China’s Changing Face – Farmers’ Friend the Organic Way – Part 2/3

August 29, 2010

The members of “Farmers’ Friend” decided to work with the poorest peasants near Liuzhou City in Guangxi Province. 

The village they selected was Nashe, a three-hour drive from the city that was far from the urban pollution.

The president of “Farmers’ Friend”, Zhou Jinzhang, talked to the senior caption of Nashe, Wei Xiuqing.

It wasn’t easy convincing Wei that organic farming could be profitable for everyone. To encourage the peasants, “Farmers’ Friend” agreed to be responsible for any economic losses.

With this guarantee, Wei agreed to work with “Farmers’ Friend” to set up the duck-rice system.

The ducks would eat the insects and pesticides would no longer be needed. 

Soon after starting the project, there were problems. Some of the ducks died from pesticides used by other farmers.

“Farmers’ Friend” also brought in experts to help create better pig breeding programs. The result was that the urban people enjoyed healthier food and the peasants earned more income.

Now Wei has a dream to become prosperous enough through organic farming to attract the young people who left to work in urban factories to return home to the village.

See Deng Xiaoping’s 20/20 Vision

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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. 

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China’s Changing Face – Farmers’ Friend the Organic Way – Part 1/3

August 29, 2010

China uses more pesticides than any other country. 

To prove a point, Greenpeace conducted an experiment and sent 45 samples of fruits and vegetables from rural Chinese peasant farmers to an independent laboratory to find out how serious the problem was.

Five of the samples had no pesticides on them. The other 40 samples had 50 different kinds of pesticide on them.  Source: Greenpeace

This video is about a group called “Farmers’ Friend”, professional urbanites from Liuzhou City in Guangxi Province, who wanted to have healthier food to eat that was pesticide free. 

To achieve this, these Chinese professionals connected with peasants in rural China with goals to encourage organic farming that would offer higher incomes to the peasants and healthier food to urban people.

“Farmers’ Friend” wanted to work with the poorest peasants in the poorest rural areas.

Since 1980, hundreds of millions of rural people had moved to urban China to work in factories. This resulted in demands on peasant farmers to grow more food to feed the country, which results in heavy pesticide and chemical fertilizer use.

In 2006, the central government announced a policy of urban support for rural development. However, by then, “Farmers’ Friend” had already taken its first step in 2005 to encourage organic farming in rural areas.

See Women in Science & Business

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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. 

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The “What If” Housing Bubble in China

August 29, 2010

Charles Hugh Smith writes for the Daily Finance and claims that China’s Housing Bubble Will End Badly.

That’s not going to happen for several reasons. The first reason is that China’s economy does not depend on the housing market to survive. Most people in China still don’t own their homes even in the cities.

In the US, housing loans to GDP were 79% but in China, that number is about 15%, which means real estate in China doesn’t prop up the economy.

Let’s look at one fictional individual who loses his job in China and can’t make his mortgage payment.

If he always lived in the city and has family (even distant relations), he will move in with them and rent his home to make the payments. The family may even pitch in so he doesn’t lose the home.

If that fictional Chinese man came to the city to work from a village, he returns home.  The peasants in rural China don’t have to worry about losing those homes.  In fact, it’s as if China had two economies: rural and urban.

If the government needs to develop the land the peasant’s home sits on, a new home is provided. More than seven hundred million Chinese live in villages owned by collectives and the central government. Those peasants don’t have a mortgage payment, pay rent or property tax.

Even in urban China, people only pay property tax once when they buy the home they live in.  Property tax for your home isn’t an annual burden as in the US.

Another factor is that the average savings rate in China is 40% and the wealthiest Chinese own about 40% of urban real estate.

See Betting Against China’s Housing Market

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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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Nothing Lasts Forever

August 27, 2010

An interesting piece from Forbes scored solid points for pointing out why China is Winning the Economic War.

Of course, there will be some Americans who will disagree. They will say that the U.S. is still the greatest nation on earth, the land of the free, and that it always will be.

I’m sure these misguided patriots would point out China’s flaws like exploiting workers with low pay and long hours.

However, Forbes deals with that flawed logic by pointing out that the U.S. once exploited its workers too and forced children to work 14-hour days.

In fact, the young American Republic once had slaves and women were chattel, who couldn’t vote or own property.

The Forbes piece says, “The U.S. was winning (the economic war against Communism) hands down for a long time, but not so much anymore due to a number of countries surpassing the U.S. in recent years in a number of specific areas.”  

Using a quote from Sam Houston in 1850, Forbes explains why the US is losing. Houston said, “A nation divided against itself cannot stand,” and, for sure, Sun Tzu would agree.

In fact, the U.S. has been divided for the last 15 years in “increasingly bitter time and energy consuming political arguments: the morals of President Clinton, whether or not war should be waged to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, whether the country’s current problems are due to the depth of the economic hole dug during the last (G.W. Bush) administration, or ineptness of the current administration in pulling the economy out of that (very deep) hole (the Republicans dug).” Source: Forbes 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. 

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“Gray” Money

August 24, 2010

The Bloomberg News reports that China’s wealthiest people are hiding 80% of $1.4 trillion. That leaves about 280 billion for the rest of China’s people to hide.

Bloomberg calls this “gray” income and lists all the possible “illegal or quasi-illegal” ways it may have been earned.

When the piece mentions that the wealth gap between China’s rich and poor may lead to social unrest threatening the rule of the Communist Party, this may be true, since the real cause of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 was due to corrupt government officials lining their pockets at the expense of the worker.

In fact, it should come as no surprise that reducing this income disparity is a top goal of China’s current president and prime minister.

However, the same problem is happening in the United States. “Millionaires in the U.S. and Canada saw their wealth increase 15 percent in 2009, to a total of 4.6 trillion dollars.” Source: 7Bends

Then there is the fact that the gap between the rich and poor grows in the US too.

“Since the 1990s, 40 percent of the increased wealth went into the pockets of the rich minority, while only 1 percent went to the poor majority.” Source: China’s Report on US Human Rights Record in 2000 Information Office of China’s State Council

Also in the US, the FBI estimates that that white-collar crime costs the US more than $300 billion annually.

The grim facts about income disparity between the wealthy and the working people means both the US and China have similar challenges—to create jobs for the worker that pay adequate wages.

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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. 

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