China’s Oil Hunger Grows

May 23, 2010

China’s hunger for oil is stretching from Canada to Nigeria. According to Addison Wiggin, the Chinese state-owned oil producer Sinopec bought a 4.65 billion dollar share of Canada’s biggest tar sands project from Conoco Phillips.

What choice does China have? Oil consumption has skyrocketed from about 2 million barrels per day in the early 1980s, to 9 million this year as the Chinese start to buy more cars than Americans do.

Tar Sands in Canada

Wiggin says that China’s oil consumption could double in the next decade.

The BBC reports that Nigeria and China signed a 23 billion dollar deal for three refineries to be built in Nigeria to increase production. When completed, the Nigerian project could produce another 750,000 barrels a day.

China subsidizes energy costs, but to cut back on oil consumption, China is raising prices to the consumer. Source: Seeking Alpha

However, if China’s current plans succeed in moving rural China into the modern mainstream, the hunger for oil may surpass the United States soon.

See Electricity is the Key

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Giant Panda

May 12, 2010

The Panda is popular.  I just Googled the Giant Panda and there were 269,071 hits and that was just for Blogs.  The first post was “Pandas are Precious“.  The second Blog was from the Smithsonian and was about Mei Xiang, a Giant Panda, who wasn’t pregnant.

When we took my sister and her youngest daughter to China in 2008, my forty-year-old niece wanted to see the Pandas and have a picture taken of one sitting on her lap.

The Giant Panda, because it is so cute with its black and white coloring, is considered by many of the bear’s fans as docile, but it has been known to attack humans. It probably isn’t a good idea to have a Giant Panda sit on your lap. An adult male may weigh 330 pounds and a female 275 pounds. That pudgy bear is cute, but it is still a wild animal.

In fact, China’s Giant Pandas are considered a living treasure. Although the dragon has historically served as China’s national emblem, recently the Giant Panda has also served as an emblem for the country. The Chengdu Research Base is working hard to breed the Pandas so the species survives.

The Budget Traveler is a good site to find out about places to see the Giant Panda in China.

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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 lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

#1 - Joanna Daneman review posted June 19 2014

Where to Buy

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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China’s Stick People

May 11, 2010

I’m always looking for information about China, and I hit gold with the May 8 The Economist. Click the link to read the entire piece or read this summary. I bought the magazine.

China has two classes—rural and urban.  The urban people have prospered for the last thirty years as China built a middle class.  Most rural Chinese have not been able to benefit from the booming economy and are getting restless.

Rural China

Rural land outside China’s cities belongs to collectives. When Mao won China, the Communists divided the land among villages—not individuals. Individuals do not hold title to farmland and cannot sell land that no one owns.

China saw what was happening in India when farmers sold their plots to developers.  Rural people in India flocked to the cities and built sprawling slums. To avoid that, the Chinese government created a system to keep rural people on their farms.  Another motivation was fear of another famine like the one that struck China from 1959 to 1961 killing millions from starvation. If farmers left the fields for a better lifestyle in cities, that nightmare might return.

Currently, an experiment is being tried in rural areas outside Chongqing to see if the land can be divided among individuals while increasing food production. Since the government still hasn’t figured out how to make the transition smoothly, don’t expect rural land reforms to happen quickly.

Discover China’s middle class expanding

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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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Food and China’s Eating Culture

May 10, 2010

China is an eating culture and always has been.  Although Today’s Chinese do not eat the quantities of meat the average American does, China accounts for half of global pig production because pork is the popular meat to eat.  Small farmer producers raise ninety-nine percent of pork in China. Source: China Translated

Chinese Farmer

Even when grain production falls in China that does not translate into a shortage since China has historically kept large food-grain stockpiles and those individual small farmer/producers help ensure food security. Source : China Through a Lens

As China’s economy continues to grow a spreading middle class with money to spend, food demand and eating habits are changing along with waistlines.  To meet this demand, Chinese have set up large pork and chicken operations in Australia to meet the growing demand for meat on the mainland. Source: Food Crisis

To insure a dependable supply of food to feed 1.3 billion people, Chinese companies have also bought or leased land in Africa sending Chinese laborers to produce crops for sale on the world market – and back home.  Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Discover Tofu

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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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VOLTING all of China into the 21st Century

May 9, 2010

For China to match the United States, a dependable supply of electricity is needed. Besides more power plants and running more lines to carry that electricity, it also means replacing the ancient villages from feudal times with homes built to modern standards.

China at night

Then rural China would have the same opportunities to live like the spreading urban middle class. To succeed, China would be starting the largest construction project in the history of humanity.  Once completed, all 1.3 billion Chinese would be able to buy and plug in washing machines and dryers for clothing, TVs, computers, air conditioners, electric heaters, refrigerators, freezers, etc. 

What is it going to take rural China to catch up with urban populations?

It is estimated that each American uses about 11,000 kilowatts a year.  Since the United States produces 4.062 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity a year, China would have to produce almost 18 trillion kilowatts so everyone in China could plug in the same number of gadgets Americans do. Source: EIA

America at Night

For the Chinese to match the American middle class example, China’s sky would have to look like America at night. Of course, while all this construction and relocation was going on, the Western media would be reporting how horrible China’s government was to force those rural people to give up their old, feudal lifestyles.

Read more about the next super power.

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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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