China Moving – Part 2/2

January 5, 2011

 To maintain perspective, I will start this segment about poverty in China by citing the CIA World Factbook. The CIA report says that only 2.8% of China’s population lives in “absolute poverty”, while reporting that 12% live in poverty in the US.

India’s listing says 25% live in poverty. The poverty percentage for the United Kingdom (Britain) was fourteen. Zambia, the highest poverty rate I saw was at 86%.

The CIA says, “National estimates of the percentage of the population falling below the poverty line are based on surveys of sub-groups, with the results weighted by the number of people in each group. Definitions of poverty vary considerably among nations. For example, rich nations generally employ more generous standards of poverty than poor nations.

In fact, the 2010 Global Hunger Index says there were 925 million hungry people in the world. The index ranks countries on a 100-point scale, with zero being the best score (no hunger) and 100 being the worst.

China’s score was nine.

Al Jazeera’s Samah El-Shahat says, “The Chinese economic miracle dominates headlines around the world.… The economy there is predicted to grow at 8% up to 2010 and beyond, which is an incredible rate of development.”

To make this happen, people migrated to where the jobs are creating crowded cities and empty villages.

This segment starts out in Sichuan Province on a family farm where bringing in the crop falls to a young girl and her grandmother, Wei Shu Bin.

Wei Shu Bin says the young girl’s parents are away working in the city to earn money—”that is their way of taking care of me.”

In fact, the money sent home from the city has transformed the family’s life in the countryside. Before the parents went away, the family lived in a hut with a thatched roof reminiscent of the middle ages in Europe.

Today, they live in a larger house, but most of the village people are very old or very young because 80% have gone to work elsewhere.

Yang Xui Ying in the village market says, “We keep pigs and grow vegetables for sale in the market. We can support ourselves.”

The reason stated for so many leaving the villages to work in the cities is to provide a better future for their children so they can attend school. However, there is a downside to not having parents at home—the crime rate among rural Chinese teens has gone up.

To build a modern China with improved lifestyles requires sacrifice and hard work. It doesn’t come free.

Return to China Moving – Part 1

______________

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.

Leave a Comment » | America, China, cultural differences, economy, education, family values | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China Moving – Part 1/2

January 4, 2011

To put this topic in perspective, I’ll start by talking about poverty in the United States.

Business Insider says that 45 million Americans lived in poverty in 2009, which saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.

U.S. household participation in the food stamp program has increased 20.28% since last year, and in June, the number of Americans on food stamps surpassed 41 million for the first time.

One of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.

More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the U.S. government health care program designed principally to help the poor, and 20% of children now live in poverty.

The poverty in China you will now read and/or see is not unique. Poverty is a global challenge.

In fact, the World Bank says the poverty rate in China fell from 85% in 1981 to 15.9% in 2005, while in India, 421 million live in poverty.

In this 2007 video, Al Jazeera reported that 150 million people left rural China to find jobs in the country’s rapidly growing cities.

On the outskirts of Shanghai is an illegal shantytown built by migrant laborers. Most migrant laborers are farmers who left their land to find work in the city.

The migrants in this Al Jazeera report collect debris from construction sites, which they sell to recycling centers. Even though these workers earn little, it is more than double what they earned at home.

However, the narrator “does not” mention that on the farm, there may not be much money to buy luxury goods but the home they lived in was rent-free and as farmers, they grew enough food to feed themselves.

The World Bank says that one percent of the world’s population survives by collecting valuable trash and debris as the men depicted in the Al Jazeera video do to earn enough money to survive.

Trash collecting represents the first tenuous step to escape the poverty of rural China.

Professor Shi Ming-zheng, Director of NYU in Shanghai, says the urban people have mixed feelings about the millions of migrant workers flooding into the city to improve their lives.

He says, “On one hand, the urban people feel the migrants are necessary to provide cheap labor. On the other hand, they also despise them because they come from uneducated, poor rural backgrounds.”

For most migrant labors, the only hope for the future is with the children and education is the key.

In fact, China’s government sees the importance of raising the education levels of children so they become useful people for China.

But, according to Al Jazeera, of China’s 20 million migrant children less than half attend school.

Part 2 of “China Moving” will focus on what happens in the countryside when so many people left to find work in the cities.

Learn more about The Urban-Rural Divide in China.

______________

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.

Leave a Comment » | America, China, cultural differences, economy, family values, parenting | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Living in an Egg House

December 27, 2010

Matt Hickman at Mother Nature Network reports on a young Beijing architect that built a solar-powered, egg-shaped hut and planted it on the streets of Beijing near where he worked.

I’ve been to Beijing several times and getting around is a challenge since there seems to be gridlock on the roads almost 24/7, so this was a smart move.

Hickman writes that the Egg House measured six feet at its highest point. The architect, Dai Haifei, built the wheeled home for $964 (US) using a bamboo frame clad with sack bags filled with sawdust and grass seeds.

Inside the egg house is a bed, water tank, washbasin and night table. Plug-in possessions, including a bedside lamp, were powered by a solar panel on top of the pod.

If you want to learn more of how Dai Haifei lived in his egg, click on the Mother Nature Network link above.

However, earlier this month Hickman reports that Haifei was forced to remove his egg from the sidewalk and is currently living with friends.

Tanto News powered by Xinhua, China’s state-run media, explains why Dai Haifei resorted to such an extreme.  The cost of living in Beijing or Shanghai is high.

A recent survey showed that 80% of college graduates start their careers in second tier cities instead of first tier cities such as Shanghai or Beijing.

It seems people may live comfortable in a second tier city with a monthly salary of 4,000 yuan (about $600 US dollars).

However, in Shanghai, people barely survive with monthly earnings of $750 US.  To live in Shanghai or Beijing would require at least $30,000 US annually.

Discover more about China Going Green

______________

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.

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

Building an Empty City

December 17, 2010

In November 2009, Al Jazeera English reported that part of China’s stimulus plan was to create jobs for Chinese losing work due to the 2008 economic crises (caused by New York’s greedy Wall Street and US banks).

To do this, Beijing pledged $585 (US) billion in stimulus spending.  Some of that money went to encourage social development and domestic spending.

Rural residents received up to 17% in rebates for buying televisions and refrigerators.

However, about $220 billion went into building roads and other public infrastructure. Two hundred billion dollars went into expanding the railway system.

The theory was to keep people working and spending.

For example, China built the empty city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia in just five years for a population of one million.

One reason was to increase GDP by spending more money. Since the more a country builds, the more its economic activity increases and the higher the GDP will be.

Al Jazeera’s Melissa Chan reported that most of the residential apartments in Ordos have been sold but remain empty since the buyers bought them as investments.

The reason that Ordos was built in this location of Inner Mongolia was because the region is China’s Texas (oil country), which has created many millionaires.

______________

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.

Leave a Comment » | capitalism, China, Communism, cultural differences, economy, family values | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Comparing Stimulus Packages

December 12, 2010

I read an informative and fascinating post by John Ross at Key Trends in the World Economy comparing how China and the US handled the 2008 global financial crises.

Ross has an impressive resume and knows what he is talking about.

It appears that Ross was one of the few voices that predicted China would recover faster than the US. 

Most conservative Western economists kept predicting the US would recover faster than China.  As it turned out, this was a wishful fantasy.

Three years later, the results show that Ross was correct. Between 2008 to 2010, China’s GDP grew more than 30% while US results were dismal.

While Ross provides much graphic evidence to support why this happened, it is his conclusion that sums up America’s failure to compete and grow its GDP that points out possible flaws in Western economic freewheeling theories that base too much trust in the private sector with little government control.

Ross says that the strengthening of political trends in the US led by such as the ‘Tea Party’ and the consolidation of right-wing Republican control of the House of Representatives may mean the US economy will continue to be hobbled in comparison to China’s GDP growth.

Ross feels that only if the US were to turn to a program of direct state intervention to boost new investment would the US benefit, which is what happened in China.

Instead of learning from the past, stubborn US conservatives appear to be repeating the same mistakes that caused the 2008 global financial crises.

Learn more at Building Things and Going Places

______________

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.

4 Comments | America, American culture, business, capitalism, China, Chinese Culture, economy, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »