“You must matter,” she tells the girls that are her students. “You must be independent.”
The teacher wants her students to know the alternatives so they have choices. She says, “You don’t change overnight. It takes time. The ideas have to sink in.”
The students are schoolteachers from China’s rural areas. They have come to Beijing for workplace training and to learn more about themselves.
Moreover, this is happening in Communist China and most Western critics have no idea what is going on.
The rural teachers study the Chinese Constitution to learn about their rights and responsibilities.
After all, men and women are equal under the law in China, but there is a long way to go to change the old ways of thinking to achieve that equality.
As in the US, women in China are not paid the same as men for the same jobs.
One of the schoolteachers from rural China said, “You come to believe that you are not as good as men. But I hope when I return to my town that I will have the strength to stand up for myself.”
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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Change taking place in China is not happening as fast as many Western critics want it to. To these critics, China should flip the feudal switch to democracy and the light should come on without effort.
However, in spite of Western pressure to speed things up, changes are taking place as planned by China’s government.
For example, foot binding was around for several centuries when the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1911) first attempted to end a practice that would continue for several more centuries.
Even the Nationalists failed to end foot binding in the 20th century. In fact, foot binding wouldn’t end until after 1949 when the Communist Party ruled China.
After a long period of nothing happening, which was due to Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, new approaches to education were encouraged after 1977.
In 1976 when Mao died, twenty percent of the population was literate. Today more than 90% can read with a goal to reach 99%.
In 1985, school reformwas implemented making nine years of education mandatory for all children. Academic achievement became the new priority over the political consciousness of Mao’s era.
An example of how China’s education policies have brought about change may be seen among the “Granite Women”, who live near the coast in southeast China.
For centuries, these women carried the blocks of granite from the quarries where their husbands, brothers and fathers worked cutting the stone.
However, today, China’s economic reforms along with education are changing the old ways.
Younger women, who have now had enough education, know what they don’t want for their lives.
For centuries, others like the Qing Dynasty and the Nationalists failed to bring about change in China. Where these others failed, the Party appears to be succeeding.
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.
Chris Devonshire-Ellis wrote a convincing piece at China Briefing that India‘s economic growth would speed past China in the near future.
He says, “It (India’s) growth rate could overtake China’s by 2013… Some economists think India will grow faster than any other large country over the next 25 years.”
However, there are flaws in that opinion.
Once again, the foundation of this prediction is based on India being a democracy “where entrepreneurs are all furiously doing their own thing” while China is a culture of secrecy and censorship. Chris mentions a few of China’s other flaws too, which China is struggling to overcome.
What Chris doesn’t mention is the difference in poverty and illiteracy between India and China.
India and China both became independent about the same time—China in 1949 and India in 1947. Due to Chairman Mao’s policies, China suffered horribly from 1949 to 1976 and little progress was made.
For China, most of the progress has taken place in the last three decades. India, on the other hand, has had more than 60 years to solve its problems.
Let’s see what each has accomplished.
The World Banksays, “that China’s record of poverty reduction and growth is enviable. Between 1981 and 2004 the fraction of the population consuming less than a dollar-a-day fell from 65% to 10% and more than half a billion people were lifted out of poverty.”
For India, the World Bank says, “poverty remains a major challenge. According to the revised official poverty line, 37.2% of the population (about 410 million people remains poor, making India home to one-third of the World’s poor people.” UNICEF shows the poverty in India to be 42%.
World Bank studies also established the direct and functional relationship between literacy and productivity on the one hand and literacy and the overall quality of human life on the other.
India’s literacy rate was about 12% when the British left in 1947. Today, literacy is 68%.
In China, literacy is more than 93% with a goal to reach 99% in the next few years.
This means that India has about 800 million literate people competing with 1.2 billion in China.
As for India succeeding, MeriNews.com says, “At a time when we (India) are poised on the threshold of becoming a superpower, the rampant malnutrition and prevalence of anemic children and women to the extent of 48 per cent of the population is a definitive indicator that we have failed as a democracy in ensuring the fundamental requirements of our citizens.”
It appears that China—with its censorship, secrecy and socialist government—has done a much better job of taking care of its citizens.
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.
Many American Conservatives and most Sinophobes probably won’t want to learn this but millions of Chinese students from Communist China have attended American universities and colleges and earned degrees.
Many of these students return to mainland China influenced by what they learned in America.
Imagine, when China’s growth to become a modern nation is complete, the country might turn into a republic and/or democracy influenced by America’s “so-called” socialist, liberal institutions of higher education.
I’m sure members of the GOP and the Christian Coalition would much rather have educated these Chinese citizens in conservative Christian colleges and universities. Too bad.
Next time you visit USC, MIT, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford or UCLA, look around. How many Chinese faces do you see?
In USA Today, there is a piece about Chinese college students flocking to U.S. campuses and says that last year alone, 98,510 Chinese graduate and undergraduate students poured into U.S. colleges and universities lured by China’s emphasis on academic achievement and the prestige of U.S. higher education.
However, this did not start recently and it isn’t free. In fact, it costs a lot of money for a foreign student to attend a college or university in the U.S.
Since the door out of China opened as early as 1980, more than a million Chinese students have graduated from the U.S. and returned to China, which may explain China’s Sexual Revolution in the late 1990s.
It might shock Americans to realize that most of the people in China that have the money to send their children to the US belong to the Communist Youth League or the Communist Party so many of the children of China’s leaders have lived in and been educated in the U.S.
No wonder, China wants to be the next America and people in China stand in line to eat at Pizza Hut.
In fact, if there was a revolution in China to replace the Communist Party, don’t be surprised if the survivors moved to America where many already own houses and have bank accounts.
Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the father of China’s republic, was sent to Hawaii in 1879 where he studied science and Christianity in college.
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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 parts 1 through 5, I provided evidence showing that China is building a republic that may last for centuries.
What is happening on the Internet offers more evidence that China is moving toward a more open society. In China, there are more Blogs than any nation and a free exchange of ideas via e-mails.
In fact, in China there are more people logging onto the Internet than America’s entire population.
China could have limited all Internet use as North Korea has, but China hooked up to the World Wide Web instead.
What are the real reasons China struggles to censor parts of the international internet like pornography, WordPress, Facebook and Blogger?
Is it possible that China is doing this because they do not have the confidence that most of their people are sophisticated enough to deal with all the crazy ideas floating around in international cyberspace.
Instead, China is opening to the world like a slow blooming flower allowing the people to adapt instead of being overwhelmed, which might lead to a meltdown and a return to chaos and anarchy.
However, anyone who wants to sneak past China’s Net Nanny may do so.
I’ve known people in China who have slipped past the Net Nanny, which is more like a leaky dam getting ready to burst, and it isn’t that hard. It just takes some time. See Tech Crunch for more information about Internet use in China.
Deng Xiaoping was right. If China had the political gridlock and partisieanship that exists in America today, would the Chinese have achieved the goals to modernize that they have?
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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