Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 1/7

October 23, 2010

The China Law Blog challenged an opinion I wrote about China becoming a republic with more freedom for the people.

I wrote, “The Economist wants India to win this race, because it is called a democracy as is the U.S., but what isn’t mentioned is that China is becoming a republic with a Chinese twist, which is what Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted.… Once you read the two pieces in The Economist, you may understand why India’s democracy cannot beat China’s evolving republic.” Source: Comparing India and China’s Economic Engines

The China Law Blog criticized this post saying, “In other words, iLook takes what he sees as China’s aspirations and assumes (without a shred of factual support or even argument) that China will very shortly fully achieve those aspirations.”

I don’t recall writing “very shortly“.

In fact, the freedoms the world’s democracies are urging China’s government to implement ASAP may not materialize for decades and some freedoms found in the West may never appear.

To understand why China may be moving toward more freedom slowly, the best place to start is with Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866 – 1925)

Sun is known as the father of China’s Republic.

To achieve this dream, Sun started by unifying the Communists and Nationalists into a two-party republic in southern China in the early 20th century. Both parties respected Sun, and he made it work.

Unfortunately, Sun died in 1924 at a time when China was in ruins and torn by anarchy and violence between competing warlords.

Then, Chiang Kai-shek, who was a member of the ruling class and a man who hated the Communists, went on a rampage slaughtering Communists and igniting a civil war that would rage even after Japan invaded during World War II. 

Chiang’s first move against the Communists was in the south. His next was in Shanghai to break the labor unions the Communists had been organizing to improve the lives of sweatshop labor working in foreign owned factories. 

Chiang Kai-shek’s goal was to exterminate the labor unions and the Communists, and he had support from the foreign factory owners.

The Communists that survived had no choice but to defend themselves. Surrender wasn’t an option.

Decades later, in 1949, the Communist Party won the revolution under Mao’s leadership and with the support of China’s peasants.

Chiang Kai-shek would flee to Taiwan and protected by the US, he would rule that island under martial law as a brutal dictator for twenty-six years. Taiwan would not become a democracy until years after Chiang and Mao’s deaths.

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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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Face of Compassion

October 19, 2010

In August, I wrote China’s Got Talent Too about Liu Wei, the armless pianist who plays the piano with his toes. 

This week, he won the contest and performed by singing, “You Are Beautiful” in English. 

Lui Wei’s motto is, “I have two options – I can die as fast as possible, or I can live a brilliant life, and I chose the latter.”

Another one of Liu Wei’s quotes is, “To me, there are three things that cannot be missed in life – air, water and music.”


If you watch his winning performance in the embedded video and don’t speak Chinese, be patient. Eventually you will get to hear Liu Wei perform.

Liu Wei was 10 years old when he lost his arms after touching a high-voltage wire during a game of hide-and seek. In America, the standard current is 110 V.  In China, the standard electric current is 220 V.

If you travel the globe, you may want to know about the World Electric Guide so I included this link and visit Electric Shock to discover a few tips to avoid that jolt.

I also read a piece in the People’s Daily Online asking, Do Chinese people lack compassion? After reading the piece, I’m sure most animal lovers in America would say that the Chinese lack compassion. 

However, I would disagree. Most Chinese have a lot of compassion but it isn’t the same as showing compassion in the West, which usually means donating money or time to an animal shelter.

In China, compassion helped Liu Wei win China’s Got Talent and he became a national celebrity and an example to every child in China showing what it means to never give up regardless of the odds.

Liu Wei earned that compassion by not allowing his handicap to get in his way – not because he lost his arms in an accident.

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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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Striking Differences

October 18, 2010

In Psychology Today, I read a post by Christopher Peterson.

I wrote a comment to his post, but addressed it to the wrong person. Since I couldn’t edit the comment, I have no way to fix the mistake.

Peterson writes about how much he enjoyed his recent August trip to China. He said, “I loved the Chinese people I met! We did not talk politics with anyone…”

In fact, I’ve been to China about ten times since 1999 and have never talked politics to anyone there.

There is no reason for that. After all, in China, the government runs the country and doesn’t ask the people for advice.

I sometimes wonder who is running America since there are so many opinions and so much anger.

Peterson also said, “China is not only a highly collectivist culture but also one that takes a very long time perspective on things. We often heard mention of the ‘seven generation’ view, which means that the Chinese take into account the consequences of policies for at least seven future generations.”

Peterson also mentioned, “the Chinese want their people and especially their children to be happy… There are of course cultural differences in what constitutes legitimate happiness.”

Then I read a post in the Democratic Underground, which was striking in its darkness and inferred unhappiness and anger.

The Democratic Underground said, “in the past week or so, at least 29 candidates (running for political office in the U.S. November midterms) have unveiled advertisements suggesting that their opponents have been too sympathetic to China and, as a result, Americans have suffered.”

Evan B. Tracey, president of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising, said that “China has sort of become a straw-man villain in this election” in a way that elicits comparisons to the sentiments toward Japan in the 1980s over car manufacturing and Mexico in the 1990s over the North American Free Trade Agreement. Source: Democratic Underground

It’s common in America for politicians to turn the people’s anger and unhappiness on a scapegoat. It helps win elections.

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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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

History’s Meaning of the Mandate of Heaven – Part 5/5

October 16, 2010


A few Chinese intellectuals pleaded for a more open approach for knowledge. This took place a few decades before the clash between China and the West during the Qing Dynasty.

One Chinese scholar, Chiang Siu Chung, said that the Confucian texts were history and Confucius may be a true guide to life but the time was past to continue following this old curriculum of study.

Two years before this scholar’s death in 1799, he wrote a letter that said that history should no longer concern itself merely with the past but should use the past to reform the present and to look into the future. He predicted the fall of the Qing Dynasty.

Near Chiang Sui Chung’s death, China was about to come face to face with another culture whose view of history was diametrically opposed to Chinese tradition.

The Europeans with their Judea-Christian heritage believed that history had a purpose — that it was leading toward an appointed end and they would be the winners.

When The Chinese first met the Westerners, the Chinese had a dark description of the Europeans as a savage people who didn’t just come to sell but came to impose their ideas, their religions and their will on everyone they met.

This era culminated in the Opium Wars, which meant the Europeans wanted to get as many Chinese addicted to Opium as possible.

China was defeated by the very technology they had developed centuries earlier because they had stopped in their development. Unable to cope with the pressure from the West, the Chinese government collapsed and the Western Imperialists treated the Chinese people as if they were animals in their own land.

Then a great time of revolution had arrived as the I-Ching, the book of changes, says. In the I-Ching, there is a hexagram titled revolution.

In a revolution, the I-Ching says there are two mistakes that must be avoided. You must not move with excessive haste nor use excessive ruthlessness against the people.

Return to History of the Mandate of Heaven – Part 4

 

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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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Influenced by the Mandate of Heaven

October 13, 2010

Although I wrote on the Mandate of Heaven in April, I didn’t see how deeply that belief was influencing China’s Communist Party.

The epiphany took place soon after reading page 235 in Living With Evolution.

At the same time, I realized that America’s judgment of China’s Communist Party was in part due to half a century of entitlement programs for minorities and the disadvantaged in the U.S. — often rewarding those who were less qualified and punishing those who were successful through merit by holding him or her back.

However, in China after Mao was gone and Deng Xiaoping opened the country to world trade, meritocracy was back with a vengeance.

Meritocracy is a system in which the talented succeed and move ahead based on his or her achievement.

The Chinese for almost four thousand years believed that humans were responsible for how events unfolded on earth with human actions subject to the approval or disapproval of heaven.

Successful actions were held to be those that heaven approved of and unsuccessful actions were held to be those heaven did not approve of.

What this means is that anyone, regardless of his or her social status could challenge the elite and rise to the top on the claim that it was legitimate according to the Mandate of Heaven — a concept that was also quintessentially meritocratic.

This explains why China’s central government treats political and/or religious activists, who challenge the status quo, so harshly. 

If the Communist Party allows the Falun Gong, Tibetan and Islamic separatists or Western style human rights activists to have the kind of freedom of expression that is allowed in the West, most Chinese, including the Communist Party, may see this as a sign of weakness.

In fact, the Dalai Lama’s popularity in the West is seen as a challenge to the Party’s mandate to rule. The same could be said about the rival government in Taiwan.

To have a better understanding of what this mean, you may want to start reading the Living With Evolution Blog

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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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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