Going Faster in China

December 4, 2010

In April 2010, Al Jazeera English reported on China’s high-speed rail growth, which will cost an estimated 300 billion dollars to build.

This latest generation of trains will crisscross the country at speeds up to 400 kilometers or 248 miles an hour.

China expects this infrastructure project to sustain economic growth.

Originally, plans for high-speed rail were in the future. However, faced with about 15 million job losses due to the 2008 global economic crises caused by US banks and Wall Street greed, China put six-million people back to work in 2009 by speeding up this project.

High-speed rail is a large component of China’s stimulus package.

Today, China has the world’s busiest rail network.

However, according to the World Bank if we measure kilometers of rail line per one million people, China’s rail network is not the size it should be to sustain growth.

With room to grow, China’s transport ministry set a goal to add 16,000 kilometers (almost ten thousand miles) of track to be built by 2012.

However, for most of China’s population, the cost of high-speed rail may be too high and some rural villages will have to be relocated to make room, which is a result of change.

Although some economists have concerns about the level and pace of infrastructure development in China, it is obvious that China is planning far into the future and not waiting for the future to arrive first.

In fact, China plans to have the largest high-speed rail network in the world within five years.

As economic conditions improve in rural China, more people may be able to buy tickets to ride fast trains.  However, buying a ticket to fly may still be out of reach for most rural people.

China is also improving air travel. Short News from Flanders China Chamber of Commerce says, “In the next ten years China will add 90 new airports tripling the size of China’s small-sized jet passenger fleet from 500 to almost 1,600 by 2030.

Discover more at Speed on Rails and the Three Gorges Dam Makes News

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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

Ugg Boots – Where they come from

December 4, 2010

I bought a pair of Ugg boots a few years back at Big 5 for less than $30 to keep my feet warm.

I didn’t consider where the boots were made, and I never intended wearing them to go shopping or outside. Since I work at home and save money by leaving the heat off on cold days, my feet get cold so it made sense to wear a pair. (I just Googled Big 5 and saw Uggs on sale for $39 a pair).

Uggs do not appear designed for outdoors, yet I see many young American women looking sharp shopping in Ugg boots. It seems to be the latest fad.

Curious, I did a bit of research to learn more about this popular fad.

I learned from Business Gather.com “Make no mistake about it: Ugg boots are not just for girls. Sure, they may look cute and snuggly, but with football quarterback Tom Brady on board as the brand’s new spokesperson, Ugg boots are poised to attract hoards of manly men all around the world.”

Then I wanted to know where Ugg boots came from and what it costs to make a pair.

I discovered this video on YouTube of a factory in China where the material and labor come together to make Uggs. The conclusion of the description below the video says, “These boots are the most cheap and excellent quality boots in the world.”

The New York Times recently reported “The salaries of factory workers in China are still low compared to those in the United States and Europe: the hourly wage in southern China is only about 75 cents an hour.”

Chinese factory workers often work overtime as long as sixteen hours a day for six days weeks.

However, in 2009, the US federal minimum hourly wage was $7.25, which pays about $15,000 a year for a full time job not counting hidden benefits, which don’t exist in China.

In China, the Ugg factory workers in that video are probably earning less than $3,700 (US) annually and working twice the hours to keep those Ugg prices down so American women and men may buy a cheap pair to look stylish while shopping.


This is a video explaining how to detect fake Ugg boots

After I watched this video, I checked the Ugg boots I bought from Big 5.  They were fake. Does that mean they weren’t made in China?

Who makes a profit from the real Ugg boots? Deckers Outdoor Corporation holds the Ugg trademark in more than 100 countries worldwide and reported sales of 689 million US dollars under the Ugg brand in 2008 and sales were up in 2009. Source: Source: Wiki.Ugg Boots

How many Americans would be willing to pay four or five times the price for a pair of Ugg boots so those low paying minimum wage jobs would come to the US?

Then, how many Americans are willing to work for the federal minimum wage without benefits? Not many since there are about eleven million illegal aliens in the US working those jobs.

So, if you live in the US, next time you hear political ads or someone bashing China for stealing jobs from Americans, look in a mirror.

Update:  After I wrote this post and up-loaded it, The Walking Company sent me an e-mail advertising “Zealand” slippers (another “Ugg” type product) on sale at 70% off.  Instead of paying $65 a pair, I paid less than $20. I stocked up and bought four pair and was surprised when the shipment arrived to discover that the “Zealand” product line is made in China instead of New Zealand.

Discover The India, China battle to eliminate poverty and illiteracy

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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.

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7 Comments | America, business, capitalism, China, cultural differences, economy | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Floating Population Going Home

December 4, 2010

When Mao died in 1976 and China changed direction from revolutionary Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party wrote a new Constitution in 1982 and set out to reinvent China. 

This did not happen in an instant and more than three decades later China is still changing.

In 1953, when China had its first modern census, it was revealed that China had a population of 583 million. By 1982, the population had almost doubled to a billion. Source: Columbia University

The poverty rate in China in 1982 was 64% of the population. By 2004, that rate had declined to 10%, which means about 500 million people left poverty behind during this period.

The World Bank says poverty refers to people whose income is less than $1.25 per day.

For three decades, most of the economic development took place in the cities. Deng Xiaoping said that a better life would eventually reach almost everyone but some would have to wait longer for it to happen.

Last year, China shifted the focus on economic development to rural China.

No one knows the exact number of migrant workers. However, estimates run from 200 to 300 million.

These people represent the largest migration in human history—three times the number of people who immigrated to America from Europe over an entire century.

As in the US, migrant workers in China and around the world are often required to work longer hours for lower pay than the law requires. Yet, most still earn more than from where they came from.

For example, when my wife first came to the US from China, her first job was in a restaurant where she waited on tables for no pay. She earned only the tips customers left behind.

Back in China, the migrants work in factories, construction, restaurants, beauty salons, housework, childcare, and brothels. Some work in the recycling industry.

In 2010, China set goals and started projects to extend electricity, roads and railroads into rural China to improve lifestyles there.

These modern improvements in rural China have already created jobs closer to remote villages and migrant workers are returning home to find jobs that pay the same as distant urban cities.

 A government survey of migrant workers in 2009 found the number returning home had increased by 8.2% from the previous year and now accounts for almost half of the total migrant population.

To discover more about China’s migrant workers see China’s Stick People

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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

Building Things and Going Places

December 3, 2010

I discovered this time-lapse video at zerohedge.com of a fifteen-story hotel being built in a few days in Changsha, a city in south-central China.

While watching, I thought of all that China has accomplished in more than two-thousand years that no other country or civilization has achieved.

There’s the amazing miracle the world has witnessed since the early 1980s as China rebuilt and reinvented itself from a medieval kingdom to a modern nation with the only maglev line in the world.

It is obvious that the Chinese don’t give up easily once they start something.

After all, the Chinese spent more than two thousand years building the Great Wall and about a thousand years building the Grand Canal.

The largest palace on the earth, the Forbidden City, is in Beijing and was built more than five hundred years ago. 

The first emperor of China had a tomb and a Terra Cotta army built that makes the pyramids of Egypt seem insignificant.

Then there was the great fleet commanded by Admiral Zheng He during the Ming Dynasty.

In recent years, the Chinese announced they are going to build a space station, since the West won’t share theirs with China.

China has also said they are planning to build a colony on the moon, mine for rare earth metals and send a Chinese expedition to Mars within a few decades.

The Chinese recently proposed building a bullet train from Beijing to London while building thousands of kilometers of rail for bullet trains in China.  America doesn’t have one bullet train yet.

Does anyone doubt the Chinese won’t accomplish these tasks once they have announced the goals?

No wonder the Western democracies want China to have a Western style democratic government.

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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.

2 Comments | business, China, economy | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Virtue of Saving Money

December 3, 2010

Hung Huang, one of China’s four Opras and the CEO of China Interactive Media Group, the host of TV talk show Crossing Over and one of the top-five most popular Bloggers in China wrote a post for the New York Times Economix Blog about why the Chinese save so much. She thinks the Chinese save out of fear.

I don’t agree, because China is not unique when it comes to Asians saving money. Galbi Think.org says, “Savings rates for East Asian economies averaged about 35% of GDP.

Another study reported by All Business.com says, “The fact that the saving rate of rural households (in China) is considerably higher than that of urban households even though their income levels are so much lower is surprising.”

Not so surprising. I married into a Chinese family and I’ve come to believe the Chinese can out frugal anyone. The less earned, the more the Chinese save.  All it takes is saying no to buying frivolous junk and eating out when the money isn’t there.

In fact, I found the comments to Huang’s post to be more convincing.

Melvin Chin says, “Asians, including Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, are predominantly brought up with the concepts of frugality and saving from very young.… Saving teaches them to be proud of what is accumulated, enjoy the fruits of abundance, and cherish the habit as a virtue.”

B. Ray says, “The strong family connection is the reason for Chinese to save. It is the same in Taiwan. Almost every elder person I know saves for their descendents.”

Fei says, “Simply look at the generations of Chinese who live in North American, you’ll find out that the majority of them still maintain a lifelong enthusiasm of saving … because saving is a habit that’s deeply rooted in the Chinese culture.”

If all Asian cultures are so good at saving money and are all collective cultures, what does that say about the West and North America’s individualistic cultures?

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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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