Greenpeace China

January 2, 2011

If China is a totalitarian country without much freedom as critics such as Liu Xiaobo claim, why is Greenpeace thriving there without harassment from China’s central government?

Then, if democracies are so desirable, why did Japan send two Greenpeace activists to jail for one year after exposing widespread corruption in the Japanese government’s Southern Ocean whaling programme?

Even though the US remains the world’s worst number one CO2 polluter, during the Bush administration, warnings from government scientists were ignored as if climate change wasn’t happening.

While in China, efforts to combat climate change demonstrate that China’s government acknowledges the challenge as well as the responsibility of China to tackle them.


Listen to Greenpeace China’s Tom Wang in Tianjin calmly being honest about China’s pollution challenges.

In fact, Greenpeace China has offices in Hong Kong (opened 1997), Beijing and Guangzhou (opened in 2002) and is the largest non-governmental organization (NGO) in the People’s Republic of China.

Then in 2006, Greenpeace China was the only NGO to be consulted on an early draft of renewable energy law by China’s National People’s Congress.

Has the US government consulted with Greenpeace?

China has also allowed two Greenpeace expeditions to China’s Himalayan region in 2006 and 2007 where evidence was discovered of the dramatic retreat of glaciers, which was reported in National Geographic Magazine.

One Greenpeace China campaign focused on stopping Monsanto, a US-headquartered biotechnology giant, from patenting a Chinese indigenous soybean variety.

Earlier campaigns in China focused on food, agriculture and electronic waste while highlighting the dangers of PVC in children’s toys.

Today, Greenpeace China runs five major campaigns focused on climate, energy, food and agriculture, water pollution and a campaign on air pollution focused on Hong Kong only.

I admit finding this information about Greenpeace China surprised me because all I’ve heard in the Western media of Greenpeace is that they are a gang of dangerous activists doing crazy things to get attention.

Until reading about Greenpeace in China, I didn’t know what a positive force this NGO was for cleaning the environment.

Now I want to know why the US isn’t doing more.

Discover Where All that Pollution Came From

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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.

To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Environmental Economics in China

December 31, 2010

We were in China in 2008 when China banned stores from handing out free plastic shopping bags. It is a fact that some industries must suffer to clean the environment.

Tough legislation in 2008 was evidence that China’s government accepts the need to address environmental issues. A new ministry was also created to deal with environmental challenges.

This report from Al Jazeera is an example of the sacrifice and challenge to go green in China.

Tony Cheng reported for Al Jazeera about China’s challenge to achieve growth without damaging the environment.

Cheng says the largest plastic bag producer in China was closed after the government banned super markets from handing out free plastic bags.

This factory produced 250 million tons of plastic bags annually. Twenty thousand workers lost their jobs with few opportunities for new jobs.

However, the plastic bag industry was a small part of China’s workforce.

In 2008 China, of 814 million workers, about 29% worked in Agriculture, 27% in industry and 33% in service occupations.

The main industries are mining and ore processing, machine building, armaments, textiles and apparel, petroleum, cement, chemicals, fertilizers, consumer products, food processing, transportation equipment such as automobiles and aircraft, telecommunications equipment and commercial space launch vehicles.

In other areas where China plans to clean the environment, China is building newer cleaner coal burning power plants and shutting down the old plants.

In fact, CNN Money reports, “Beijing’s initiatives to curb pollution have resulted in the closure of many dirty factories, while remaining manufacturing plants face stricter environmental regulations.”

Learn more about China Going Green

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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

The Qing – China’s Last Dynasty – Part 3/3

December 12, 2010

The last travelogue segment takes us on a tour of the Qiao family’s grand courtyard and residence located in Jinzhong, a prefecture in the center of Shanxi Province. Today, this prefecture is home to more than 2.5 million people.

The Qiao family complex shows the blending of the mansion’s practical functions, artistic design and ancient architectural techniques to create complex art in a simple plan.

The details show the glamour of China’s ancient residential house culture in northern China. Each engraving in the mansion is detailed artwork telling a story of life’s philosophy.

The narrator takes us on a tour of a Qiao family courtyard made famous by Zhang Yimou when he directed Raise the Red Lantern. Zhang Yimou won two awards for this 1991 film at the Venice Film Festival.

Raise the Red Lantern also turned the Qiao family’s mansion into a popular tourist attraction. The mansion covers 8,000 square meters (almost 10,000 square yards) of land with 313 rooms.

For security reasons, the roofs are connected.

To build family mansions of this size and scope takes generations of successful businessmen working together as a collective family unit.

However, if a family loses its moral compass, the fortune and land were often lost over time.

These mansions also represent the feudal culture of ancient China.

The last of the three mansions covered in this travelogue was the Chang Mansion, which demonstrates the poetry of a Chinese garden.

Large families such as the Changs built elaborate mansions and gardens. However, the mansions and gardens were built according to rules and guidelines.

Shaanxi province is considered a treasure trove of ancient Chinese architecture.

There are 106 family compounds similar to the four in this travelogue and some date to before the Sung Dynasty (960 to 1276 AD) representing about 70% of China’s surviving ancient wood built architecture.

Return to China’s Last Dynasty – Part 2 or start with Part 1

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

1 Comment | China, Chinese arts and music, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Confucianism, cultural differences, environment, family values, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Surviving Extinction

December 11, 2010

In a conversation (through comments) of Saving Siberian Tigers in Northeast China, I wrote that the tiger poachers, if caught, should be castrated and given a second chance at life then executed if they hunted tigers again.

The individual I was having this conversation with said that castration followed by a death sentences was a bit harsh and he or she was right. 

It is harsh.

However, my response, which follows, shows why such harshness may be necessary for humanity to survive its own extinction.

You are correct to sense my anger over the slaughter of animal species by humans.  It’s one thing for a species to go extinct due to environmental changes in the planet but for humans to slaughter senselessly as Americans did with the North American buffalo in the 19th century when expanding west toward the Pacific was wrong in so many ways.

What explains the 19th century people who sat in trains shooting through open windows at the buffalo to see how many they could kill?

The closest example I can think of is World War II in China when Japanese army officers would have beheading contests to see how many innocent Chinese noncombatant citizens could be beheaded in a given time span.

There are terms for people like this:  sociopaths, narcissists, self-centered, and “A” type personalities such as Hitler.   Humanity would be better off to rid individuals like this from the gene pool, which is why I have no problem with China’s death sentences and execution rate.

I’m reading a book, Living With Evolution or Dying Without It.  Before writing the book, the author, K. D. Koratsky spent most of his life studying all aspects of evolution—not just the evolution of species but culture, civilizations, religions, etc.

In one section, he pointed out that cultures that executed dangerous criminal types with behavior that threatened the stability of the culture such as what happened in 2008 with the global economic crises caused by Wall Street and US banks, tended to be stable and survive for much longer period of time than cultures that were too lenient on such people such as the US is today.

If the men depicted in the Inside Job documentary had been Chinese citizens and had caused the 2008 global financial crises from China instead of the United States, the odds are good that they would all have been tried and convicted in a Chinese court and already have been executed for the 64 trillion US dollars in global losses and millions of jobs that vanished.

Instead, in the US, there hasn’t been an investigation and most of the men who brought the world this crises are still working in the industry doing business the way they did before the 2008 financial crises hit.

In America, repeat child molesters are allowed to go free after prison sentences and are often chemically castrated yet have managed to molest again and then are sent back for another prison sentence with another parole in the future. 

This is insanity.

I was actually going easy on the tiger poachers when I suggested castration and a chance to live.  People like that should be tortured then executed to send a strong message.

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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’s Feathered Dinosaurs

December 10, 2010

For as far back as I can remember I have been fascinated with dinosaurs. As a child, I read as much as I could from encyclopedias and nonfiction books on the subject and dreamed of traveling back in time to see for myself.

In high school, every time a science fiction or fantasy book came along that had dinosaurs in the story, I checked the book out from the school library.

It may not surprise anyone when I reveal that I own a set of the DVDs of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park franchise.

That’s why soon after the December issue of Smithsonian magazine arrived in the mail and I saw China’s Dinosaurs listed on the cover of the magazine, I couldn’t wait to read the piece.

Smithsonian says, One of China’s star paleontologists, Zhou Zhonghe (and colleagues) in 1995 announced the discovery of a fossil from  (China’s) prehistoric disaster zone that heralded a new age of paleontology.


from Discovery Science

The fossil was a primitive bird the size of a crow. They named the new species Confuciusornis, after the Chinese philosopher.

Zhou works at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. The discovery Zhou and his colleagues made answered one of the biggest questions in dinosaur science about the real relationship between birds and dinosaurs.

Smithsonian says, “China’s spectacular feathered fossils have finally answered the century-old question about the ancestors of today’s birds.”

The idea that birds are descended directly from the dinosaurs isn’t new.  Smithsonian says, In 1870, an English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley wrote a treatise on the subject.

So, next time you eat turkey or chicken remember you are chewing on a descendent of the dinosaurs.

Discover more of China’s past from The Machines of China

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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.

1 Comment | China, education, environment, history, science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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