The BBC World reported that China’s premier Wen Jiabao said China urgently needs to press on with political and economic reforms but added that reforms had to be “gradual and orderly” and were essential for the country’s economy.
“This was the last NPC meeting before a leadership transition begins later this year,” the BBC report continued. “The once-in-a-decade transfer of power will begin in October. Vice-President Xi Jinping is widely expected to take over the party leadership from President Hu Jintao, and Vice-Premier Li Keqiang is tipped to succeed Mr. Wen… He is seen as the people’s champion and is known – in public at least – for his humility, says our correspondent.”
In addition, Xinhua Net.com reported, “Premier Wen Jiabao said Wednesday that China needs not only economic reform but also political structural reform, especially the reform of the leadership system of the Party and the government…”
“Wen warned at a press conference after the conclusion of the annual parliamentary session that historical tragedies like the Cultural Revolution may happen in China again should the country fail to push forward political reform to uproot problems occurring in the society,” Xinhau said.
Time Magazine’s Global Spin added, “The content was similar to that of the past nine times Wen has addressed the media at the end of the NPC, but this time the tone was sharper.
“He warned, for instance, that further delays in political reform increased the risk of Cultural Revolution-type upheavals.
“It was the rhetoric of a man who knows his days in the bully pulpit are numbered… And he expressed hope that the rewards of China’s economic growth could be more evenly spread to poorer regions in the country’s interior, a goal he and President Hu Jintao have advocated since they came to power a decade ago.”
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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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“You must matter,” she tells the girls that are her students. “You must be independent.”
The teacher wants her students to know the alternatives so they have choices. She says, “You don’t change overnight. It takes time. The ideas have to sink in.” This also applies to a country where less than a century ago women were the property of men and their feet were broken as children and bound to restrict growth.
The students are schoolteachers from China’s rural areas. They have come to Beijing for workplace training and to learn more about themselves.
Moreover, this is happening in Communist China and most Western critics have no idea this is going on.
The rural teachers in this program study the Chinese Constitution to learn about their rights and responsibilities.
After all, men and women are equal under the law in China, but there is a long way to go to change the old habits and ways of thinking to achieve all that equality offers.
As in the US, women in China are not paid the same as men for the same jobs.
One of the schoolteachers from rural China said, “You come to believe that you are not as good as men. But I hope when I return to my town that I will have the strength to stand up for myself.”
In October 2011, Chen Zhili, vice-chairperson of the National Congress Standing Committee and president of the All-China Women’s Federation, joined representatives from eleven other Asian and African countries and regions at a conference in Seoul, South Korea. In her speech at the conference, she “emphasized the four concepts of education as a fundamental right; of education as a means to achieving gender equality and empowering women; of the health and social benefits to be gained from investing in women and girls’ education; and of the responsibility all state governments and international society bear in promoting gender equality.” Source: Women of China
In addition, “Data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics shows that women in China ages 18 to 64 have had an average of 8.8 years of education compared to 9.1 years for men. The gender gap in average years of education has decreased from 1.5 years in 2000 to 0.3 years in 2010.” Source WIA Report – Tracking the Progress of Women in Academia
worth watching if you have the time – a PBS 2007 documentary running almost one hour
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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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In another post at Greenpeace.org, we learned that Greenpeace activists went undercover in China up to a year to infiltrate and investigate factories that were releasing hazardous chemicals into China’s waterways.
Greenpeace said, “Two weeks after we released our report, Puma came out with its promise to eliminate toxic substances from its supply chain. When we heard that, we were overjoyed. Since then Adidas, H&M, Nike and Li-Ning have all followed suit.”
Climate Voices from China
“More than 3,500 environmental organizations now have legal status in China,” Andrew Grant said. “While activists there are not as vocal as their counterparts in Europe or the United States, they have made an impact by encouraging transparency and pressuring local governments and industries to adhere to (China’s) new national regulations.
“Through a program called the Green Choice Alliance, environmental groups publish lists of companies in violation of environmental regulations and offer to conduct a third-party audit if a company chooses to clean up its act.
“Last year, under the supervision of environmental groups, independent auditors found that Fuguo’s Shanghai leather factory had rectified its major violations and reduced gas emissions.”
Yangtze River, China
“The local and national Chinese press has been very aggressive in uncovering environmental problems and mobilizing forces to go after polluters. Local newspapers have broken stories about cancer villages, which have been picked up by television networks and broadcast nationwide. In some cases, the revelations have been praised by government officials. In other cases the revelations have been embarrassing or hurt investments by officials, and the sources of the stories have been harassed or jailed.” Source: Andrew Grant, Discover magazine, March 18, 2011
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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Note from Blog Post — This post is iLook China’s fifteen-hundredth (1,500) post, and with it this Blog will be cutting back from posting daily to two or more days a week. The next post (1,501) will appear March 12.
When The Diplomat.com asked Li Yan, head of Greenpeace in East Asia’s Climate and Energy Campaign about China, Li Yan replied, “China has made impressive efforts to cut back its carbon emission growth, and it’s fair to say that China is doing much better than many other countries, including industrialized ones. However, with the rapid growth of emissions, China needs – and has the capability – to do more…”
“According to a recent U.N. Environment Program report, China has surpassed the United States in renewable energy investment in 2010, making it now the world’s largest… In 2010, China’s wind power installation capacity was about 42GW, which places China as the biggest installation country globally.”
In addition, a recent post by Ma Tianjie on the Greenpeace East Asia Blog said, “As early as 2009, after a series of lead pollution cases, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (China) had called for a ‘blanket inspection’ of heavy metal pollution facilities. This means, in theory, local governments should already have an inventory of local industrial facilities that release heavy metals, with basic information on who is discharging what…”
Gloria Chang is Greenpeace China’s key campaigner on climate change – June 2007
“It is clear that the government’s environmental protection apparatus, low in capacity and short in manpower, cannot fight this battle alone,” Ma Tianjie said. “The public, especially non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working for the protection of the environment, has a role in contributing to such efforts.
“In August 2011, the ministry (in China) made an unprecedented move by releasing detailed pollution information on more than 1,900 lead-acid battery facilites across the country. It was the first time that information on an entire industry’s environmental performance was made public.
“Reactions to the initiative were overwhelmingly positive. A close scrutiny of the data by the media, environmental NGOs and the public resulted in corrections and a dataset of improved quality, which would only help the ministry to better supervise the listed facilities.”
Ma Tianjie recently appeared on China’s CCTV news program “China 24” to discuss the recent toxic metal contamination of water supply in Guanxi Autonomous Region. You may learn more of this CCTV appearance at Greenpeace.org.
However, China is often criticized by its critics/enemies for censorship and controlling what the state owned media reports without any mention of broadcasts such as this one on CCTV with Ma Tianjie of Greenpeace East Asia.
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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I find it difficult to believe that a disabled American vet calling himself Chicomaniac would be posting comments from a remote location in China’s poorest province. However, that’s where two comments from this second cyber-bully assault (in recent months) may have come from.
I deleted the two comments from the posts they were intended for and added them to the appropriate location on this Blog – where the first cyber-bully attack is posted.
In fact, if you compare Chicomaniac’s two comments with those from the first cyber-bully assault, you may recognize similarities in the writing style and use of language, which is why I have posted them as a comment on the same page under the heading of Another Cyber Bully. If you visit this page, you may scroll up to see the comments from the first assault. This second cyber bully may be a copy cat.
Bully Online says, “The stalker exhibits a familiar pattern of behaviour. Stalking often starts as a result of rejection; rejection rage and abandonment rage motivate the stalker to seek revenge through a predictable pattern of stalking behavior. The stalker, usually a loner and socially inept, becomes obsessed with their target and bombards them with messages, emails, gifts, or abuse. The stalking behaviour can last for years and the intensity of abuse increases over time. The abuse, initially consisting of psychological violence, often escalates and culminates in physical violence…
“The Vengeful stalker is the most dangerous type whose mission is to get even and/or take revenge. Mostly male, he has a grudge and he’s going to do something about it…”
Chicomaniac said, “As a disabled vet I would like to add that the wrong guys made it out of ‘Nam and I hope when your time comes those who believe in America and what We stand for are allowed to have a chat with you.”
In an attempt to identify this cyber bully, I conducted several IP searches and traced the location to where those comments may have originated, and it turned out to be an organization that calls itself Xin Xin Ling located in northwest China.
The coordinates for the IP address were at Latitude 35 and Longitude 105 located near Lanzhou between Dingxi and Tianshui in the Ningxi Hui Autonomous Region northwest of Xian in a desolate region.
“This sparsely settled mostly desert region lies in the vast plain of the Yellow River in the north, which has been irrigated for centuries. Over the years, an extensive system of canals was built. Extensive land reclamation and irrigation projects have made increased cultivation possible.” Source: Wiki-Ningxia
Chicomaniac’s IP address was 118.194.218.153. The host, Yin Yin Ling, also used the same IP address, and I used My IP Test.com to trace the location.
To learn more about the people that live in the region, I did a bit of research and learned that the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region covers an area of 51,800 square kilometers.
Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region is the unique provincial Hui autonomous region in China, and it had a population of 6.1265 million in 2007, among which, about 1.5 million were from the Hui, Muslim ethnic group — therefore, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region is often called the “Province of Islam” and “Province of Muslims” by foreign travelers.
I learned that among the Hui, local activists have not called for complete separatism or absolute independence, but generally express concern over environmental degradation, which may explain the motivation behind the comment that mentioned Bosshard.
In addition, I traced Bosshard’s IP address [207.204.249.151] to California at an address off Oscedia Lane, Whitfield Ct., and George Ct. near Adam Roger’s Park in San Francisco at Latitude 37.7312 and Longitude -122.2836. Bosshard’s host is Reliable Hosting.com. Bosshard may be a conservative, evangelical Christian that spent some time in China.
This is what I discovered about Chicomaniac. He or she may live in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in China and might be a Muslim. There may be a connection to one of the Islamic separatist movements in China and/or with a group that is concerned about environmental pollution.
I doubt if Chicomaniac is a disabled American veteran that fought in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. However, maybe he or she is a disabled Chinese veteran that fought in Korea, Vietnam, India, Tibet or against Uyghur separatists in Xianjiang.
The reason I say this is that a disabled American veteran would have his or her medical care through the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as I do, which is only available in the US and its territories but not in China. The VA provides patient care and federal benefits to veterans and their dependents.
Chicomaniac also said, “ps Archie Bunker inc. just like they told you on the chinadaily forums, shorten your prolonged missives they do nothing but put us to sleep.”
I recall that the only person that said this was the first cyber bully , and he wrote it on this Blog.
I’ve never left a comment on the China Daily Forums. In fact, I cannot recall leaving any comments on any Blog forums in China. In addition, Archie Bunker was a character in a TV sitcom that went on the air in 1971 and went off the air in 1983.
Archie was a complex character. Along with his overt bigotry and ignorance – he had a paranoid fear of Black Power; Communists, and the Mafia. He was also portrayed as hardworking, a loving father and husband — basically decent and, rather than being motivated by genuine malice (as cyber bullies are), was merely a product of the era and working-class environment in which he had been raised.
Most Americans at least 35 or older should have known these facts.
I suspect that Chicomaniac was born after Archie Bunker went off the air and/or may never have seen the show. He may also be disappointed that Bosshard’s comment appeared in the previous series of posts several times, which focused on global environmental soil and water pollution instead of specifically on China.
If you decide to compare the two cyber bullies, you may find them at Another Cyber Bully.
I wonder what members of Al-Qaeda say about the United States on Internet forums. I doubt that there is much of a difference between them and this Chicomaniac. After all, Al-Qaeda’s goals are to destroy anyone that does not agree with them using any means possible.
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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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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