep lying about China?

October 23, 2019

Frank Dikötter wrote what is called an ARGUMENT published by Foreign Policy.com. Dikötter alleges that “The People’s Republic of China Was Born in Chains” and “The Communist Party calls 1949 a liberation. But China was far freer beforehand.”

Dikötter has a right to his biased opinions about China, but he is wrong to the point of being a liar.

For instance, David C. Schak reports, “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.”

Later in his paper, Schak says, “The fall of the Qing Dynasty and the dynastic system in 1911 changed China significantly, but the major change to the condition of the peasantry was from armed conflict. Between 1911 and the communist takeover in 1949, China suffered thirty years of warfare: battles between warlord armies over territory; the Northern Expedition leading to the establishment of the Nationalist government in Nanjing; the extermination campaigns against the communists; the very deadly war against the Japanese (1937-45); and the resumption of the civil war from 1946 to 1949. Aside from the destruction caused by the battles themselves, marauding armies often confiscated crops and forcibly conscripted men, leaving the peasants with no resources. Moreover, competing warlords each taxed the peasants, sometimes many years in advance.”

Then there is Chiang Kai-shek, a brutal dictator from 1928 until his death in 1975.  Along with Mao Zedong, he is listed as one of the top nine killers of the 20th century. “Surprisingly, Chiang Kai-shek ranks number four, killing ten million people from 1928 to 1949.”

In 1927, When Chinese workers (some of them belonged to the Chinese Communist Party) attempted to organize labor unions and negotiate working conditions with better pay, Chiang Kai-shek, ordered his army to slaughter them. This resulted in the Shanghai massacre of April 12, 1927 and started the Civil War between China’s Communist Party and Chiang’s Nationalist dictatorship that would not end until 1949.

Before April 12, 1927, the Chinese Communist Party was one of several political parties that belonged to the so-called Republic of China that was founded by Sun Yat-sen soon after 1911, a republic that never held any elections.

Even after Chiang Kai-shek lost the long Civil War to the Chinese Communists in 1949, he remained the never-elected president of Taiwan. In fact, he declared martial law in Taiwan on May 20, 1949 and ruled with a brutal iron fist until he died in 1975. Martial law would remain in place until July 14, 1987, and Taiwan would not hold its first democratic presidential election until 1990.  That means, between 1949 and 1990, Taiwan was an authoritarian state and not a democracy.

The US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health reports, “In 1949, the life expectancy in China was only 36 years. In early 1980s, it has increased to 68 years. This increase in life expectancy is attributed mostly to improved nutrition and lowering of mortality due to decrease in infectious diseases. Though population, disease and mortality statistics of modern China are spotty and sometimes questionable, common consensus among the researchers is that since 1949 the public health situation in China has improved tremendously (after the Chinese Communist Party ruled the country).”

Mao might be as guilty as Chiang Kai-shek for brutality, but when Mao died in 1976, the average lifespan had dramatically increased from age 36 to 64.63. In addition, in 1949, China’s population was 541.6 million people. By the time Mao died, China’s population had reached 930.7 million people, an increase of more than 389 million people.

It is obvious that Frank Dikötter does not know what he is talking about unless he is deliberately spreading lies about China. It is a fact that the Chinese have a better quality of life and more freedom today than they have ever had throughout the history of their country.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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China’s October Golden Week Holiday

October 2, 2019

China and the United States have at least one thing in common, a holiday that celebrates the founding of a country.

For the United States, that day is July 4. History.com says, “On July 2nd, 1776, the Continental Congress voted in favor of independence, and two days later on (July 4th) delegates from the 13 (British) colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence, a historic document drafted by Thomas Jefferson.”

Of course, the United States would end up fighting its war for independence with the British Empire from 1775 – 1783. A war that lasted eight years until the country was really independent. During this conflict, the United States lost an estimated 25,000 – 70,000 killed vs 78,200 British, German and Loyalist troops that lost their lives.

China, on the other hand, waited until after the civil war to celebrate, and it was a long wait from 1927 – 1949, twenty-two years if we do not count the so-called time-out to fight World War II from 1937 – 1945. Some eight million Chinese were killed during a Civil War that was complicated by the Japanese invasion of China that killed an additional twenty-million Chinese.

Imagine what it must have been like to be fighting a Civil War and then getting invaded by another country at the same time.

In China, “National Day holiday is fixed at October 1–7 with adjacent weekend days being mandatory workdays to make up for lost time. This period is also called ‘golden week’ because of the biggest week for tourism in China, when people have a week off to reunite with families and take trips.”

China Highlights.com reports, “Due to preparations for the celebration of China’s 70th Anniversary, many top attractions in Beijing will be closed for a certain period in 2019.” Click the link in this paragraph to discover those facts.

The History of China’s National Day

After the Civil War ended, the People’s Republic of China was established, and an official victory celebration and ceremony was held in Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949.

The South China Morning Post reported, “Twice a year China sees a mass migration of its citizens as it celebrates Golden Week. … In 1999, an estimated 28-million people travelled for the first Golden Week. In October 2017, 705-million people travelled around China and spent 583.6-billion yuan (US$85 billion).”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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September 13th is Mid-Autumn Day

September 11, 2019

China’s Mid-Autumn Festival is similar to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. Families and friends in China get together and celebrate a bountiful harvest by coming together to eat, drink, and be happy.

Around the world, Chinese and Vietnamese celebrate this festival. For instance, in San Francisco, not far from where I live, the Chinatown Autumn Moon Festival took place on September 7 – 8, 2019.

During the Mid-Autumn Festival, it is customary to have Moon-Watching parties, and offerings are still made to the Moon.

Also known as the “Full Moon Festival,” the Mid-Autumn Festival falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month and takes place when the moon’s orbit is at its lowest angle to the horizon, making the moon appear brighter and larger than any other time of the year.

One historical event linked to this festival is the Moon Cake Uprising.

Near the end of the Yuan Dynasty (1271 – 1368 AD), many Chinese wanted to take back their country from the invading Mongols. Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644 AD), united the resistance forces. However, it was not easy to organize the different factions spread across the country so the rebels hid notes with details about the rebellion in mooncakes and sent them to the different factions on Mid-Autumn Day. Since then, eating moon cakes have been a Chinese custom during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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Say Hello to “The Farewell”

September 4, 2019

If you marry someone that grew up in China, the odds favor that you will also be married to a Chinese family. When I married Anchee in 1999, I got a lot more than a wife. In China, I also was accepted by her family, her friends, and I started to learn about the country of her birth, its long history, and its culture, and I haven’t stopped learning. The only thing I haven’t learned is Mandarin, a tonal language where what sounds like one word can be four words depending on the tone. I’m not tone deaf. I enjoy listening to music, but I cannot tell the difference between the sounds needed to pronounce four different words that sound like they are one word.

I saw “The Farewell” alone on a Monday morning in an almost empty theater with two other people that sat higher up in what I call the bleachers. The film offered more than the drama of a Chinese family that discovers their beloved grandmother in China has a short time to live. Throughout the film, the Chinese family and their friends, and even the Japanese bride hide the doctor’s verdict from the grandmother.

To keep this secret, her two sons that haven’t been to China with their families for twenty-five years, use the excuse of a sudden engagement to bring family and friends together for this unexpected wedding before grandmother dies. One son lives in the United States, and his brother lives in Japan where his son has a Japanese girlfriend, the bride to be.

The lead character is Billi. She was six when her mother and father moved to the United States. When we first meet Billi, she is in her twenties and living alone in a postage-stamp-sized apartment in New York City.  She can’t pay her rent, won’t ask her parents for financial help, and doesn’t want to move back home.

Billi played by Awkwafina, an actor that was born in New York City in 1988 as Nora Lum, grew up Chinese in the United States helping her understand the differences between the two cultures.

What I think made this film worth watching was witnessing Billi’s American individualism in conflict with China’s collective culture, until she remembers or learns, when in China, do as the Chinese do.  By the way, the grandmother lives in an older building. Many residential buildings in China’s cities are newer looking and more modern than what I saw in this film unless the story took place before the 21st century.

Too bad, so many Americans are not interested in learning about other cultures. “The Farewell” opened July 12, 2019, and its total domestic lifetime gross to date is about $12.8 million. More Americans should see films like this one instead of cartoons like “Monsters, Inc.” that grossed almost $600 million.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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