China’s Electric Challenge

May 10, 2010

To bring electricity to the 1.3 billion people in China is a challenge due to the terrain. If we count only land, America is the third largest country and China the second. Russia is first.

To give you an idea, America has 922,095,840 square miles of cropland to feed 4.5% of the earth’s population. China, by comparison, has 247,878,000 square miles of farmland to feed 20% of the earth’s population. The rest of the land is either desert or mountains.

Currency from the Song Dynasty

Never forget that during the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279 AD), China had the highest per capital production and income in the world. At the time, China’s GDP was the largest in the world until the middle of the 19th century when Western Imperial colonial powers invaded China winning two Opium Wars. Source: ELSA Berkeley.edu

Discover China’s clean coal power plant in Tianjin

See Electricity is the Key

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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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America Electrified — China’s Road Map (Part 2 of 2)

May 9, 2010

In 1935, FDR issued an executive order to create the Rural Electrification Administration to bring electricity to millions of rural Americans.

The sad fact is that if President Obama were to propose doing something similar today, the issue would become devisive.  Politics might stop the process. The Tea Bag people would scream socialism, big government. They would march in the streets calling it “Obamapower” instead of the REA.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt - 32 President of the United States

It took six years after the REA was launched in 1941 to help 800 rural electric cooperatives to string 350,000 miles of power lines.

Click on the America’s electrical grid and learn more about what it took to build the most extensive electric transmission system in the world.  The electrification of America took more than half a century and is still evolving.

The biggest difference between China today and America in the 1950s is the population.  America electrified a nation with a population of about 160 million people.  China has 1.3 billion—a daunting task. Since China has connected about five hundred million in less time than it took the United States to connect far less, if anyone can do it, the Chinese can.

Discover China Going Green or return to Part 1 of America Electrified

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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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America Electrified — China’s Road Map (Part 1 of 2)

May 9, 2010

In 1952, China was producing 0.005 kilowatts of electricity. Now they need trillions of kilowatts. After Mao’s death and Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world, China seriously started building electrical power plants.

If you study the timeline for the growth of America’s electrical grid, you will discover that Thomas Edison designed and built the first direct current (DC) power plant in 1882. Then the first alternating current (AC) power plant opened in 1885 and transmitted power 200 miles from the plant.

By 1927, forty-five years later, the first power grid was established in Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t until 1933 that Congress passed legislation establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority, which now produces 125 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year.

Similar to China today, in the 1930s there was a huge gap between people in America’s towns and people on farms. About 10 percent of U.S. farm families had central station electricity in the mid-30s. Like China, almost all urban people had power. Source: Living History Farm

Go to Part 2 of America Electrified or discover Deng Xiaoping’s 20/20 Vision

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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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Second China Quiz

May 8, 2010
The answers may be found anywhere in the first three hundred posts for this blog.  The first person to answer all the questions correctly will win a free copy of either My Splendid Concubine or Our Hart.

This prize will be open until the first person answers all the questions correctly. Write your answers in a comment to this quiz.  Make sure to number the answers so they match the questions and provide an e-mail address for me to contact you. Each question has a link that will take you to where you may find the answers.

China

1. What does the First of all Virtues mean?

2. What is the Chinese attitude toward health care?

3. What was the life expectancy for the average Chinese person before the Communists won China in 1949?

4. What was the debate on salt and iron about?

5. Chinese Internet users are _____________ as likely to have blogs as Americans. (fill in the blank)

6. (From Similar “Oily” Interests) What is Wahhabism and where does the money come from to pay for this?

7. What happened during Deng Xiaoping’s Beijing Spring?

8.  What happened to Deng Xiaoping’s son when he spoke out against the Cultural Revolution?

9. What vital key does China hold for humanity’s future?

10. How does Communist China treat its minorities compared to the way minorities have been treated in the United States?

11. Who was Faith Dremmer and what happened to her?

12.  What did Peter Hessler say about happiness?

13.  How many of the world’s smokers live in China?

14.  What is the name of China’s Oprah and how large is her audience?

15. What is the difference between China’s labor laws and United States?

16. What did Lin Yutang say about the Chinese and Christianity?

17. What did the first emperor of China consume that contributed to his madness and death? (This answer is in one of the nine linked posts in a series about Qin Shi Huangdi.) Why did Qin Shi Huangdi do this? (must answer both questions for # 17)

18. When the “Cult of the Dead Cow” gains access to your computer, what do they do?

19. Which issue of National Geographic magazine provides proof that Tibet was part of China for centuries before Mao’s invasion and reoccupation?

20. What is the name of the all-electric car being manufactured in a joint effort between Chinese and California partners?

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Great Generations

May 7, 2010

America and China both have a generation that matured during tough times.

I wonder if the American generation that survived the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the Great Depression and won World War II, would riot like these Greek mobs. 

My parents were from the Great Depression generation. At fourteen, my dad went into the mountains near Los Angeles to fill fifty-pound bags with oak leafs for a nursery, and he mucked out horse stalls at Santa Anita. At fourteen, my mom was a server in a coffee shop in Eugene, Oregon. She supported her mother and younger sister from the tips. Mom and dad weren’t perfect. They had vices.

Japanese invasion of China, World War II, Chungking

What happened to America after World War II is happening in China today. The Chinese who are turning China into a super power are the ones who fought the Japanese during World War II, who won the revolution to free China from Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang dictatorship and threw off the yoke of Western Imperial colonialism. They also survived the deprivations and repressions of the Cultural Revolution under Mao.

Hardships breed survivors, who do not riot when economies collapse. They work for less at any job. They eat yams, rice and soybeans instead of ice cream, candy, French fries, drinking sodas or Starbuck’s lattes.

People from the great generations did without TVs and iPods. They survived without phones and the Internet. They saved and paid with cash instead of using credit cards.

Discover more from Deng Xiaoping’s 20/20 Vision

Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

Sign up for an RSS Feed for iLook China

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