The Sent Down Girl was filmed in China and directed byJoan Chen. It is a Mandarin language film with English subtitles and was filmed on the hauntingly beautiful Tibetan high plains.
During the Cultural Revolution, millions of teens were sent from the cities to the country or camps to learn humility and a simpler, peasant life.
This movie stars Lu Lu as Xiu Xiu, a teenage girl and Lopsang as Lao Jin, a castrated Tibetan nomad who is assigned to teach the innocent teen how to handle and train horses.
Xiu Xiu
Lao Jin falls in love with his young charge but he is a eunuch. Then there is a local low ranking Communist official and others, who introduce Xiu Xiu to a brutal world of sex for favors. This movie was not a condemnation of Communist China. This example ofsexual harassment and abuse of power can happen anywhere.
The movie was based on an award-winning novella banned in China because of political and sexual content. This was the first film Joan Chen directed. She is best known for her role in The Last Emperor as one of the emperor’s wives.
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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Why is it that everything that happens in China is that government’s fault?
At least that’s how the Western media and politicians seem to report it. If the Chinese government is to blame for what every Chinese citizen does, then every senator, congressmen, Supreme Court justice and the president of the United States are responsible for everything happening in America.
China has every right to deny they are responsible. After all, where is the evidence? I always thought people were considered innocent until proven guilty. Shouldn’t governments have the same right. Isn’t that the foundation of American justice? China has a huge population using the Internet. Anyone could be doing this.
In fact, there are 485 million Internet users in China, more than any other country in the world.
How would you like to keep track of 1.3 billion people? Heck, the government of the United States can’t even control its people, and I know that China does not control their people as much as many in the West want to believe it does.
Here’s an example of what happens when Yellow journalism in the West and politicians stir the pot. One Blogger Who Found Them Guilty is evidence that “simple” minds jump to conclusions based on propaganda, which is a two way street.
In addition Hacker Statistics.com says, “The United States currently leads as the country that suffered the most attacks in regards to online cyber threats with 35% of these aimed at citizens of the US; the US was also the country that hosted the most attacks, with 60% of phishing attacks starting from the US.”
Then there is this ranking of countries that are good in computer programming and the best in computer hacking. First place goes to Russia.
2. India
3. Poland
4. The United States of America …
15. China
Source:Share Ranks.com
However Rediff.com ranks the United States tops in malicious Internet activity, the number one country of orgin for Web-based attacks in 2009, accounting for 34 percent of the worldwide total.
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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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We arrived early when the parking lot and the streets were about empty. That’s the best time to get there.
Zhouzhuang is surrounded by water, and boats are needed for most short trips.
Zhouzhuang history is rooted in China’s Spring and Autumn Period (770 BC – 476 BC) more than a thousand years before Venice was established. However, it would not be called Zhouzhuang until 1086 AD .
The town is well known for its preservation of numerous buildings from the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
As you can see, it gets crowded. Most of these tourists were Chinese citizens from the growing middle class.
This is where I was a photo thief. I wanted to take a picture of these captured birds but the owners wouldn’t let me. He pointed at a sign that said I’d have to pay.
I walked a distance and used my meager telephoto lens to take this shot of the birds tied to the owner’s boat.
For a comparison with Venice in Europe, while there are no historifcal records that deal directly with the founding of Venice, available evidence has led some historians to agree that the original population of Venice were refugees from Roman cities near Venice (420 – 568 AD). From the ninth to the twelfth centuries Venice became a city state.
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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What is better, universal health care as China offers its citizens or what Wal-Mart offers its associates/employees? You decide.
From Making Change at Walmart.org, we learn, “Wal-Mart’s health care plans fail to cover hundreds of thousands of associates. In 2009, Wal-Mart claimed that 52% of associates were covered under their healthcare plan. The company has refused to disclose coverage rates for its 1.4 million U.S. employees since then. [4]
“Wal-Mart stopped offering health insurance to part-time employees (working less than 24 hours per week) in 2012. [5]
Taxpayers are forced to provide healthcare for Walmart’s Associates. Hundreds of thousands of Associates and their family members qualify for publicly funded health insurance. [6] Indeed, according to data compiled by Good Jobs First, in 21 of 23 states which have disclosed information, Wal-Mart has the largest number of employees on the public rolls of any employer. [7]
In fall 2011, Wal-Mart made it even more difficult for associates to get quality health care for themselves and their families. Beginning with the 2012 enrollment period, Wal-Mart rolled back health care coverage for part part-time employees and raised premiums for full-time employees by as much as 63% for non-smokers and their families and as much as 162% for smokers with families. . For employees earning $8.81/hour working an average of 34 hours per week, some of Wal-Mart’s 2012 healthcare plans would cost between 77% and 104% of the employee’s annual gross income. [15]
In fact, there is no universal health care in the United States. What is known as Obamacare in the US is not a universal healthcare plan that is run by the government. It is a healthcare plan that just expands health care through private sector health insurance programs with the government subsidizing the costs of health-care premiums for Americans that do not earn enough money to pay for it so huge corporations such as Wal-Mart will allow the government to subsidize its private sector profits. In addition, if Mitt Romney is elected president and he follows through with his promise to get rid of Obamacare, America’s health care will return to where it was in 2007 and 2008:
The percentage of people without health insurance in 2008 was not statistically different from 2007 at 15.4 percent. The number of uninsured increased to 46.3 million in 2008, from 45.7 million in 2007.
The number of people with health insurance increased to 255.1 million in 2008—up from 253.4 million in 2007. The number of people covered by private health insurance decreased to 201.0 million in 2008—down from 202.0 million in 2007. The number of people covered by government health insurance increased to 87.4 million—up from 83.0 million in 2007
The percentage of people covered by private health insurance was 66.7 percent in 2008—down from 67.5 percent in 2007 (Figure 7). The percentage of people covered by employment-based health insurance decreased to 58.5 percent in 2008, from 59.3 percent in 2007. The number of people covered by employment-based health insurance decreased to 176.3 million in 2008, from 177.4 million in 2007. Source: Census.gov
Maybe now, a few of China’s critics may understand why the Chinese Communist Party and most of China’s people continue to resist becoming a democracy similar to America. Don’t get me wrong. I love my country and I am willing fight for her again(if it was a real threat and not one based on malarkey and lies as Vietnam and Iraq were)as I did in Vietnam in 1966 as a US Marine, but she has some serious problems that will be difficult to solve regardless of who is the next president of the United States. In fact, I think if Mitt Romney is elected, the problems will become worse.
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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To compare universal health care in China to private sector health care, I’m going to use Wal-Mart as an example to explain why we cannot rely on the private sector when it comes to the importance of health care and the quality of life.
In the private sector in the US, Wal-Mart did not achieve success because a sorcerer waved a magic wand and “POOF” suddenly Wal-Mart is everywhere as if a light switch were turned on. The first Wal-Mart store opened in July 1962. By 1967, there were 24 stores. Today, forty-five years later, Wal-Mart has 2.2 million employees/associates worldwide and serves 200 million customers each week at more than 10,000 stores in 27 countries.
But China’s challenge is to serve 1.3 billion Chinese compared to Wal-Mart providing health care for 2.2 million of its workers. There is a HUGE difference in the numbers and China hasn’t had forty-five years to build the infrastructure of this new universal health care plan.
Of course, a China critic may point out Wal-Mart’s success because it was a private sector business but that same critic, out of ignorance or by design, will not mention what Christian Science Monitor.com says about Wal-Mart’s health care for its employees:
“In addition to stopping the retaliations and respecting workers’ right to free speech and assembly, OUR Wal-Mart members would like to see the retailer offer more dependable work schedules, affordable healthcare for full-time workers, and a living wage ($13 per hour minimum).
“Wal-Mart has been advertising that they are a family-oriented company. And if this is how family is treated, then I would rather not have a family at all,” says Ms. Cruz.”
In the private sector, the way corporations/businesses treat employees varies from company to company. There is no universal standard of treatment, and there never will be unless the private sector eventually is owned by one global corporation.
Business Insider.com shows how Wal-Mart treats its employees: “Wal-Mart Guts Its Employee Health Care Plan and Raises Premiums—Rates are expected to climb by more than 40 percent for some employees. Combined with high deductibles, employees are complaining that their health care will now eat up to 20 percent of their annual pay.”
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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Xiu Xiu
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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