The Copy-Cat Dietary Revolution

September 7, 2011

Al Jazeera’s Melissa Chan reported from Beijing February 14, 2011, and said, “We are looking at one of the most amazing achievements in the history of mankind. In just one generation, China has managed to lift 500 million people out of poverty and many in China now have more than enough to eat.”

The reason for this is revealed by the CIA World Factbook, which says only 2.5% of Chinese live below the poverty line with a 7.8% illiteracy rate compared to India’s 25.0% living below poverty and 39% illiteracy rate.

However, since there is so much to eat in China, Chan says, “the one child policy encourages doting parents to stuff their children with all the things (meaning too much food) they were denied.”

This has resulted in an explosion of urban fat.

To make her point, Chan compared meat consumption in the U.S. with China revealing that China consumes almost twice as much meat as America. However, Chan points out, there are four times as many Chinese as there are Americans.

What lesson can the Chinese learn from the United States when it comes to eating too much meat and fast food?

According to the CDC, this consumption has resulted in one-third of U.S. adults (33.8%) being obese while about 17% or 12.5 million children ages 2 to 19 are obese, and according to US-China Today, more than 74% of US adults age 15 and older are classified as overweight.

The difference between overweight and obesity is determined by using weight and height to calculate a number called the “body mass index” (BMI).

BMI is used because, for most people, it correlates with their amount of body fat. An adult who has a BMI between 25 and 29.9 is considered overweight. An adult who has a BMI of 30 or higher is considered obese. Source: CDC Defining Obesity

With an overweight percentage of 38% and rising, mainland China is home to a staggering 380 million-plus people with weight problems, and studies show that weight issues are becoming increasingly prevalent among urban youth (920 million Chinese are not overweight). Source: US-China Today (University of Southern California)

The US, on the other hand, has about 231 million Americans that are overweight leaving 81 million that are not.

This love of meat and fast food in the US and China has resulted in 11.1% of the US population to suffer with the lifestyle disease of diabetes while only 9.7% of China’s population suffers with it.

For a better idea of middle-class prosperity, meat and fast food, consider that in 1992, the rate of diabetes in China was only 2.5% (diabetes has increased in China almost 400% in 18 years) and the first KFC opened in China twenty-four years ago in 1987.

Today, KFC operates 3,200 fast food restaurants in China, while Pizza Hut has 510, McDonalds 850, and Starbucks 450.

Discover The Challenge of Rural Health Care in America and China

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

3 Comments | America, business, China, Chinese food, Chinese middle class, economy, food, health care | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Education in the Real World – Part 2/2

September 6, 2011

Compulsory education in China for primary education is from ages 6 to 12, and in 2001, there were 121 million students enrolled in this system.

Unlike the United States, almost half of those 121 million students dropped out of school at age 12 or entered vocational training, while the other half went on to the junior secondary education system, which educates ages 12 to 15.

Another 54.8 million children drop out of China’s education system at the end of the junior secondary system at age 15.

China’s senior education system educates about 12 million students ages 15 to 18, which means China’s top 10% of all students, while in America, the public schools are still struggling to teach 90% of the children that started school at age 6, and about a third are not interested for a variety of reasons such as the self-esteem parenting movement, hunger or safety.

In China, to be accepted into the senior education system, students must take an entrance test called the ‘Zhongkao’, which is the Senior Secondary Education Entrance Examination held annually in China to distinguish junior graduates.

While exams in China compare students so only the best move on, exams in America do not do this. Instead, exams in the US are used to measure the success of schools and teachers, and students are not treated as failures no matter what their score.

When a student fails in the US, the teacher is often blamed—not students or parents.

However, China’s school system operates mostly on meritocracy so only the best students move on, while the US keeps every student until age 18 no matter what their academic performance, attitude toward education or classroom behavior is.

The reason so many students are kept in the American education system is that there is no competition among students to succeed since the system is designed to make it look as if all students are equal.  Often, one student graduates at age 18 reading at a 4th grade level, while another from the same class graduates reading at the university level and these two students may have been taught in the same classrooms by the same teachers.

America does this so students will not be embarrassed or feel bad about themselves. Instead of failing the student, the US fails the teacher for what the student did not learn even if the student did not study.

In China, if a student stays in school and makes it into college, he or she can be assured to be ready for university work but in the United States over half of high school graduates cannot do university work and must take remedial classes before enrolling in university courses.  This creates a huge economic burden on America’s economy due to a majority of Americans refusing to accept reality that countries such as China accepted long ago.

Return to Education in the Real World – Part 1

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This edited and revised post originally appeared on August 8, 2011, at Crazy Normal as Civil Disobedience and No Child Left Behind – Part 4

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

2 Comments | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese middle class, cultural differences, education, family values, parenting | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Wage Thieves in the Private Sector

August 20, 2011

Tom Carter, the author of China: Portrait of a People, sent me a link to a forum on political and social change in China that I found interesting. The forum was published in the Boston Review.

One in particular that I agreed with was China’s Other Revolution by Edward S. Steinfeld.

Steinfeld points out that “patterns of inequity are unfortunately not unique to the Chinese experience”, and then he makes a strong point when he writes, “One need look no further than the United States and Western Europe for developmental histories replete with exploitation, abuse, violence, and environmental degradation.”

By coincidence, the same day Carter sent me the link to this forum in the Boston Review, I read Wage theft a scourge for low-income workers by John Coté, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle.

It seems while many Americans and the Western media often criticize China for exploitation of migrants, low-skilled wage laborers, and the rural poor, the same practice is alive and well in the United States.

Coté writes, “It’s part of a national scourge known as wage theft. More than two-thirds of low-wage workers (in the United States) reported some type of pay-related law violation…”

The piece Coté wrote for SFGate was on two pages and ends with six facts.  One says, “$56.4 million is stolen every week from (low-wage) workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.”

In addition, Poverty News reports, “Low-wage workers in the United States are gripped by increasing financial insecurity as they inch along an economic tightrope made riskier by pervasive job losses and rising prices. Many struggle to pay for life’s basics—housing, food and health care—and most report having virtually no financial cushion should they stumble.”

How many Americans are considered low-wage workers?

According to the Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston College, “The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2008, 39.8 million people (13.2 percent of the U.S. population) lived at or below the Federal Poverty Level (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2009).”


When it comes to poverty, America ranks 3rd worst among developed nations.

If two-thirds of these low-wage workers (and there may be more) in the U.S. are being cheated, that is about 26 million people that are not being paid what they earned.

It seems to me that the American media, the nation’s leaders and most Americans should focus on solving these types of problems in the U.S. before criticizing other countries.

Discover more from The India, China battle to eliminate poverty and illiteracy

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

6 Comments | America, business, capitalism, China, Chinese middle class, Chinese minorities, economy, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Building China too Fast and the Struggle to Slow Down

August 18, 2011

Andrew Thomas of Aljazeera English reported from Chuzhou, China July 13, 2011.  He tells us about real estate agents in Beijing canvassing the traffic during rush hour, which happens to be most hours in China’s capital.

In the U.S., we might see homeless people going car to car offering to clean windows for a dollar but in China, the odds are those people going car to car will be real estate agents handing out flyers urging people to buy homes.

During most of the day, one can get around Beijing faster on foot or using the subways than driving a car or taking a taxi, which usually results in sitting dead in traffic breathing fumes from other cars.

Thomas reports that the real-estate agents will do just about anything to sell apartments hitting the market. The reason is that the Chinese are building more new apartments than any country on earth.

In Chuzhou, three hours from Shanghai, Thomas takes us on a tour of what he calls an “unremarkable town” and says this level of housing development is happening all over China.

Thomas says, between 2009 and 2010, there was a 41% rise in housing construction as prices soared. He then questions if Chinese speculators are driving this housing bubble.

In addition, he says China’s electricity authority, last year, reported that over 65 million homes use no power because they are standing empty as prices keep going up.

Thomas says China’s government is worried and wants to avoid a real estate bubble bursting so they have raised interest rates and increased the minimum down payment people must pay for second homes.

Stephen Joske of the Economist Intelligence Unit says, “We are not looking at a bubble burst resembling anything like what’s happened in the U.S.—probably a short correction.”

Therefore, for economists in the West that keep predicting China’s housing bubble will burst and slow China’s growth, think again.

As for aspiring home buyers, many in China are waiting to see what happens and are hoping prices go down. Thomas says a price drop could hurt many overseas markets that depend on China’s growth and development.

If a real estate bubble bursts in China, the odds are that the shock waves will be felt worse outside China in countries still recovering from the 2008 global financial crises caused by the private banking and financial sector in the United States, and Thomas explains why that may happen.

The reason for this speculation may be the central government’s plans to move a few hundred million more rural Chinese into newly built urban cities and new homes in older cities as China transitions from an economy dependent on exports to one driven by middle class consumption.

These property speculators are betting on the future.

Discover more from The “What if” Housing Bubble in China

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

7 Comments | business, capitalism, China, Chinese middle class, economy, environment, government | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Expressway Dilemma and the Solution – Part 2/2

August 10, 2011

One element of China’s plan is to not become addicted to foreign oil as the U.S. already has and one-step toward achieving this goal led China to become a partner with Shai Agassi and Better Place — something Washington D.C. has not done.

Time and Foreign Policy magazines recently named Shai Agassi as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.  The reason is that Agassi, an entrepreneur from California, launched a company called Better Place.

Deutsche Bank analysts may have already concluded that the Better Place’s approach to end global “oil” addiction could be a “paradigm shift” that causes “massive disruption” to the auto industry, and has “the potential to eliminate the gasoline engine altogether”.

To achieve a world free of a dependency on oil, Better Place has already partnered with California, Hawaii and Canada, while globally, Better Place is working with Australia, China, Denmark, Israel, Japan and the European Union.

On June 18, 2011, Better Place unveiled Europe’s first battery switching station in Denmark, and you may have noticed that China, as one of Better Place’s partners, is positioning itself to save China from the same fate that has already happened to politically gridlocked Washington D.C.

The station in Denmark, which show cased the company’s battery switching technology, is the first of 20 battery switching stations to be deployed across Denmark over the next nine months.

In the next few years, if successful, Better Place may lower the cost of driving significantly and break big oil’s monopoly on the economies of the world while lowering the cost of cars worldwide by providing an affordable, convenient and sustainable system through a revolutionary switchable battery model.

This means that instead of filling up with gas when the tank is empty, a driver pulls into a Better Place switching station and swaps battery packs in less time than it takes to wait in line and fill a tank with gasoline or diesel.

Return to or start with China’s Expressway Dilemma and the Solution – 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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

7 Comments | America, business, capitalism, China, Chinese middle class, economy, environment, government, politics, science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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