Organized religions and cults such as theFalun Gong have been in China for centuries, but have never played a major role in the culture until the 19th century when Christianity was forced on China.
C.M. Cipolla wrote in his book, Guns, Sails and Empires, “While Buddha came to China on white elephants, Christ was born on cannon balls” powered by opium.
The treaty that ended the opium wars included a clause that required China to allow Christian missionaries free access to all of China to convert the heathens.
Then the Taiping Rebellion led by Hong Xiuquan, God’s Chinese son and a Christian convert, was responsible for more than 20 million deaths. Hong claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Millions believed him.
In the early months of 1900, thousands of Boxers, officially known as Fists of Righteous Harmony, roamed the countryside attacking Christian missions, slaughtering foreign missionaries and Chinese converts.
Confucius and possiblyLao-Tse have influenced the foundation of Chinese culture and morality the most. These two along with Buddha offer more of a blended influence on Chinese culture than Christianity or Islam.
Thanks to Confucius, China’s mainstream culture understands the importance of people within the family and society more so than many other countries and cultures.
This may explain why China is a powerhouse of industry today.
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.
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Note: This post first appeared on iLook China March 11, 2010 as post # 128. This revised version reappears as post # 1095.
Due to China’s long history with Korea, China has been asked many times recently by the US to put pressure on North Korea to get them to back down and not be so aggressive.
However, China’s response has been for the “relevant parties” to “calmly and properly handle the issue and avoid escalation of tension.” Source: Politics News
One reason for this response might be that China has a history with Korea going back to the Tang Dynasty in 688 AD, when there was an alliance with Silla, a Korean state.
Then it could be because Chinese culture, written language and political institutions have had an influence in Korea since the 4th century.
In the 14th century, Korea came under the influence of Confucian thought influenced by Buddhism and Daoism (Taoism).
A 1,700-year old relationship might have more weight than the one China has with America that isn’t even forty years old yet. However, measuring that weight may also depend on the trillion or more US dollars China has invested in America.
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.
Note: This post first appeared with a different title on iLook China on May 27, 2010 at 16:00 PST as post # 361. This edited and revised version reappears today as # 1080.
A friend of mine forwarded a link to Larry Summers vs. Tiger Mom, which was published in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on January 27, 2011.
Larry Summers, who has billed himself as a “hard ass”, was President Barack Obama’s top economic advisor for the last few years. Summers recently left the White House to return to Harvard as a professor then had a debate with Chinese-American “Tiger Mom,” Amy Chua, who wrote an essay that appeared in the WSJ with a headline (she didn’t write), which said, Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.
Summers said why go through all the trouble to earn a university education when computers are eventually going to do the work that requires discipline.
He also said, “People on average live a quarter of their lives as children. That’s a lot. It’s important that they be as happy as possible during those 18 years. That counts too.”
Summers isn’t alone in his belief that children should focus on being happy instead of academic excellence.
The average American parent belonging to the Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness (SAPs) spends less than five minutes a day encouraging his or her child to be happy which explains why the average American child enjoys ten hours a day watching TV, socializing on Facebook, playing video games, and/or sending hundreds of text messages.
Summers cites in his debate with Chua that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Look at what those “two” achieved without a university education.
“Asian countries value education more than other countries.”
While Gates was building Microsoft and Zuckerberg Facebook, do you believe these two billionaires spent ten hours a day doing what the average American child raised by SAPs such as Summers does to enjoy the first quarter of his or her life?
Summers doesn’t mention that Warren Buffet, one of the richest men on the planet, attended the Wharton Business school at the University of Pennsylvania for two years then transferred to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Working part time, he managed to graduate in only three years.
Summers doesn’t mention that it is common that the top one percent of executives with annual incomes of $500,000 or more often have Ivy league educations from universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
Summers doesn’t mention that the top 15% of the upper middle class are highly educated and often have graduate degrees while earning a high 5-figure annual income commonly above $100,000.
To be specific, the median personal income for a high school drop out in the US with less than a 9th grade education is $17,422, and with some college that medium income jumps to $31,054, while a person with a professional university degree earns an annual medium income of $82,473. Source: Wiki Academic Models (this source was citing US Census data).
It’s okay if Summers and his fellow SAPs let their children and teens have fun the first eighteen years of life, but don’t forget, the average life span in the US is 78.3 years.
What are those children going to do for enjoyment while working to earn a living the next 60.3 years as an adult?
Most children raised by Tiger Moms such as Amy Chua shouldn’t have to worry. Those children as adults will probably be in the top 15% of income earners and enjoy life much more than those earning less than $18 thousand annually.
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.
China is the polar opposite of America in many ways. In China, as a collective culture, the child is an extension of the parent and is not seen as an individual.
China has been this way for thousands of years where the family is more important than the individual is and the country is more important than the family and the individual.
The rules of Confucianism emphasized this cultural structure and these behaviors were practiced, endorsed and enforced by the Han Dynasty centuries before the birth of Christ.
In contrast, the American brand of individualism, which is represented by the rudeness and rebellion we see in America today has only been in practice for about fifty years.
Contrary to popular opinion, Americans have not always been rebels. That image was born and reinforced by 20th century Hollywood films that often depict rebellious children and criminals as clever, popular heroes while turning hard working authority figures such as the police, teachers and parents into idiots and oppressors.
In fact, if you read the history of child labor in the United States, you would discover that forms of child labor, including indentured servitude and child slavery, have existed throughout American history.
It wasn’t until the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which set federal standards for child labor that the US moved toward providing a free, compulsory education for all children instead of children working in factories or coalmines or on farms as young as five.
Before 1938, instead of going to school, most American children went to work at a very early age and often labored twelve or more hours a day six days a week with only the Sabbath off.
The cultural concept that earning an education is worth the sacrifice of hard work that it demands has never existed in America.
However, China has a long history of providing an education to children of all classes as far back as the Han Dynasty since that is what Confucius taught.
In China for more than two thousand years, teachers and parents have been the heroes and are respected for the sacrifices they make to better a child’s future, which does not translate into encouraging a child to chase his or her dreams since, in reality, fantasies seldom come true and only a “few” achieve such dreams
After all, not “everyone” can become the next Bill Gates, Oprah or Selene Dion.
The collective concept of Confucianism has no room for an individual’s rights or dreams. What an American sees in China as oppression, most Chinese don’t even think about because that way of thought doesn’t exist in China’s Confucian dominated collective culture.
Hence, a Tiger Mother, such as Amy Chua, is respected for doing her duty as a Chinese parent. Being a SAP (the Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness) parent would be unthinkable.
I suspect that even if Amy Chua doesn’t sell the Chinese rights to her book, a publisher in China will steal the book, translate it and it will be a massive bestseller as Chinese parents buy and read her book to discover tougher methods of parenting.
That means Chinese mothers will be reading Chua’s book to learn what it takes to raise a child that performs in Carnegie Hall, while those mothers criticize Chua in public instead of praising her while secretly trying out what she learned from Chua.
That sort of behavior to say one thing while doing another is also common in China since Taoism is the other side of the Chinese character.
Bragging is also not acceptable until you have earned the right to brag by achieving the goals you set for yourself that no one else has ever heard of since bragging that you will be the next Bill Gates when you are a child is considered stupid and maybe a sign of a mental illness.
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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.
At times, Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, looked as if she were expecting an eighteen-wheeler to appear and flatten her.
The Chinese-American Tiger Mother sat there on the Hillside Club’s stage in Berkeley, California reminding me of a graceful deer crossing a dark mountain road flanked by armies of tall sentinel trees and halfway across being startled by bright headlights rushing toward her.
How could anyone blame Chua?
I have read that she has received death threats for saying “no” to activities such as sleepovers, play dates, acting in school plays, and not allowing her daughters to watch hours of TV or play computer games until midnight or later.
Instead, she did the unthinkable and demanded excellence. Time magazine says, “Most surprising of all to Chua’s detractors may be the fact that many elements of her approach are supported by research in psychology and cognitive science.”
How horrible that a child would have all those “fun” activities restricted and be required to practice “boring” cultural activities such as learning to play the piano or violin and horror of horrors do homework, study and read to insure earning the best possible grades.
My wife and I were disappointed when Amy distanced herself as the possible poster Tiger Mother for Tough Love parents by reading the final pages of her memoir so the audience would discover how she has softened her parenting style except when it comes to grades.
She told us of the turning point when her youngest daughter Lulu shouted at her in Moscow saying how she hated her.
It was obvious that the real reason Amy Chua wrote The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was because she felt she had lost to the Self-esteem Nazis — those so-called parents and their children that probably felt sorry for Lulu because she couldn’t watch all the TV she wanted and party on weekends.
Chua wrote the book in two months soon after returning to the United States from the trip to Russia. It was a catharsis, a healing, and not a battle cry. I expect she felt much anger while pounding out the words on her computer keyboard in a relentless marathon.
That memoir was her way to heal from the trauma of defeat she faced in Moscow.
I know. My wife and I raised a Chinese-American daughter who also came home from school occasionally with the same resentment and said the same mean things Lulu said to her mother.
We discovered the fuel of that resentment was the misplaced sympathy from other children and parents.
While our daughter had to go to bed by 9:30 at night, she knew that most of her friends were up as late as two or three in the morning. In fact, the TV in our house was off most of the week and the content that was watched for an hour or two on weekends was controlled. There were no video games, no Internet connection and TV in her bedroom.
Gasp!
As a child, our daughter had to read books to fill the empty hours.
Amy Chua, to make sure the audience discovered how much she has improved as a mother, let us know that her rebellious daughter Lulu even had a recent sleepover.
However, Tiger Parents practicing Tough Love have her memoir and the facts I mentioned In Defense of Tiger Mothers Everywhere as a reminder that we are not alone. Other Tiger Parents are out there.
I was a Tiger Teacher for thirty years in the public schools. When students failed my class, I was blamed by parents and administrators for “giving” too many FAILING grades.
Often, I was accused by parents (without evidence except the complaints of FAILING teens) of being a boring teacher, being mean, prejudiced, losing homework and damaging the self-esteem of children.
Some parents even pulled children from my class and moved them to teachers that never “gave” failing grades.
In fact, I never “gave” a student a grade. My students were required to “earn” grades and there is a HUGE difference between the word “give” and “earn”.
By the time I left teaching in 2005, about 5% of my students were doing the homework and required reading necessary for academic improvement, and when standardized test scores in the U.S. fail to measure up, who gets the blame? the teachers — not the students or the parents
We almost didn’t get in to hear Chua. Although we bought tickets on-line, the Hillside Club oversold and there wasn’t room for everyone. We had to wait in the foyer to see if there were seats available but my wife and I were fortunate to get in soon after the event started.
I discovered that in the audience was the vanguard of an army of parents and teachers that may have been the victims of what has become known as the soft, positive, self-esteem approach to Western parenting. There were hundreds of us in that audience.
As Amy sat in that tall chair on stage above the audience with her feet dangling a foot from the floor, the audience laughed, applauded and gazed on her as if she were a hero.
I didn’t expect that.
Instead, I expected the Self-esteem Nazis to turn out in mass to make sure Chua would not be heard, which is the reason this former US Marine and Vietnam veteran went — to make sure someone would be on her side to fight in her defense if needed.
Thank you Confucius for a culture that values education so much that the Tiger Mother, Tough Love method of raising children hasn’t died in China as it almost has in the United States. The bully tactics of Self-esteemism and Political Correctness almost succeeded in destroying America–then Amy Chua’s essay appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
When Amy’s parents came to America as immigrants and sacrificed so much to raise their daughter the same way she was struggling to raise her children, Confucius may have saved this country, because it might be possible that being a Tiger Parent will become acceptable again.
In Time magazine, Chua said, “‘I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too.’ The tiger-mother approach isn’t an ethnicity but a philosophy: expect the best from your children, and don’t settle for anything less.”
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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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