Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 5/7

October 24, 2010

In Part 6, I provided evidence that China is making progress at improving the integrity of its government and legal system.

Returning to the topic of literacy, why would China improve the literacy rate if the government didn’t want to become a republic since illiteracy is the greatest tool of a dictator?

Illiterate people are easier to brainwash, fool and control.

Imagine the effort to raise literacy from 20% in the late 1970s to more than 90% today. Then give birth to a legal system that China has never had before. Source: History of Literacy in China

Why waste this time if the goal wasn’t to build a republic with more freedom for the people?

In addition, China rebuilt all of its major cities, took an electrical grid in 1950 that produced a half megawatt of electricity in a few cities and spread that system over a country about the size of America in a few decades to serve a population of 1.3 billion people.

In comparison, the electrical grid in America took “much” longer to build.

Experts say that the growth that has taken place in China in the last three decades has never happened before in the history of global civilization.

If China wanted to stay a totalitarian government, why bother? 

After all, North Korea lives in a state of never ending Cultural Revolution. The people starve and have few freedoms. Why not copy them? Yet, after Mao, the Chinese repudiated Revolutionary Maoism and opened China to world trade. In fact, China is buying food from all over the world to make sure the people do not starve.

Today, millions of mainland Chinese are global tourists spending billions of dollars in European democracies and in the U.S.  There are also about one hundred thousand Chinese students in U.S. colleges and universities exposed to American ideas and democracy. 

Shouldn’t China’s leaders be worried about this exposure to democracy or is it possible this is what the Party wants?

Return to Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 4

______________

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, education, government | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 3/7

October 23, 2010

In Post 2, I talked about the importance of literacy in a democracy or republic.

To fix this problem, China leaders planned ahead fifty to a hundred years with this question in mind—what would it take to successfully modernize China and educate the people for a republican government?

In 1982, China wrote a new Constitution with term limits and age limits so there would not be another modern emperor like Mao.

That constitution has been amended several times.

Although Western critics claim the Party hasn’t implemented the freedom of press and religion mentioned in the Chinese Constitution, what isn’t said is that there are other articles that give the central government and the courts the power to stop anyone deemed a threat to the stability of China’s government and economic growth.


This video is outdated but accurate in some of its facts.  In Fact, China is now the world’s 2nd largest economy.

Article 5 says, “All acts in violation of the Constitution and the law must be investigated. No organization or individual may enjoy the privilege of being above the Constitution and the law.”

Article 28 says, “The state maintains public order and suppresses treasonable and other counter- revolutionary activities; it penalizes actions that endanger public security and disrupt the socialist economy and other criminal activities, and punishes and reforms criminals.”

Article 35 says, “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.”

Notice that the language in Article 35 does not guarantee this freedom but says, “enjoy“, whatever that means.

China’s Constitution is not America’s Constitution. Yet China is often judged by Western critics as if it were.

Return to Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 2

______________

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, Communism, education, government, legal system, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 2/7

October 23, 2010

In Part 1, I talked about how Sun Yat-sen was the father of China’s republic and how Chiang Kai-shek destroyed any chance of having a two-party republic after Sun died.

Even after the Chinese civil war ended in 1949, it would take decades to prepare the people so Sun Yat-sen’s dream becomes a reality.

By reading India Falling Short, you will discover what happens when a democracy or republic moves too fast from a feudal society to a modern one.

For a republic or a democracy to survive, people must be educated and literate.

In fact, literacy in the US is listed at 99 percent. However, studies assert that 46% to 51% of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn “significantly” below the threshold poverty level for an individual. This means that the chances of the US surviving as a republic or democracy are grim.

In 1949, when the Communists came to power about 32% of the people above the age of 12 could read.

By 1976, literacy was 20% when Mao died. The reason literacy had dropped so much was because of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution, which the nine top leaders of the Communist Party voted against.

Mao had those men eliminated or removed from power one at a time and went ahead with The Cultural Revolution.

Today, literacy in China is more than 90%. See China’s Literacy Policies

During the Tiananmen Square incident, Deng Xiaoping said that the Party wanted democracy for China, but Western style democracy would bring the economic growth to a grinding halt because the country (as India still is) wasn’t ready yet to become a democracy or the kind of republic Sun Yat-sen envisioned.

In 1989, China’s literacy program was in its infancy. Almost a billion people in rural China lived in conditions similar to serfs during Europe’s Dark Ages.  China’s cities had not been rebuilt.

Return to Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – 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, Communism, education, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Too Much History

September 28, 2010

I’ve read A FEW opinions about iLook China on other Blogs that say I write too much about China’s history.

I’ve also been judged to be a “Panda Lover” and “Pro China”.

I happen to enjoy learning about history and there is a reason that history has been included as a topic in this Blog.


A SHORT HISTORY LESSON

Barbara Tuchman (1912 to 1989) explains it better than I do. 

Tuchman was an American self-trained historian and author, who twice won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.

One of her last books was The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

Tuchman says, Many individuals are guilty of folly (Tuchman also calls this woodenheadedness), but when governments persist in folly, their actions can adversely affect thousands, even millions of lives. Folly is a child of power. “The power to command frequently causes failure to think.” (p.32).

I’ve read that historians say an event must be at least fifty-years old to be judged as history. I used that as my criteria.


LEARN FROM HISTORY

I wanted to find out if I was writing too much history about China, so I surveyed all 734 posts that I have written to date.

The first history post I discovered was Foreign Devil Heroes and that was post 49 that appeared on February 13.

An American Genocide (56) and An American Shadow Over the Philippines (57) qualify but those two are about American history, and I have discovered that some misguided American patriots don’t want to learn about the dark side of U.S. history. 

The next history post would be Learning from China’s History (90).

Next was China’s Health Care During Mao’s Time (92)

Post 118 is about The Man Who Made China, which qualifies since China’s first emperor lived more than two millennia ago.

The history of religion in China appears with Christianity and Islam in China (125) followed by Cults and Christian Cannon Balls (126) and The Influence of Confucius (127).

Since so much of China’s history with Christianity and Islam turns out bad, one commenter complained that I was against Christianity.


A LONG HISTORY LESSON

Of more than 730 posts, 107 were on history and 70 of those appeared in the last two months mixed in with more than a hundred posts on other topics—the number of history posts represents less than 15% of the total.

Then I checked statistics for top posts of “All Time”.  If no one was reading history, I decided I would stop writing about it.

Seven history posts were among the top twenty and iLook China has had more than eleven thousand visits since the January 28, 2010 launch. 

That means 35% of the top 20 most-popular posts visited were on China’s history.


A FINAL LESSON ABOUT HISTORY

For individuals who want to avoid history, there are menus on the HOME page that offer choices.

______________

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 | education, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Speaking Out about Education – Part 6/6

September 15, 2010

I’m angry at this national witch-hunt in America, which stems from the self-esteem movement.

Teachers have a thankless job.

It is difficult and traumatic to deal with antagonistic parents and belligerent children, who feel they have the right to say or do anything they want including telling lies at home to avoid reading or doing homework.

In fact, instead of being recognized and praised in public for my accomplishments as a teacher, I was often under assault by parents and administrators for being too demanding.

  • George Carlin says sociopaths have high self-esteem. Caution, Carlin uses vulgar profanity in this video clip – just in case you are easily offended by anything that isn’t politically correct.

If you are an American parent, how many hours of TV do your children watch daily?  How many hours do they spend on the phone socializing or surfing on the Internet?

How many books and magazines are in your home?  How many hours do you require your children to read each day? 

Do you attend parent conferences [these tips might help if you haven’t been]? 

Did you know that many American schools have homework Internet hotlines so you can see what the homework is for each of your child’s classes? 

This information is usually sent home from school with your children, who are supposed to share it with his or her parents.

This is the end of my rant about education in America and why the Chinese do it better – at least for now.

Return to Speaking Out About Education – Part 5

_______________

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 this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

2 Comments | America, China, Chinese Culture, cultural differences, education | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »