A friend sent me a link to the story of Glenn Shriver, an American sent to jail for four years after he pleaded guilty for being paid $70,000 by China to attempt to get a job with the CIA or another intelligence agency in the US.
The Huffington Post said, “Court documents said Shriver was approached by Chinese officers while living in Shanghai in 2004 after earlier study trips to China.”
Shriver didn’t get the job since the CIA caught him before he was hired by the agency.
In fact, the Daily Herald reported that Shriver isn’t alone and “was one of at least 57 defendants in federal cases prosecuted since 2008 involving espionage conspiracies with China or efforts to pass secret information, sensitive defense technology or trade secrets to various players within the nation — be them intelligence operatives, state-sponsored research institutes or private-sector businessmen, according to an Associated Press review of U.S. Justice Department cases.”
It’s a fact that China spies on the US. That cannot be denied. Heck, there are cases where England and Israel have spied on the US too.
However, before you start ranting about China being sneaky and underhanded, you may be interested that spying is a two way street between nations and the US plays the same serious game.
In February 2003, the BBC News World Edition reported, “The US Central Intelligence Agency has launched a campaign to attract Chinese-American recruits with an advert welcoming the Year of the Goat.” The CIA advertised in newspapers and magazine in American cities with big Chinese communities.
What’s ironic, is Glenn Shriver never became a spy. He only appeared to have had the intent to spy. Since Shriver was paid $70,000 over a period of several years and still failed to get a job, who are the fools here?
How much does the CIA spend for its operations?
The overall US intelligence budget has been considered classified until recently when Mary Margaret Graham, a former CIA official and deputy director of national intelligence for collection in 2005, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion. Source: Wikipedia.org
However, that may not be all the money the CIA spends on spying.
According to Source Watch.org, “The CIA black budget is annually in the vicinity of 1.1 trillion dollars and the covert world of ‘black programs’ acts with virtual impunity, overseen and regulated by itself, funding itself through secret slush funds, and is free of the limitations that come from Congressional oversight, proper auditing procedures and public scrutiny.”
Don’t have any secrets to sell. Don’t worry. Glenn Shriver was paid $70,000 by China and had nothing to sell and if Source Watch is correct, the CIA has a lot of money to throw around but watch out. You may find yourself in prison for just wanting to be a spy for the other side.
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.
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.
According to Missing and Exploited Children, about 800,000 children younger than 18 were reported missing (globally) in a one-year period of time studied resulting in an average of 2,185 children being reported missing each day.
China’s share of the number of abducted children was less than 10% of the global total. According to China’s Missing Children, it is estimated that 70,000 children go missing in China every year or an average of 192 a day.
These youngsters are often kidnapped and made to perform hard labor in illegal businesses, or sold into the sex trade. Traffickers also sell children to couples who are either unable to have children or who want male heirs, which is still the tradition in large parts of the country.
The Hunt for Missing Children reunites son with Chinese Parents two years after abduction. Technology was critical.
The China Daily reported on Cheng Ying that had a daughter abducted. After meeting other parents (that lost children) online last year, Cheng Zhu set up the “Parents of Lost Children League” and began to plan a month-long trip that would take his van through nine provinces, regularly stopping to not only hunt for his lost daughter but also to raise awareness of child trafficking.
The “Parents of Lost Children” is not the only organization like this in China.
“Baby Come Home” is an organization in China with about 20,000 volunteers that helps parents of missing children. Zhang Baoyan, director-general of Baby Come Home said, “People feel more comfortable with others who share the same experiences and they support each other. It is the collective power.”
Police in China are also learning how to deal with the growing crime of child abduction.
In 2009, Police in China solved 4,420 cases related to the trafficking of women and children as part of a special operation to crack down on the problem, according to the Ministry of Public Security. The mission resulted in almost 1,000 gangs being rounded up and 6,200 arrests.
With the help of a DNA database, which through a large investment has been developed into a nationwide network of laboratories, the police were able to correctly identify 298 of the 2,169 rescued children, according to figures released by the ministry.
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.
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.
You may be surprised to learn that the British Empire started this cycle of theft in the 19th century.
In the 18th century, China was the most advanced nation on the planet. In 1793, China’s Qianlong Emperor sent a letterto King George III of Britain. The emperor made it known that, “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
Then the Industrial Revolution started in England but wasn’t felt until the 1830s or 1840s. After almost two thousand years, the West had an advantage and used it.
The author, Sarah Rose, tells the story of how, before 1848, China was the only country that knew how to grow and make tea. The British sent botanist Robert Fortune deep within China to steal plants to grow on British plantations in India.
In addition, by the 1830s, the English had become the major drug-trafficking criminal organization in the world; very few drug cartels of the twentieth century can even touch the England of the early nineteenth century in sheer size of criminality.
By the 1840s, the British and French fleets sailed into China’s rivers and destroyed its fleets forcing China to bend to the will of the West. Besides Western opium trade and the theft of China’s tea, Britain and France forced China’s emperor to allow Christian missionaries free access to Chinese everywhere.
Today, with China’s rise as a major economic and military power, it seems that theft may be changing history again but this time the wind blows from the East to the West.
However, in an attempt to keep the power, Europe and America came up with a new set of rules making the kind of theft they used in the 19th century wrong.
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.
Johnson wrote, “China has secret weaknesses. Its most serious: gambling and drug addiction. China’s new prosperity is already producing a rapid expansion of the country’s international gambling class, not to mention an appreciable increase in the number of drug addicts.”
What Johnson says of China isn’t a secret.
In fact, North America is by far the king of global gambling and drug use — something Johnson doesn’t mention.
From Illegal Drug Trade in the People’s Republic of China, we learn “there are over 900,000 registered drug addicts in China, but the Government recognizes that the actual number of users is far higher. Some unofficial estimates range as high as 12 million.”
When we compare China’s figures with the US, we discover that “an estimated 12.8 million Americans, about 6 percent of the household population aged twelve and older, use illegal drugs on a current basis (within the past thirty days).…” Source: NCJRS.gov
If these numbers are correct, China and the US have about the same number of illegal drug users. However, China has five times the people, which mean 6% of Americans are addicted to drugs while less than one percent of Chinese are.
How about Johnson’s claim that the Chinese have a secret sickness for gambling? The answer may be found at Global Economics of Gambling (GEG).
From GEG, I learned that in 2006, revenues from gambling in America were 94.9 billion dollars while they were only 5.1 billion in China.
I have a question for Paul Johnson, “Why are you focusing on China when North America has more of a problem with gambling and drug use than China has?”
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.
My family had a date to walk the mile to the local Sunday Farmer’s Market, which up until today has always been a pleasant experience.
However, at the Farmer’s Market, I came face to face with the ignorance and hate that surveys say about 40% of Americans have concerning China.
It started out as a conversation with a young man giving away free samples of a local newspaper as part of a program to grow subscriptions.
The feature story on the front page said, Walmart sex-discrimination case headed to the Supreme Court. This led to a conversation about Wal-Mart being anti union. The newspaper vendor said that in Europe Wal-Mart had no choice about unions then I mentioned that Wal-Mart had stores in China where all the workers belong to unions.
The conversation then turned to China. Eventually the newspaper vendor asked why I knew so much about China, and I told him that I write a Blog about China.
Since spending a decade researching Robert Hart for my first two historical fiction novels, it has become my goal to explain why China is the way it is since it was during that decade that I discovered how biased and ignorant many in the West are of China.
That’s when the fair skinned WASP with the ruddy winter blush on his cheeks stepped in. He was standing several feet away with his trained dog sitting on its box. He’s there almost every Sunday demonstrating what a great animal trainer he is. Since I have no interest in training animals, I’ve never had a conversation with him.
Without being asked, he said China was guilty of killing twenty million women. (I don’t remember the exact words but that’s close enough.) Within minutes, he would boost the number to forty million.
I attempted explaining that China’s central government cannot be blamed for centuries of cultural behavior and that there were laws against female infanticide in China today. I started to explain that even the one-child policy is misunderstood but he cut me off.
The WASP with the ruddy face waved his arms above his head and shouted I should get two Communist flags and wave them in the air so everyone at the market would know I was a China lover.
I don’t love China. I also don’t hate it. Instead, I want to understand.
America, with all of its flaws and there are many, is my country but I do not blindly love the US either. I wore the uniform of a US Marine and fought in Vietnam out of youthful patriotism decades before I discovered that in Vietnam then in Iraq, US presidents launched wars based on lies and deceit.
Standing there at the Sunday Farmer’s market, the adrenalin started fizzing through my body as my PTSD was triggered and I moved into combat mode thinking of all the China facts I could teach this ignorant, biased WASP, while realizing that he didn’t want to learn.
The Marine Corps taught me not to get into a fight that I couldn’t win and winning meant killing before being killed.
I decided to walk away but before leaving, I jabbed an index finger in his direction and said, “Your biased opinions are based on ignorance. There is a lot you should learn of China.”
That’s when the WASP doubled the figure of female deaths in China from 20 to 40 million.
If surveys are correct, about 120 million Americans hold the same ignorant, biased opinions of China that this WASP believed.
Most Sinophobes know nothing of The Opium Wars; Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century seeking help from the British Empire and the US to build a democracy in China and being rejected; or the facts behind China’s Civil War and all the other history that led to China being as it is today.
It’s true that female infanticide has been a cultural practice in China for centuries. It’s also true that the CCP passed laws to end that practice and sends teams into rural China to teach the people that it is wrong. That doesn’t mean that all the Chinese will change.
In fact, The Society for the Prevention of Infanticide (SPI) says, “Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.”
SPI says, “One way to control the lethal effects of starvation was to restrict the number of children allowed to survive to adulthood.”
Even “Darwin believed that infanticide, ‘especially of female infants,’ was the most important restraint on the proliferation of early man.”
“Today,” SPI says, “At least 60 million females in Asia are missing and feared dead, victims of nothing more than their sex. Worldwide, research suggests, the number of missing females may top 100 million.
“Estimates indicate that 30.5 million females are ‘missing’ from China, 22.8 million in India, 3.1 million in Pakistan, 1.6 million in Bangladesh, 1.7 million in West Asia, 600,000 in Egypt, and 200,000 in Nepal.”
However, the ignorant WASP at the Sunday Farmers Market was “foaming” at the mouth about the evils of China when in fact, SPI says, “The colonists brought infanticide to America from England while at the same time finding that the Indians practiced it as well.”
In addition, “In 1646 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay had enacted a law where ‘a stubborn or rebellious son, of sufficient years and understanding, would be brought before the Magistrates incourt and such a son shall be put to death.’
“Stubborn child laws were also enacted in Connecticut in 1650, Rhode Island in 1668, and New Hampshire in 1679.”
In Modern American “In 1966, the United States had 10,920 murders, and one out of every twenty-two was a child killed by a parent.”
“Statistically, the United States ranks high on the list of countries whose inhabitants kill their children. For infants under the age of one year, the American homicide rate is 11th in the world, while for ages one through four it is ‘first’ and for ages five through fourteen it is ‘fourth’.
“From 1968 to 1975, infanticide of all ages accounted for almost 3.2% of all reported homicides in the United States.”
I learned something new today. I learned that it is easier to deal with ignorance at a distance on Blogs and Internet forums where there are others reading what I write than it is talking to ignorance face to face.
It took more than an hour for my burst of combat adrenalin to work its way out of my system and it wasn’t until I finished writing this post that I was calm again. I wanted so much to attempt smacking down that WASP and discover if I had remembered what the Marine Corps drilled into me of hand-to-hand combat. After all, that training kept me alive in Vietnam, and I’ve broken bones learning martial arts.
However, I’m glad I walked away. Violence is not a solution to ignorance and it won’t open closed minds. After Vietnam and the Marines, I was a teacher in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005) where I learned how difficult it is to open minds.
You cannot teach someone that doesn’t want to learn.
______________
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.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
iLook China 