Speed on Rails and the Three Gorges Dam Makes News

November 2, 2010

While the Globe’s number one debt-ridden super power talks about building bullet trains and coastal wind farms and doesn’t plan to replace outdated coal burning, polluting power plants, China builds them.

From Yahoo News and the Associated Press comes news of the bullet train from Shanghai to Hangzhou.


Bullet Train from Shanghai to Hangzhou – Mandarin News

However, the big news was the mighty Three Gorges Dam, which holds as much water as Lake Superior in the US. The dam is capable of producing 18 gigawatts of electricity equal to about 40 nuclear power plants.

China is the world’s largest producer of hydroelectricity, followed by Canada, Brazil and the United States. Since no fuel is needed to run a hydroelectric plant, there is little pollution.

Although there was controversy about moving the 1.4 million people who lived in the area behind the Three Gorges Dam, those still waters may save many lives during times of drought and flood.

One example of the controversy comes from a 2007 piece in Time Magazine, which mentions the project has been mired in controversy ever since it was first proposed by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1866 -1925), the founding father of China’s republic.

In fact, floods along the Yangtze killed more than 300,000 people during the 20th century but there was no mention of that in the Time piece.

Taking into account the loss of life from floods and the threat of droughts in China, why did the Western media spend so much effort publicizing the controversial resettlement project without mentioning the potential benefits to hundreds of millions of Chinese?

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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

Opposites Attract

November 1, 2010

If the old saying that opposites attract is true, China and the US are perfect for each other.

The Huffington Post’s Robert Lenzner writes that China Needs to Hit the Brakes; US Needs to Step on the Gas.

Lenzner explains that China’s economic goals are to avoid what happened in the US when subprime mortgages burst the real estate bubble and almost brought down the West’s house of cards.

To succeed, China is attempting to slow its economic growth and smother inflation.

However, in the US, the opposite it happening as the US wants to add to the national debt to avoid deflation and stimulate the economy at the same time.

Lenzner points out why China has everything to lose if this doesn’t work. China’s current 12th five-year economic plan is concentrating on the rural poor, and it is about time.

In fact, smaller cities are being built for some of the rural poor while extending electricity to remote villages across China.

At the same time, China is expanding the rail system and building more roads to reach people that haven’t been touched by China’s economic progress.

To avoid unrest, China’s future depends on improving the lifestyles of about 700 million rural Chinese.

Learn more at Volting all of China into the 21st Century

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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

Fear of Famine

October 31, 2010

One thing China has been proud of is the ability to produce enough food to feed its people.

For millennia, China has managed to avoid widespread famine except during Mao’s Great Leap Forward when millions starved to death due to “bad” political decisions based on ideology instead of reason. After Mao died, Deng Xiaoping would return the country to reason.

To deal with the threat of widespread drought and famine, China’s Emperors started construction of the Grand Canal around 500 BC. 

Other emperors improved methods of agriculture and added to the canal.

Today the fear of famine has returned. Although China currently has more than enough food to feed its growing population, for the first time in history, China has to import some foods from Europe, Africa, Australia, South America and the United States.

In fact, Freakonomics says, “China gave up any pretense of being self-sufficient in soybean production a long time ago and is now the world’s largest soybean importer.”

China is largely sufficient in growing grain, so it is a net exporter of grains. However, it has to import other products like sugar, oil seeds and vegetable oil.

Some high quality convenience food items such as butter and cheese are also imported in small quantities.

In 2008, China Daily (Xinhua) reported that imported foods to China would total 1 trillion yuan or 147 million US dollars in the next five years.

As China’s population continues to grow and food demand outpaces domestic food production, the fear of famine and political blackmail from countries that import food to China will grow.

Since China’s centeral government does not want to depend on other nations, this is a sensitive area.

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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

Silicone “Juice” in China

October 27, 2010

In You Can’t Build a New Silicon Valley Just Anywhere by Margaret O’Mara, writing for Foreign Policy magazine, she says, “for many of the would-be silicon cities being constructed by the Russias and Chinas of the world; with their long histories of centralized control, they are still convinced they can order up success.”

O’Mara’s theme is that the success we have seen in California’s Silicon Valley is due to the freedom America’s republic—now a democracy—offers along with loads of money from the government and venture capitalists with no strings attached.

If that were true, explain how China (ruled by Emperors under an autocratic imperialistic monarchy) was more technologically advanced than any country on earth for almost two thousand years.


If you don’t speak Chinese, the English subtitles say it all.

After all, the Chinese invented the stirrup for saddles which revolutionized warfare on horseback, gunpowder, the multistage rocket, the compass, paper, the printing press and pasta along with a long list of other innovations, which changed the world.

Without the Chinese, where would the world be today? See Chinese Crossbow and other Inventions

China may not offer the same individual freedoms the West does, but “face”, which is important in Chinese culture, is a strong motivator to improvise and invent so one gains “face” and becomes powerful and wealthy.

Before Deng Xiaoping and the “Getting Rich is Glorious” generation that he gave birth to, I would have agreed with Margaret O’Mara but not now.

In my next series, The Machines of Ancient China, we will discover more about China’s contributions to the world we live in.

To discover the Chinese advantage, learn about Guanxi in 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.

2 Comments | America, business, capitalism, China, Chinese Culture, cultural differences, environment, science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Escaping the Trap that Comes With the Evolution of Civilization – Part 5/5

October 10, 2010

Guest Post by K. D. Koratsky – Originally published at Living With Evolution. Due to its academic nature, this version has been edited, revised and serialized with permission from the author.

It is through this evolutionary lens, therefore, that the current trends in the West and the East were quite predictable.

For while China had largely embraced flawed socialistic ideas and enacted dysfunctional policies that were counter to evolutionary performance benchmarks, which in turn led to their performance stagnation, America enjoyed a meteoric rise in status by embracing the enlightenment ideals of constitutional democratic republicanism and free-market capitalism that are remarkably well supported by evolutionary principles.

And now, as the West has increasingly allowed a particularly virulent strain of socialistic cultural mutations to set in, reflecting the degree of its previous rise, the degradation in performance has been just as spectacular, leading to what may prove to be the most-rapid regression to the mean for an empire ever recorded.

Meanwhile, it is the East that has increasingly embraced the Enlightenment ideals that led to the rise of the West while the latter simultaneously abandons them.

Rejecting Regress

 

It is with all this in mind, therefore, that we know the regression to the mean can be overcome at every level of human existence.

Indeed, all one must do is, first, accept that the level of adherence to evolutionary principles will dictate success or failure, and second, fashion all policies around the ideas that stem from this acceptance.

The result will not only be greatest possible level of continued prosperity and survivability for any given individual or group that embraces evolutionary ideals, but the greatest possible level of prosperity and survivability for the human species as a whole.

Return to Escaping the Trap – Part 4

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K. D. Koratsky is the author of Living With Evolution or Dying Without it: A Guide to Understanding Humanity’s Past, Present and Future. Koratsky also writes a Blog on this subject at Living With Evolution.

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

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