In China, little is left to chance and the central government takes its job so seriously, many in the West believe the leaders of China are totalitarians and brutal dictators. In fact, China’s leaders are acting as the collective culture dictates.
Those in China who speak out against the government are considered aberrations and few have sympathy when they are punished. Confucianism and piety demand that citizens do not publicly challenge the government but, in turn, the government has an obligation to the people to insure a secure and bountiful future.
Fail in that and the Communists will lose the mandate to rule.
The most critical obligation is water. China has two of the world’s longest rivers—the Yellow and the Yangtze. However, there is still not enough water in the north.
To solve that challenge, China is building both above and underground pipelines from the south to the north to move water from the Yangtze and the Danjiangkou reservoir in Hubei province.
The most difficult task will be tunneling under earthquake prone mountains as high as five kilometers above sea level.
The South-to-North Water diversion Project in China with an estimated cost of 70 billion dollars is the largest of its kind ever undertaken. Mao Zedong first proposed the project in 1952, and it took 50 years to plan before construction started with completion set for 2050.
When done, China will divert almost 45 billion cubic meters of water annually to the drier north. Source: Water Technology.net
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.
“In China, automotive industry workers are striking for higher pay. In the U.S., auto-industry workers are agreeing to pay cuts — and then their employers are being sold to Chinese companies.” Source: Salon.com
Striking for higher pay isn’t the only thing the Chinese are doing. They are also buying sections of the US auto industry.
Bertel Schmitt at The Truth About Cars writes about Chinese investors buying up Western Auto Parts manufacturers. He says that 70% of China’s $160 billion auto-component makers are foreign companies.
It appears that due to the sick global economy, which hasn’t hit China as hard, many of these foreign auto parts companies are hurting as profits shrivel.
Schmitt says that some deals have already been made as Chinese bought Australian gearbox maker Drivetrain Systems International, a supplier to Ford and Chrysler, and GM sold Nexter to a Beijing Consortium who had government backing.
Similar sales took place in 2009, and today struggling U.S. Firms like Delphi, Lear and Visteon may be up for sale soon.
If Chinese investors buy enough Western auto-parts manufacturers, China may add that industry to solar panel and wind-turbine manufacturing along with the country’s monopoly on refining rare-earth mineral necessary for hi-tech products and weapons systems.
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.
China already leads the world in high-speed rail, solar power and wind turbine manufacturing.
Now, Spencer Swartz and Shai Oster report in the Wall Street Journal that “China has passed the U.S. to become the world’s biggest energy consumer, according to new data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), a milestone that reflects both China’s decades-long burst of economic growth and its rapidly expanding influence as an industrial giant.”
China disagrees with the IEA’s announcement but that doesn’t matter.
Even if China were correct, it wouldn’t be long before China did pass the US in energy consumption since the latest five-year plan is extending the electrical grid into rural China to send electricity to 700 million more people.
In fact, as China modernizes and catches up with the US and Europe, more energy will be required to power all those rural homes. Even if the Chinese do not consume as much as those in the US, that is still a lot of electricity.
This begs an answer for the question the Slate asks with How Communist is China? After all, General Motors sold more cars in China than in the US in the first half of 2010. And let’s not mention the Golden Arches, KFC, Pizza Hut and Starbucks.
Since China abandoned Maoism and Marxism, the Middle Kingdom has been rewriting the rules for capitalist growth. The irony is that politically, China is ruled by a single political party with an unpopular name in the West—a name that doesn’t fit any longer.
Maybe China’s government should call itself the People’s Collective Party.
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.
America has more in common with China than most think—oil spills.
MSNBC reports about the Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. After an April explosion that killed eleven workers, BP’s deep water well spilled as much as 184 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Fishing industries and tourism has been devastated while oil washes ashore turning beaches black with goo.
Meanwhile, the BBC reports that China is struggling to recover from their worst oil spill ever.
China is new to this type of disaster and yet, they quickly mobilized an army of volunteers and anglers to help clean the pollution from the area around the port of Dalian, one of China’s most important strategic oil reserves.
China’s oil spill came from an explosion in an oil pipeline. Witnesses report that China may have responded faster than the US did for the British Petroleum spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The pipeline that exploded belonged to China National Petroleum Corporation, Asia’s biggest oil and gas producer by volume. Source: Uncoverage.net
This is the price for being a modern nation where so many depend on oil for electricity and transportation.
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.
I find it interesting and amusing to read this obsession in the West about China’s labor practices. Most of what I read in the media and comments to Blog posts have a superior tone as if these people come from a culture that is paradigm of virtue.
No one in the West has earned a seat to sainthood. In an Associated Press piece by Elaine Kurtenbach, we see Western corporate greed dripping dollar signs from hungry vampire fangs in these quotes about China, “Many companies are striving to stay profitable by shifting factories to cheaper areas farther inland or to other developing countries, and a few are even resuming production in the West.… I have 15 major clients. My job is to give the best advice I can give. I tell it like it is. I tell them, put your helmet on, it’s going to get ugly,” said Goodwin…”
From BindApple.com comes this statement as if no one else in the world works these hours, “Foxconn and Inventec are two powerful brands that not many of you heard of. When Apple signed a partnership with these manufacturers, the average worker, lived and worked in the factory, doing more than 60 hours of work in a week.”
America and most Western nations are not paradigms of virtue. Labor in the West didn’t get where it is today without a struggle. All one has to do is look at history to discover what it took to earn more for less hours and be treated with “some” respect in the workplace.
If you spend time at the AFL-CIA’s Labor History Timeline in America, you will discover that in 1791, the first labor strike in the building trades took place in Philadelphia demanding a 10-hour workday bill of rights. In 1835, there was a general strike for a 10-hour workday in the same city.
When there was a national uprising of railroad workers in 1877, ten Irish coal miners were hanged in Pennsylvania and later nine more were hanged. Then in 1914, there was the Ludlow Massacre of 13 women and children and 7 men in a Colorado coal miners’ strike. In 1934, during the Great Depression, there was an upsurge in strikes, including a national textile strike, which failed.
Click on the Child Labor Public Education Project and you will learn that “Forms of child labor, including indentured servitude and child slavery, have existed throughout American history.” In fact, “(American) factory owners viewed them (children) as more manageable, cheaper, and less likely to strike.”
This situation in the US didn’t change until, “Child labor began to decline as the labor and reform movements grew and labor standards in general began improving, increasing the political power of working people and other social reformers to demand legislation regulating child labor.” Even then, it wasn’t until 1938 that child labor laws were enacted to protect America’s children from exploitation.
So, if you are one of those paradigms of virtue who feels the need to criticize what is going on in China today, consider America’s labor history before you open your mouth or finger dance your computer keyboard.
It took more than two-hundred years for the US to reach the place it is today with a standard 40-hour workweek with benefits and overtime pay for many workers, while removing child labor from the workplace.
China didn’t start until 1950, when Mao created laws that made women equal to men. Progress stopped during Mao’sGreat Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, which went on for almost thirty years.
Since 1980, China has had about thirty years to evolve, while in America the income gap between the rich and poor widens as if the US is taking backward steps while union membership shrinks.
In fact, Chinese manufactures may be building plants in the US to take advantage of cheaper labor. After all, Japanese companies like Toyota and Honda have already done that.
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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