China’s Chery

September 15, 2010

After you saw the title, I’ll bet you were thinking of something else. Sorry to disappoint you.

Chery Automotive in China builds and develops electric cars.  Chery is working in a joint venture with BenQ, a company in Taiwan, to develop lithium-ion battery technology

Auto Blog Green says Chery’s line of EVs are not strong sellers, yet Chery continues to build and develop electric vehicles anyway. 

Do they know something we don’t? 

After all, China’s central government could announce that all gas and diesel powered cars must be replaced with electric.

Critics in the West would complain but the air in China would be cleaner, which should make environmentalist’s happy.

Chery industries appears to be taking quality and safety seriously too.

Chery’s collision and safety laboratory has been identified as Asia’s largest and can fulfill collision tests at different angles while testing airbag and restraint systems. Source: Chery International

How are the Chinese at building cars?

Sho Minekawa, president of joint venture Guangzhou Honda Automobile Co., says that in-house quality tests show that the China-made Accord is actually superior to the one made in the U.S. Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

Look out, Detroit. The Chinese are coming.

See China’s Future Lock on your Next Auto Repair

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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. 

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China’s Changing Face – Farmers’ Friend the Organic Way – Part 3/3

August 30, 2010

“Farmer’s Friend” started in 2005 and today what they are doing is supported by the central government’s ” Urban Support for Rural Development“.

Zhou Jinzhang, the founder and president of “Farmers’ Friend”, once worked in the advertising industry.

In 2007, he quit his job and opened an organic restaurant in Liuzhou City. Forty percent of the restaurant’s profits are used to purchase organic agricultural products that support rural peasant farmers.

The cost of the organic rice is more than four times that of rice grown with the use of pesticides, which allows the farmers to earn more.

The members of “Farmers’ Friend” work together helping peasants develop organic farming and breeding.

Their goal is to have people enjoy the original tastes of food again.

“Farmers’ Friend” also continues to expand organic farming in urban areas near Liuzhou City. 

Unfortunately, too many farmers still use pesticides and chemical fertilizers seeking short-term profits over healthier long-term goals. There are still many challenges to overcome during the rush to modernize China.

See The Reasons Why China is Studying Singapore

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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. 

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China’s Changing Face – Farmers’ Friend the Organic Way – Part 2/3

August 29, 2010

The members of “Farmers’ Friend” decided to work with the poorest peasants near Liuzhou City in Guangxi Province. 

The village they selected was Nashe, a three-hour drive from the city that was far from the urban pollution.

The president of “Farmers’ Friend”, Zhou Jinzhang, talked to the senior caption of Nashe, Wei Xiuqing.

It wasn’t easy convincing Wei that organic farming could be profitable for everyone. To encourage the peasants, “Farmers’ Friend” agreed to be responsible for any economic losses.

With this guarantee, Wei agreed to work with “Farmers’ Friend” to set up the duck-rice system.

The ducks would eat the insects and pesticides would no longer be needed. 

Soon after starting the project, there were problems. Some of the ducks died from pesticides used by other farmers.

“Farmers’ Friend” also brought in experts to help create better pig breeding programs. The result was that the urban people enjoyed healthier food and the peasants earned more income.

Now Wei has a dream to become prosperous enough through organic farming to attract the young people who left to work in urban factories to return home to the village.

See Deng Xiaoping’s 20/20 Vision

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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. 

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China’s Changing Face – Farmers’ Friend the Organic Way – Part 1/3

August 29, 2010

China uses more pesticides than any other country. 

To prove a point, Greenpeace conducted an experiment and sent 45 samples of fruits and vegetables from rural Chinese peasant farmers to an independent laboratory to find out how serious the problem was.

Five of the samples had no pesticides on them. The other 40 samples had 50 different kinds of pesticide on them.  Source: Greenpeace

This video is about a group called “Farmers’ Friend”, professional urbanites from Liuzhou City in Guangxi Province, who wanted to have healthier food to eat that was pesticide free. 

To achieve this, these Chinese professionals connected with peasants in rural China with goals to encourage organic farming that would offer higher incomes to the peasants and healthier food to urban people.

“Farmers’ Friend” wanted to work with the poorest peasants in the poorest rural areas.

Since 1980, hundreds of millions of rural people had moved to urban China to work in factories. This resulted in demands on peasant farmers to grow more food to feed the country, which results in heavy pesticide and chemical fertilizer use.

In 2006, the central government announced a policy of urban support for rural development. However, by then, “Farmers’ Friend” had already taken its first step in 2005 to encourage organic farming in rural areas.

See Women in Science & Business

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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. 

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Dead Zones

August 28, 2010

In the 2010, July/August Smithsonian magazine, there is an interesting piece about Jellyfish: The Next King of the Sea.

You may be asking what jellyfish has to do with China. Before I’m done, I will make that connection.

The piece mentions about 500 coastal, ocean “dead zones” around the world that have been so depleted of oxygen due to manmade pollution that the acidity level of the oceans is rising and threatening most of the life there.

Imagine the oceans without turtles, whales or porpoises and no more salmon suppers.

The Smithsonian says few sea creatures survive in these “dead zones” but the jellyfish does. A map in the magazine shows that the east coast of the U.S.A. and the Gulf Coast are thick with “dead zones”.

Europe is also dense with “dead zones” and so are Southern Japan and the tip of South Korea.

However, what’s surprising is how few dead zones there are along China’s coast.

The reason for that may be the fact that China started to industrialize in the 1980s, but Europe and America started polluting more than a century earlier than China, which I mentioned in Where Did All that Pollution Come From.

 Maybe China will realize that they still have time to save the oceans along their shores and do something before they have as many “dead zones” as the US and Europe.

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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. 

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