For decades, I’ve said that American arrogance (due to being the only super power), run-away consumerism and growing debt of all kinds coupled with how the average American child is being raised by parents obsessed with the child’s self-esteem above all else would lead to the inevitable end of the American experiment in personal freedoms and a rapid decline in living standards followed by chaos and anarchy.
Then I had an e-mail this week from an American friend and expatriate living in China, who recently returned to teaching English to Chinese children.
I asked him in an E-mail how it was going.
He replied, “You’ll be interested to know the kids are WAY fatter and noisier than they were in 2004. I asked some other teachers about this. They attribute it to McDonalds (3 all on the same 3-kilometer street in this very small city). In 2004 there were none (in that city), and Chinese parents spoiling their kids more and more; that sense of entitlement carries over into the classroom….”
After teaching American children and teens for thirty years and experiencing the same decline in child health and behavior, I understood what he meant.
Could this cultural decay be a sign of the pending collapse of civilization?
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.
In Part 1, we discovered what happened to India as a multi-party parliamentary democracy.
What does US history teach us? Since Independence, the US has had several financial crises leading to severe unemployment and economic hardships for many. The US suffered through financial/economic depressions in 1807, 1837, 1873, 1893, 1929-1939 (known as the Great Depression). Source: San Jose State University Department of Economics
Then there was the recent 2008 global financial crises leading to about 64 trillion dollars in global losses and tens of millions of lost jobs (9 million in the US and about 20 million in China alone).
This global financial collapse had its start in the world’s most powerful democracy and could have been avoided.
Although there have been many predictions in the West that China’s economy will collapse, that hasn’t materialized yet as it has in the US several times.
In fact, soon after the 2008 global financial crises hit, China put the unemployed back to work while importing goods from other nations helping to support those economies to survive the crises.
As The Damnedclearly shows, democracy doesn’t always work,and Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant, who plunged the US into the bloodiest war of its history.
This happened again in Vietnam under President Johnson and in Iraq under President G. W. Bush.
For example, after the Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1911, instead of an orderly republic replacing it as Sun Yat-sen hoped, China fractured with warlords fighting each other in every province.
Then in 1926, Chiang Kai-shek’s distrust of the Communist Party led to decades of Civil War (1926 – 1949) and unrest instead of cooperation between the two founding parties of Sun Yat-sen’s fledgling republic — the Communist and Nationalist parties.
In Part 3, we will learn from Chinese history and the US 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.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
In February 2008, Amy Chu was one of two guests on Riz Khan’s Al Jazeera talk show as an expert on the rise and fall of empires.
LegalTreeHouse.comsays of Chua’s second book, which has nothing to do with parenting, “Day of Empire (2007) argues that great civilizations — hyperpowers, as she calls them — rise because of their tolerance of minority cultures and religions. Conversely, hyperpowers decline when this stops, when they, in the words of the Publishers’ Weekly review, “lapse into intolerance and exclusion.”
Chua speaks first saying, “A hyperpower is one of a few remarkable societies in all of history that amassed so much wealth and military might they dominated the world.
Then the host turns to Parag Khanna, who says he does not disagree with Chua. However, he mentions that the European Union (EU) and China are also capable of influencing affairs and events globally.
While answering the first caller’s question, Chua says her book explores parallels between the Roman Empire and the United States and there are many. She then says that every hyperpower in history was tolerant while rising and intolerant while in decline.
Chua says, she does not mean tolerance for modern human rights and respect for others. She means being tolerant by allowing many different kinds of people regardless of skin color, ethnicity or religion to live, prosper and participate without persecution or limitations.
Today, to be globally dominant, Chua says, a society must attract the best and brightest from all ethnicities around the globe. She says if her thesis is correct, China cannot become a hyperpower but can become a super power since China doesn’t allow many ethnicities to live, work and prosper in China as citizens.
Parag Khanna answers the next question of how the US may react as it is in decline since it has so many weapons of mass destruction at its disposal. He also mentions that the EU is the largest economy in the world — not the US. Then he says India is far from being able to compete globally with the US, the EU and China since it has so many internal challenges to solve.
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.
The CIA, in an alliance with the Nationalist Chinese (KMT), addicted millions of Americans on drugs such as heroin and cocaine to finance a covert war against the spread of Communism.
The KMT’s leader was the brutal, authoritarian dictator Chiang Kai-shekof Taiwan, which the US still supports. Chiang Kai-shek ruled Taiwan with an iron fist until his death.
However, it wouldn’t be until the 2000 presidential election in Taiwan that the KMT’s hold on power came to an end there.
I first learned of the KMT-CIA drug pipeline into the US in the early 1980s when I read of Congressional hearings leading to the closing of Air America, a covert airline owned by the CIA that was one of the methods used to move illegal drugs out of Southeast Asia and into the hands of US citizens.
While writing of all things Chinese, I forgot about the Nationalist (KMT) Chinese generals that worked with the CIA during the Vietnam war to supply American troops in Vietnam and addicts in the US with heroin and cocaine in trade for weapons.
After the Chinese Communists under Mao won the Civil War in 1949, a large force of KMT troops in southern China fled to the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, which is located in Laos, Thailand and Burma. That’s when the KMT became involved in the drug trade with the CIA.
For reminding me of this dark chapter of America’s history (which evidence says is still an open book), I thank a ’21st Century Marco Polo, who is a committed and experienced human rights and legal education professional with a history of working internationally throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Ryan writes, “This book examines a wide-ranging number of covert US operations since World War II, and, among other things, demonstrates that many of these operations were intimately connected with, and dependent on, illicit drug trafficking….”
The Senophobic, American capitalist obsession with everything Communist led the US down this dark path that introduced an expressway of heroin and cocaine into the US in what may contribute to the eventual failure of the most successful and powerful democracy in the history of humanity.
I have embedded a four part series of an audio transcript of a 60 Minutes broadcast of the CIA controlled drug trade.
60 Minutes on CIA Drug Smuggling – Part 1
60 Minutes on CIA Drug Smuggling – Part 2
60 Minutes on CIA Drug Smuggling – Part 3
60 Minutes on CIA Drug Smuggling – Part 4
To understand the impact on US society, Drug Rehabs.orgsays, “The trafficking of illicit drugs burdens various components of domestic financial sectors as individuals and organizations frequently engage in illegal activates to generate income in order to purchase drugs or finance drug trafficking operations. Mortgage fraud (think 2008 financial crises which originated in New York), counterfeiting, shoplifting, insurance fraud, ransom kidnapping, identity theft, home invasion, personal property theft, and many other criminal activates often are undertaken by drug users and distributers to support drug addictions…”
Did you know that Mao, after winning the Chinese Civil War (1926 to 1949) between the Communists and Nationalists, ended drug trafficking and drug use in China in about 24 hours?
Illegal drugs wouldn’t return to China until after Mao’s death when China joined the WTO and opened its doors to world trade.
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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.
In a virtual conversation with several others at Understanding China, One Blog at a Time, hosted by an anonymous American working (or once worked) in China, an incident at a McDonalds in China of a baby defecating in a washbasin is mentioned.
This led to a series of comments where Ontario Mike says he is “sick of hearing of China…” or Omar Tabee who said, “China has one of the most barbaric and backwards histories mankind has known.”
Tabee’s statement was one of the most ignorant I’ve read since writing this Blog. Historical facts say otherwise. For more than two thousand years until the 19th century, China was the most powerful, wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation on the earth. Then in about a century, the West shot ahead of China during the industrial revolution.
My comments, which Ontario Mike called “long winded”, were an attempt to explain why China is the way it is and some of its history. Without knowing a country’s history, you cannot fairly judge that country, its government or its people.
In May 2010, I wrote a series of five posts about the importance of electricity bringing China into the modern world.
In fact, in 1952, China’s electrical generating capacity was almost nonexistent and most of the people in China lived as they have for millennia—some still do.
In China’s Electric Challenge,I wrote about what it would take to bring electricity to China’s 1.3 billion people and how difficult that task was going to be. It wasn’t until after Mao’s death in 1976 that China seriously started building electrical power plants and extending the grid. The first step was to provide electricity to urban China, which had a population larger than the United States and China did it faster than the US did a century earlier.
Then in Electricity is the Key, I posted a chart showing the electrical generation projections for China from 2010 to 2030 and mentioned the gap in living standards between rural and urban China was due to the lack of electricity and paved roads in remote areas far from urban centers.
In VOLTING all of Chinainto the 21st Century, I compared China to the United States. I also wrote of China’s plans to extend the grid to rural China until China’s night sky looked like America at night, and I included photos so readers could see the difference between the US and China.
As a further comparison, I wrote America Electrified(a two part series) that covers the time and effort it took to build America’s electrical power grid.
Thomas Edison built the first power plant in 1882. Forty-five years later, the first power grid was established in one state, Pennsylvania, and it wouldn’t be until after World War II and the 1950s that America would extend the electric grid to most of the country.
It took America almost seventy years to build a power grid and China didn’t start building one until the 1980s with about five times the people to hook up. As can be seen from America’s history, modernization takes time.
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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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