Bo Xilai’s 32 Million

October 26, 2010

When you hear about crime and corruption in China and how horrible it is, remember the name Bo Xilai, and what he is doing to combat that image.

In 1930, mountainous Chongqing was home to about 200 thousand people.  Today, this municipality is the fastest growing urban center on the globe with an eye popping 32 million. Seven and a half million live in the metro area.

Chongqing is not one of China’s bustling coastal cities as Shanghai is. It sits almost 900 miles inland west of Shanghai or more than 1400 kilometers from the sea. Chongqing is the biggest inland river port on the Yangtze in western China.

During World War II, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist retreated here to set up their provisional capital—far from the Japanese front lines.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the city became notorious for organized crime and corruption well before the Communist era.


The word “alleged” means an assertion made by a party in legal proceedings that is still to be proven.

In Chongqing, gangsters oversaw businesses involving billions of yuan and the corruption reached into the law-enforcement and justice systems.

 In 2009, city authorities under the leadership of municipal Communist Party secretary Bo Xilai decided to do what none has accomplished before.

Foreign Policy magazine in Chicago on the Yangtze says the Chongqing Security Bureau cracked 32,771 criminal cases, arrested 31 mob bosses, sentenced six to death and gave the others long prison sentences.

Foreign Policy says that some of China’s political writers refer to Bo as an example of the “New Maoism” (I’ll write about “Maoism” in the next post).

Bo Xilai’s tough stand against crime earned him “Man of the Year” in a recent People’s Daily Internet Poll.  He is extremely popular among the working class and feared by corrupt officials and organized crime in China.

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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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Sun Yat-sen’s Last Days – Part 3/3

October 26, 2010

Later, it was discovered that the medical report of Sun’s condition was incomplete. Some of the samples and part of the report had been stolen and no one knows why.

During World War II, after the Japanese invaded China, Japanese troops occupied the hospital where Sun Yat-sen’s liver samples were kept.

Chinese representative requested the liver samples and the report be turned over to them.

Some of the liver samples were given to Dr. Tang Qiping, who worked at the Sino-Belgian Radium Institute in Shanghai.

Another man, Chu Minyi, forced Dr. Tang to give him those samples.

In 1946, Chu Minyi would go to prison as a traitor to China. He tried to use Sun Yat-sen’s liver samples to save himself. However, Chu was still executed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.

Sun’s liver samples would be lost during the revolution between the Communists and Nationalists. Later, it would be discovered that the samples had been stolen again.

When the Nationalists launched their Northern Expedition to take China from the warlords, the warlord in Beijing, who met with Sun before his death, was their only ally.

When Sun died, his political advisor wrote, “If Dr. Sun Yat-sen had lived for a few years or even a few months longer, China’s situation would have changed completely.”

Soon after Sun’s death in 1925, the democratic government created by him after the 1911 revolution failed.

After a struggle, Chiang Kai-shek gained control of the Nationalists, because he controlled the army. Chiang then gave orders to his troops to execute all the Communists, which started the revolution and led to Mao’s famous Long March.

Return to Sun Yat-sen’s Last Days – Part 2 or start with Part 1

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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.

Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

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Sun Yat-sen’s Last Days – Part 2/3

October 26, 2010

After arriving in Beijing, Sun Yat-sen saw a French doctor who gave him injections to help with his illness.

With his health growing worse, a nurse that worked at a German hospital was sent to his Beijing hotel to care for him.

His condition was so bad that at times he could not talk.

Since the Western medicine wasn’t improving his health, he was convinced by advisors to talk to an herbalist doctor, Ge Lianfu.

Sun Yat-sen told Ge Lianfu that he would give the Chinese medicine to the Western doctors to see if they could copy it. 

Ge said he wasn’t sure if Chinese and Western medicine were interchangeable.

Since Sun was a trained Western doctor, he did not believe that Ge’s treatment was going to work. Ge Lianfu concluded that Sun had liver disease but Sun did not trust the diagnosis.

While staying in the Beijing hotel, Sun was treated by doctors from the US, Germany, Russia and the Peking Union Medical College Hospital.  However, the treatments did not help and his condition worsened.

The western doctors concluded that he needed exploratory surgery. After they cut him open, they discovered liver disease as Ge Lianfu had diagnosed without surgery.  

In fact, Sun was in the final stages of liver cancer. At that time, Western medicine had no treatment to deal with a disease that he must have had for years.

In 1916, Sun had often suffered from abdominal pain and the Western doctors treated him as if he had stomach trouble.

Learn more about Chinese Herbalism (Eastern Medicine)

Return to Sun Yat-sen’s Last Days – Part 1 or continue to Part 3

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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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Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

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Sun Yat-sen’s Last Days – Part 1/3

October 25, 2010

In October 1911, a revolution in China overthrew the Qing Dynasty and ended more than two thousand years of imperial monarchy.

After the revolution, the Republic of China was founded but warlords still controlled much of China.

The leader of this revolution was Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), and he served as the first president of the Republic of China.

The Chinese Communist Party persuaded Sun that if his Nationalist Party formed an alliance with the Communists, Sun would gain support from China’s peasants and industrial workers to help end the anarchy in China. Source: Time Asia

In 1924, Sun Yat-sen’s health was not good. He was so sick he had turned command of the Nationalist navy and army over to Hu Hanmin, who would later be a rival with Chiang Kai-shek for control of the Nationalists (Kuomintang) in the late 1920s. 

The reason that Sun Yat-sen gave command of the navy and army to Hu Hanmin was because he wanted to go to the Baiyun Mountains of Guangzhou to recover from his illness.

However, Sun Yat-sen was invited to Beijing instead — the reason was to meet the warlord that controlled Beijing.

At the time, The Nationalists only held power in Southern China.

When he arrived by train, about 20 thousand people met him at the station. 

The warlord had invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing to talk about how to end the chaos and anarchy that still raged throughout much of China.

Continued in Sun Yat-sen’s Last Days – Part 2

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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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Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 1/7

October 23, 2010

The China Law Blog challenged an opinion I wrote about China becoming a republic with more freedom for the people.

I wrote, “The Economist wants India to win this race, because it is called a democracy as is the U.S., but what isn’t mentioned is that China is becoming a republic with a Chinese twist, which is what Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted.… Once you read the two pieces in The Economist, you may understand why India’s democracy cannot beat China’s evolving republic.” Source: Comparing India and China’s Economic Engines

The China Law Blog criticized this post saying, “In other words, iLook takes what he sees as China’s aspirations and assumes (without a shred of factual support or even argument) that China will very shortly fully achieve those aspirations.”

I don’t recall writing “very shortly“.

In fact, the freedoms the world’s democracies are urging China’s government to implement ASAP may not materialize for decades and some freedoms found in the West may never appear.

To understand why China may be moving toward more freedom slowly, the best place to start is with Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866 – 1925)

Sun is known as the father of China’s Republic.

To achieve this dream, Sun started by unifying the Communists and Nationalists into a two-party republic in southern China in the early 20th century. Both parties respected Sun, and he made it work.

Unfortunately, Sun died in 1924 at a time when China was in ruins and torn by anarchy and violence between competing warlords.

Then, Chiang Kai-shek, who was a member of the ruling class and a man who hated the Communists, went on a rampage slaughtering Communists and igniting a civil war that would rage even after Japan invaded during World War II. 

Chiang’s first move against the Communists was in the south. His next was in Shanghai to break the labor unions the Communists had been organizing to improve the lives of sweatshop labor working in foreign owned factories. 

Chiang Kai-shek’s goal was to exterminate the labor unions and the Communists, and he had support from the foreign factory owners.

The Communists that survived had no choice but to defend themselves. Surrender wasn’t an option.

Decades later, in 1949, the Communist Party won the revolution under Mao’s leadership and with the support of China’s peasants.

Chiang Kai-shek would flee to Taiwan and protected by the US, he would rule that island under martial law as a brutal dictator for twenty-six years. Taiwan would not become a democracy until years after Chiang and Mao’s deaths.

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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.

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