Western Minds may have it Wrong about China Building Empty Cities

March 13, 2011

World Net Daily quoted Patrick Chovanec, an expatriate and business teacher at Tsinghua University in Beijing, saying, “Who wants to be the mayor who reports that he didn’t get 8 percent GDP growth this year? Nobody wants to come forward with that. Therefore, the incentives in the system are to build. And if that’s the easiest way to achieve growth, then you build.”

What Mr. Chovanec is referring to is China building empty cities by the dozens then connecting them with expressways.

Although Mr. Chovanec has an impressive resume, I’m sure China’s leaders did not confide in him, which explains why he may be wrong.

In fact, what World Net Daily doesn’t mention is in the last thirty years China had the largest migration in recorded history of almost 300 million people moving from rural to urban China as it became an export nation resulting in the expansion of China’s urban industries.

The People’s Daily wrote in 2003, China was encouraging the migration of between 300 to 500 million people from rural areas to towns and cities by 2020, a transformation that Beijing hopes will help drive growth but which will also fundamentally alter the economy of the world’s most populous nation.

“A country where most of the population is in poor or remote villages will not be a modern and developed nation,” said Wang Mengkui, minister at the State Council’s Development Research Centre. “Our urbanization rate [of 39 per cent now is equivalent only to that of the UK in the 1850s, that of the US in 1911 and that of Japan in 1950.”

Wang Mengkui says, “I think our urbanization rate should reach 55-60 per cent of the population by 2020.”

Where do Mr. Chovanec and World Net Daily think China is going to house all those people as they move from rural to urban China?

Unlike democracies, where chaos, lobbyists and political agendas lead to mostly short-term decisions without planning for the future as in America’s case regarding the HUGE federal deficit and what I wrote about in India Falling Short, China’s leaders tend to plan long-term goals that benefit the most people.

China’s leaders have demonstrated for millennia (not just China’s Communist Party) that China’s collective culture often plans decades and centuries into the future, which explains the success of projects such as the Great Wall and the Grand Canal, which took centuries to complete.

This same long-term thinking led to modern, empty towns being built in Tibet years ago that are now filling with Tibetan nomads  (I wrote of this in an earlier post) that suddenly found the grass they depended on to feed their herds gone due to global warming ending a lifestyle that had survived for centuries.

China’s leaders — being scientists and engineers instead of economists such as Mr. Chovanec — studied the potential future and planned for it, which is a benefit of being an autocratic one-party republic instead of a chaotic democracy that depends on short-term goals and quarterly profits to guide the decisions of accountants and lawyers.

What China is doing by building these empty cities, roads and railways is getting ready for the future.

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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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5 Comments | business, China, cultural differences, economy, environment, government | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Cause of China’s Pollution

February 26, 2011

Before criticizing and blaming China for polluting the environment, learn about the history that caused the pollution first.

The first Industrial Revolution took place in England after James Watt developed the coal/wood burning steam engine in the late 18th century. This was beginning of air and water pollution.

The second Industrial Revolution (1820-1870) helped the economic development of the United States. Then industrialization increased between 1870 and 1914.

Pollution from industries grew to epidemic proportions after 1945. In fact, the type of pollution changed significantly when industries in America and Europe began manufacturing and using synthetic materials such as plastics and DDT.

These materials are not only toxic; they accumulated in the environment and were not biodegradable. This increased rates of cancers, physical birth defects, and mental retardation.

Due to an increase in world trade after World War II and moving a significant percentage of the world’s manufacturing to Japan, then China after Mao died, the pollution created using these synthetic materials increased and pollution reached a global scale.

Most of the products manufactured in China were sold around the globe by multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart. If you buy products made in China, you are partly responsible for the pollution there. The odds are that the computer I’m using was made or assembled in China. Darn!


June 2007 – the US still has more cars on the road and buys much of what China manufactures for US companies.

Another factor was pressure from the people of China on their government to improve the standard of living for 1.3 billion people. India faced the same challenges.

The lifestyle changes taking place in China and India parallel the changes that already took place in America, Britain and Europe more than a century earlier.

In the 1960s, about 60% of Chinese labor worked in agriculture. That figure remained about the same throughout the 1960s into early 1990s. Then by the late 1990s, the farm force in rural China fell to about thirty percent.

In comparison, in 1870, 53% of US labor worked in agriculture. Today, farm labor in the US makes up 3% of workforce. The rest live in towns and cities with a middle-class demanding more synthetic products to feed the consumer lifestyle.

Discover The One Party Advantage

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

 

Note: This post first appeared on iLook China February 7, 2010 as post # 31. This revised version reappears as post # 1086.

2 Comments | America, business, China, Chinese middle class, economy, environment | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Learning what Win-Win Really Means from China

February 12, 2011


Living With Evolution or Dying Without It by K. D. Koratsky
Publisher: Sunscape Books
ISBN: 978-0-9826546-0-6
Reviewed by Lloyd Lofthouse

Koratsky’s book is a heavily researched, scholarly work that gathers what science has discovered since Darwin’s discoveries and fills in the gaps explaining why evolution has something to teach us if humanity is to survive.

The other choice is humanity going the way of the dinosaurs into extinction.

I started reading in early 2010 and took months to finish the 580 pages. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability level would probably show this book to be at a university graduate level leaving at last 90% of the population lost as to the importance of its message.

For months, it bothered me that so many in the United States do not have the literacy skills to understand an important work such as this (the average reader in the US reads at fifth grade level and millions are illiterate). This is certainly not a good foundation to learn how precarious life is if you do not understand how brutal the earth’s environment and evolution has been for billions of years.

As I finished reading Living With Evolution or Dying Without It, I realized that it would only take a few key people in positions of power to understand the warnings offered by Koratsky and bring about the needed changes in one or more countries so humanity would survive somewhere on the planet when the next great challenge to life arises.

On page one, Koratsky starts 13.7 billion years ago with the big bang then in a few pages ten billion years later, he introduces the reader to how certain bacteria discovered a new way to access the energy required to sustain an existence.

By the time we reach humanity’s first religion on page 157, we have discovered what caused so many species to die out and gained a better understanding of what survival of the fittest means.

To survive means adapting to environmental challenges no matter if they are delivered by the impact of a monster asteroid to the earth’s surface, global warming (no matter what the reason) or by competition with other cultures or animals competing for the earth’s resources.

In fact, competition is vital to the survival of a species for it is only through competition that a species will adapt to survive.

The book is divided into two parts.  The first 349 pages deals with where we have been and what we have learned, and the two hundred and eleven pages in Part Two deals with current ideas and policies from an evolutionary perspective.

I suspect that most devout Christians and Muslims would dismiss the warnings in this book out-of-hand since these people have invested their beliefs and the survival of humanity in books written millennia ago when humanity knew little to nothing about the laws of evolution and how important competition is to survival.

Koratsky is optimistic that the United States will eventually turn away from the political agenda of “Cultural Relativism” that has guided America since the 1960s toward total failure as a culture.

The popular term for “Cultural Relativism” in the US would be “Political Correctness”, which has spawned movements such as race-based quotas and entitlement programs that reward failure and punish success

Even America’s self-esteem movement is an example of “Cultural Relativism”, which encourages children to have fun and praises poor performance until it is impossible to recognize real success.

The current debate started by Amy Chua’s essay in The Wall Street Journal is another example of “Cultural Relativism” at work.

After reading Living with Evolution or Dying Without It, it is clear that Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother Methods of parenting are correct while the soft approach practiced by the average US parent is wrong and will lead to more failure than success.

Koratsky shows us that the key to survival for America is to severely curtail and eventually end most US entitlement programs. While “Cultural Relativism” is ending, competition that rewards merit at all levels of the culture (private and government) must be reinstituted.

He points out near the end of the book that this has been happening in China and is the reason for that country’s amazing growth and success the last thirty years.

In the 1980s, merit was reinstituted at the bottom and most who prosper in China today earned the right to be rewarded for success by being more competitive and adapting. Even China’s state owned industries were required to become profitable or perish.

The earth’s environment does not care about equality or the relativists’ belief that everyone has a right to happiness even if society must rob from the rich and give to the poor.

This book covers the evolution of the universe, the planet, all life on the planet including the reasons why most life that lived on the earth for hundreds of millions of years before humanity is now gone; the beginnings of the human species; religion in all of its costumes; the growth of civilizations and the competitions that led to the destruction and collapse of so many such as the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty two millennia ago.

The environment and evolution says that all life on the planet is not equal and no one is born with a guaranteed right to success, happiness and fun. To survive means earning the right through competition and adaption.

If you don’t believe Koratsky’s warning, go talk to the dinosaurs and ask them why they are gone.

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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

China Reaching out to South Africa

February 9, 2011

Aaron Back of India Real Time reports that Brazil, Russia, India and China have invited South Africa to join their group of emerging economies referred to as the BRIC possibly changing that acronym to BRICSA.

Aaron asks how South Africa could join the BRIC when the “rainbow nation” lacks the main unifying characteristic of the group: a fast-growing economy.

However, my answer to Aaron is that India Real Time may have missed the fact that Brazil’s economy was also sluggish until China became a major trading partner. Now Brazil is growing at about 8% a year.

Another factor is that China is now South Africa’s largest trading partner, and Radio Netherlands Worldwide says South Africa (unlike the US) enjoys a trade surplus with China that may only grow. The Chinese ambassador Zhong Jianhua, says that it is the warm diplomatic ties between China and SA since 1998 matched by growing economic engagement, which has put SA among China’s top three African trading partners.

South Africa also has another alternative to a fast-growing economy. The CIA says, South Africa is rich in these natural resources — gold, chromium, antimony, coal, iron ore, manganese, nickel, phosphates, tin, rare earth elements, uranium, gem diamonds, platinum, copper, vanadium, salt, natural gas.

The South African Guide says, the mining industry is one of the most productive in the world and raw materials make up about 60% of the country’s exports… South Africa is also the single country in the world to produce fuel from coal.

Then the BBC reports that South Africa faces major problems. Many South Africans remain poor and unemployment is high—about 25%.

After all, what South Africa has, China needs to continue the growth of its middle class, and it was these same factors that caused China to become Brazil’s major trading partner. As the trade surplus grows in South Africa’s favor, unemployment will shrink.

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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

Harbin’s Winter Wonderland

January 5, 2011

Casey Chan of Gizmodo posted A Winter Wonderland in China with two photos of The Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, which is located in Northeast China where the average winter temperature is a (minus) – 16.8 degrees Celsius.  The Festival is held in January.

Wikipedia says the annual Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival has been held since 1963. 

However, it was interrupted for a few years during the Cultural Revolution until it resumed in 1985.  Mao died in 1976, and it took time for China’s economic engine to build momentum. The fact that the festival resumed in 1985 is a sign of the changes taking place in China.

In the Comment section of Chan’s Gizmodo post, Adam wrote, “China is awesome when it comes to giant decorations and celebrations (just remember the Olympics!), but the people there still have an extremely low quality of life. Why, if they can do some things so well, do they fail at others?”

Sega8800 replied to Adam,” How do you know their life is low quality?”

Adam’s answer was a Wikipedia  link to a post of a 1994 book, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. The couple that wrote the book spent five year in China (1988 to 1993) as journalists for the New York Times.

I laughed.

The material for this book is over 17 years old. Time did not stand still. During those years, China transformed itself by rebuilding the old cities while building more than a hundred new ones.

In fact, the standard of living in China has skyrocketed as the middle class expands and grows. Last year, Chinese bought more new cars than Americans did.

Even the lifestyle of peasants in rural China improved and will continue to do so as China extends electricity to rural China, subsidizes appliances for the rural Chinese, builds new roads, airports and railroads, etc.

The embedded videos with this post are of Harbin and previous festivals.

Learn of China’s Spring Festival, which comes in February.

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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.

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, environment | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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