Copy Cat Chinese Middle Class

June 16, 2010

The Chinese are getting fat off McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut and having more heart attacks and diabetes just like Americans.

I believe in going green and weaning the world off oil and that has nothing to do with global warming.  It has to do with the pollutants that turned Los Angele’s air purple and caused asthma levels among kids to leap. If you want to find out how toxic carbon emissions are, park in a garage, close the door and sit there for twelve hours with the engine running. 

When I go to a movie theater, I walk and when I drive, I use a hybrid that averages about 40 mpg. I sneer at SUVs and there are many where we live—mostly driven by small, pot-bellied men and blonde-haired, white women wearing dark glasses.

I read in The Truth About Cars that SUV sales have climbed 90% in China, and the Wall Street Journal reports that China’s government has extended subsidies for trading-in old polluting vehicles for hybrids and all electrics to the end of the year.  If China is the totalitarian dictatorship critics in the West claim it to be, why can’t China rid itself of SUVs?

See China Going Green

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning My Splendid Concubine and writes The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

Sign up for an RSS Feed for iLook China

2 Comments | America, China, Chinese middle class, environment, health care | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Oil Greases a Shift in Global Power

June 6, 2010

Recently, I have written posts about China’s hunger for oil and energy. I also wrote a series about China’s need for electricity to build a middle class in rural China.

The DVB reported that the China National Petroleum Corporation has started building a trans-Burma crude oil pipeline to carry an estimated 240,000 barrels a day from Burma’s west coast to Kunming, the capital of China’s Southwestern Yunnan province.

China's Yunnan Province in green

While some may criticize China for working with a repressive government like Burma, it makes sense that China is doing this. After all, China has no choice but to do what it can to improve the lives of 750 million rural Chinese. To achieve this, they are working globally to provide China’s people with a higher standard of living while struggling to clean up an environment that is heavily polluted.

All one has to do is look at America’s history with dictators to see the dirty deeds that the US did in the national interest.  China has a “national interest” too and now they have the money to make things happen, as the US has for the last six decades.

_____________________

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

1 Comment | business, China, Chinese middle class, environment, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Poor in Paradise

June 3, 2010

Newsweek reported about China’s changing landscape in China’s Hobson’s Choice.  It’s a well-balanced piece and halfway down the page is a video, “Millionaires Overnight”, worth watching.  The message in that video is that sometimes it is better off staying poor.

Guilin, Southeast China

However, China doesn’t have much of a choice but to keep changing. There’s pressure from the hundreds of millions of have-nots in rural China to get what the new urban middle class already has. Then there is the drive to stay “strong” so no one will push China around as the Western powers and Japan did for more than a century after the 1st Opium War until 1949 when Mao won China.

This Newsweek piece talks about the central government waking up to the fact that they have to do something about the pollution.  However, an old Chinese saying explains the clean-up challenge best, “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away.” 

China’s one party government may appear powerful but reality is a grim fact. After all, the Communist’s Net Nanny’s cannot even keep Chinese from getting past the Internet censors and many Chinese play by their own rules regardless of laws that might end in a death penalty. Greed is a great motivator in any country.

See The Use of Power

_____________________

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

Leave a Comment » | business, China, Chinese middle class, environment | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Middle Class Defined

June 1, 2010

I finished reading “China’s New Middle Class: Constants and Variables” by Tom Doctoroff in the Huffington Post, and I agreed with most of what he wrote.

Doctoroff said that in Confucian society the burden on men to be the providers is very absolute and very heavy…, as a man, you are responsible for the overall wellbeing of your clan/family.

I agreed when Doctoroff wrote that the Chinese middle class would never become Westernized. They are becoming modern, they are becoming internationalized, but they are not becoming Westernized.

Shopping in China

There is one underlying truth in Chinese society that says the only absolute evil is chaos and the only absolute good is stability and order and this is a prerequisite for progress on a national and individual level…

Every strand of Chinese thinking reinforces the supremacy of stability and order, and this is learned from a young age, which comes from Confucianism. Doctoroff wrote that in Japan, this conflict is not nearly as severe, but in China, this conflict defines the topography of the Chinese heart. The Chinese see the central government as there for them to advance and to make order from chaos. They would never trade in the Chinese system for a Western style democracy.

One thing that wasn’t mentioned by Doctoroff was the earning power of the clan/family and how that collective earning and savings allows families to buy into the Chinese middle-class lifestyle.  When the mother of a friend of my wife wanted a better Shanghai flat, both children—a son and a daughter—came up with the cash. Most Chinese work hard and avoid squandering money.

Learn more about China’s Middle Class Expanding

_____________________

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

1 Comment | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese middle class, Confucianism | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China Aiming at Arctic Oil

May 26, 2010

If you are in Iceland and you see someone who may look like an Eskimo dressed in fur against the bitter, winter cold, look twice. That person may be a Chinese oil worker or the crewmember of a Chinese icebreaker.

Icebreaker

The reason is simple. As China brings its 1.3 billion people into the modern age so all Chinese may live like Americans, it takes oil to make that happen.  China’s critics, of course, will find fault no matter what.  If China does nothing to improve the lifestyle of rural Chinese, the government will be blamed. If the air is polluted from all the carbon exhaust from middle-class Chinese driving around enjoying their new Western lifestyle, China will be criticized for that pollution.  If the price for gas and diesel goes up at the pump in Europe or America, China’s hunger for oil will get the blame for that too.

However, China’s government could care less about any foreign patootie’s complaints, because the people they serve in China come first if they want to stay in power. It’s nice to have money, and the Chinese government has it while the rest of the world is in debt.

See “China’s Oil Hunger Grows”

____________________________

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

Leave a Comment » | business, China, Chinese middle class, environment, government, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »