China Harnessing the Wind

February 12, 2014

China’s goal to go green in the Middle Kingdom moves forward due to the wind and the sea along China’s long coast, which runs about 9,010 miles or 14,300 km.

“China has the largest wind resources in the world, and three-quarters of them are offshore,” Barbara Finamore, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Beijing office, told Scientific American.

China has an estimated offshore wind power potential of more than 750 gigawatts, far greater than the country’s land-based wind potential of 253. Source: UPI.com

There’s an advantage having China’s government when it comes to creating green energy.  In the U.S., the first potential offshore wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts took nearly a decade for approval and still faces potential regulatory and judicial obstacles.

While the U.S. struggles to get clearance for its first offshore wind farm, the world’s largest offshore wind farm started producing energy in 2010 off the British coast, the London Array, and now produces 620 megawatts, which is enough electricity to heat about 500,000 British homes. (London Array)

In China, the first offshore wind farm is near Shanghai and started supplying power to the city in July, 2010 with 102 megawatts being generated today.  The second offshore wind farm is Jiangsu Rudong Inter-tidal Wind Farm generating 150 megawatts. Nine more offshore wind farms are expected to start construction in 2014; when completed it is expected they’ll generate more than 1800 megawatts of electricity. (Offshore Wind China)

Learn more about China Going Green

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Water Woes—an epic challenge

November 12, 2013

A man or woman can survive for weeks without food but only days without water. Knowing that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Tibet will stay in China for some time and water may be the reason.

The Yellow River and Yangtze start in Tibet serving more than a third of China’s population—more than 400 million people. It’s possible that Mao realized the importance of water from Tibet when he sent 40,000 PRC troops to reoccupy the former troublesome province/tributary that at the urging of the British Empire’s broke from China in 1913 and declared its independence as a theocracy ruled by a Dalai Lama known as a living god.

Tibet has an area of about 1.3 million square kilometers (about 5 million square miles) and it is estimated that there are less than 3 million people living in Tibet. China, on the other hand, serves more than 1.3 billion people, so who benefits the most from water that starts its journey in Tibet?

Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, said, “At least 500 million people in Asia and 250 million people in China are at risk from declining glacial flows on the Tibetan Plateau.” Source: Circle of Blue Waternews

If Tibet’s water were in the hands of anyone else like a free Tibet that might favor other nations over China, China’s future would be dim at best and dire in a worst-case scenario. As it is, China is one of the earth’s driest areas and the challenge to supply more than 1.3 billion people with water is a daunting task. In fact, China is in a race with disaster and the end of that race will be reached in a few decades.

Today, water and waste pollution is the single most serious issue facing China.

While replacing thousands of older, coal-burning power plants with cleaner technologies, building more hydroelectric dams, and constructing nuclear reactors, China is also adding desalinations plants to ease the growing water crises. In 2005, a desalination facility south of Shanghai started producing about 375,000 gallons of fresh water an hour, with a goal to build more plants and produce 250 million gallons of water per day by 2010. Source: Environmental News Network

In fact, to achieve this, China contracted with IDE Technologies in Kadima, Israel to build four new desalination units and the first went on line near Beijing in 2010. These plants are designed to provide desalinated seawater for a power plant’s steam boilers as well as drinking water for local residents.

An ABC News report on September 13, 2013, said that China was building mega desalination plants to address water shortages. “China has about 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of the world’s fresh water reserves.”

China plans to more than triple its production of desalinated water to 2.2 million cubic meters a day by 2015 according to the Chinese Development and Reform Commission. Source: Bloomberg.com

And this isn’t all that China is doing to deal with its water woes. China is building an aqueduct—some of it underground known as the South-North Water Transfer Project—that may rival China’s Great Wall as a construction project that will cost twice as much as the Three Gorges Dam. The completed aqueduct will be slightly over 716 miles long.

China also plans to build 100 dams in Tibet—not only to generate electricity but to store much needed water for its more than 1.3 billion people. Both projects are controversial.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Working in China

October 1, 2013

The China Law Blog compared China’s employment laws to those of the United States. Reading this post was a revelation, because I did not know that Chinese workers had more job protection—if not higher pay—than most U.S. workers, and I was curious how this came about.

I discovered the reason was due to the transition from state controlled to private owned businesses.  Since 1978—when China implemented its open-door policy—the country went from no privately owned small businesses to more than 10 million small to medium-sized private enterprises that represent about 90 percent of all businesses.

In addition, The Diplomat.com reports, “China’s private sector now comprises some 70% or more of China’s economy …”

And before anyone criticizes China for paying low wages to migrant factory workers who moved to the cities from rural China, Bloomberg says, “Rural spending power has been lifted by wages earned by peasants working in cities. “

“Wage levels in China [while low compared to the United States] have increased continually over the last two decades as the economy has developed and the private sector has created new employment opportunities. … In 2012, a total of 25 provinces increased their minimum wage by an average of 20.2 percent.”  Source: China Labour Bulletin

Prior to this transition, state workers didn’t have to worry about a job. Once the transition began, significant numbers of workers started losing jobs. Since China’s constitution says the government’s role is to serve the people, the government changed the laws to make it more difficult to fire a worker offering better job protection.

In fact, the Library of Economics and Liberty says, “China appears to have come through the world economic crises better than many countries. … As Europe and the United States slump, the CPC can speedily launch infrastructure projects or shift millions of migrant workers from one locality to another.”

“China’s employment law system is quite different from the U.S. The main difference is that the U.S. is an employment at will system, which means you can terminate employees at any time for pretty much any reason. China’s system is the opposite. The Chinese system is a contract employment system. … An employee can only be terminated for cause and cause must be clearly proved. … This whole situation makes the employment relationship and the employment documents much more adversarial than is customary in the U.S.” Source: China Law Blog

Discover China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

2 Comments | business, China, Chinese Culture, cultural differences, economy | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

A brief history of silk: Part 1 of 2

August 27, 2013

I read an Associated Press piece by Mansur Mirovalev about silk’s so-called dark side where Uzbek children had to work and grow cocoons.


Silkworms in a Chinese silk factory

However, that’s not what this post is about.  I will say this. I didn’t see much that was wrong in Mirovalev’s piece about what was taking place in Uzbekistan. About a century ago, American children once worked in the fields alongside their parents. I see nothing wrong with that.

In fact, for most of history, children were just seen as smaller people and had to work just like adults did.


Worker makes silk cloth from a silkworm.

I’ve often read about the Silk Road, but I was curious and wanted to know more about the history of silk so I did some Google research and discovered that silk has a long history in China.

For example, in 1984, silk fabric dating back more than 5000 years was found in Henan Province.


How silk is made.

According to legend, Lei Zu, the queen of China’s legendary Yellow Emperor, was drinking a cup of tea beneath a mulberry tree one day when a silkworm cocoon fell into her cup. Further investigation revealed that the unraveling fibers were light and tough, ripe for spinning. Thus China’s silk industry was born.

What I didn’t know was that merchants from the Roman Empire sent ships by sea to China and traded directly with the Han Dynasty. It’s well known that China traded with India, the Persians and even Europe using a land route called the silk road across Asia. But this was the first time I heard of ships from Europe reaching China about two thousand years ago.

Continued on August 29, 2013 in A brief history of silk: Part 2

Discover A Millennia of History at a Silk Road Oasis

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

Leave a Comment » | business, China, Chinese history, economy, environment, history | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Gold Rush

August 8, 2013

The Imperial Color was yellow gold and the roofs of the Forbidden City were the same color. During imperial times, anyone wearing the imperial color, who did not belong to China’s ruling family, usually lost their heads.

Now, China is having a gold rush and holds more than a thousand tonnes of Gold as of June 2010, while gold demand from China’s middle class has grown 13 percent annually for the last five years.

As you can see from this Sky News video, Chinese are gobbling up gold as fast as they can regardless of the price.  To them, it is an investment and the Central Bank of China is quietly buying gold to build reserves. China is now the world’s largest producer of gold.

Frank Homes writing for Wall Street Pit, Global Market Insight, says China can’t get enough gold and state-controlled China National Gold Group signed an agreement with Kensington Mine in Alaska to buy more.

In fact, Pacific Money.com says, “China’s society is changing beyond all recognition. At the heart of the most sweeping social and economic transformation the world has seen is the rise of a powerful new largely middle-class population. In 2000, only 4% of China’s urban households were middle class; by 2012, that number skyrocketed to more than 66%.

Discover China’s Heart and Soul

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

About iLook China

China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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

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