Demanding Censorship

December 22, 2010

The Huffington Post reported this month (December 2010) that a collection of Grimm Brothers’ classic fairy tales was pulled from bookstores in China.

Since we hear so often about censorship in China, doesn’t that sound as if this children’s book was censored.

However, China’s government was not involved.

In China, even in the state-run media, reporters that write the stories or editors do most of the censorship.  Being Chinese, these people know what is culturally acceptable by the people and politically sensitive to the Party.

In fact, people that work for China’s state run media are often proud of their self-censorship.

Agence France-Presse (AFP), which is one of the three largest and the oldest (founded in 1835 and reborn in 1944) news agency, broke this story about the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales.

There are more facts to this than I shared with you in the lead paragraph, which is what the Western media often does when writing about China.

To be fair, both the AFP and Huffington Post did say in their leads the reason for the censorship of this book.

“An X-rated collection of Grimm Brothers’ classic fairy tales – including one in which the heroine engages in sexual relations with both her father and seven dwarves -– has been pulled from children’s bookstores in China.”

“Readers called us to say they did not think the book was healthy for children,” said Li Yong, the deputy chairman of the publisher, as quoted by the Telegraph saying. “After that, we pulled all the copies off shelves across the country….”

It turns out that the book was a Japanese pornographic reinterpretation of the fairy tales.

Learn more about the China Daily, which is part of the state-run media giant in the PRC.

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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

Religion’s “Cold War” with China – Part 2/3

December 20, 2010

What happened in China between the Communists and Nationalists during the revolution isn’t the reason China is blocking the Pope from having the same level of control of China’s Catholics that he has over the rest of the world’s Catholics.

The Vatican is a sovereign nation. Of 195 countries in the world, three are not members of the UN and the Vatican City/The Holy See is one of those three nations.

The independent papal state of less than 1,000 people chose not to join the UN.

Instead, the Vatican is a Permanent Observer in the UN and the Holy See enjoys, among other things, the right to participate in the general debate of the General Assembly; the right of reply; the right to have its communications issued and circulated directly as official documents of the UN assembly; and the right to co-sponsor draft resolutions and decisions that make reference to the Holy See. Source: Holy See Mission.org

The Vatican is listed as the smallest nation with the smallest population on the globe, yet the Pope rules over about a billion Catholics scattered throughout the world as if he were a world leader and they were the citizens of his nation.

In fact, since nations have banks, the Associated Press recently reported that the Vatican’s bank was mired in a laundering scandal.

The Pope is elected for life by the Church’s bishops as if he were a religious dictator.  The Pope decides if it is wrong to divorce, have abortions, etc.  He even prescribes dietary laws such as only eating fish on Friday.

Allowing the Pope to lead China’s Catholics would be the same as letting the US President lead all American expatriates living and working in China regardless of China’s laws.

In Part 3, we shall see how the Catholic Church waged war against all who threatened its existence.

Return to Religion’s “Cold War” with China – 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.

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 | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Christianity, cultural differences, expatriates, family values, politics, religion | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The State of Religion in Today’s China

December 19, 2010

The U.S. Department of State reports that China is officially atheist (and has been for thousands of years). However, Taoist, Buddhist, Christian and Muslims are allowed to worship in China and these religions have a significant role in the lives of many Chinese.

A February 2007 survey conducted by East China Normal University and reported in China’s state-run media concluded that 31.4% of Chinese citizens ages 16 and over are religious believers.

While the Chinese constitution affirms “freedom of religious belief,” the Chinese Government places restrictions on religious practice outside officially recognized organizations. The five state-sanctioned “patriotic religious associations” are Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism.

Singapore, another nation in Asia, has similar restrictions.

Historically, China has not been accepting of cults, and there is a difference between a religion and a cult.

Princeton.edu says, cult members are “followers of an unorthodox, extremist, or false religion or sect who often live outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.”

All one has to do is study China’s history to understand the Middle Kingdom’s sensitivity toward cults and political activists. China’s struggle with pagan cults reaches back almost a thousand years. Source: The Millennium Cult

There are no official statistics confirming the number of Taoists in China.


Fascinating discussion of how Chinese culture interacts with religions.

Official figures indicate there are 20 million Muslims, 20 million Protestants, and 5.3 million Catholics; unofficial estimates are much higher.

According to About Chinese Culture.com, there are more than 85,000 sites for religious activities, some 300,000 clergy and over 3,000 religious organizations throughout China. In addition, there are 74 religious schools and colleges run by religious organizations for training clerical personnel.

Buddhism, the most popular religion in China with about a 100 million followers, has a 2,000-year history in the Middle Kingdom and there are about 13,000 Buddhist temples.

Taoism, native to China, has a history of more than 1,700 years with over 1,500 temples.

Islam, which was introduced into China in the seventh century has more than 30,000 mosques.

At present, China has about 4,600 Catholic churches and meetinghouses.

Protestantism first arrived in China in the early 19th century. Today there are more than 12,000 churches and 25,000 meeting places.

Although Judaism is not listed as one of the officially recognized religions in China, there are Jewish synagogues in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Jews first settled in Kaifeng, Henan Province in 960 AD after arriving along the Silk Road. The Jews were welcomed by the Imperial government, which encouraged them to retain their cultural identity by building the Kaifeng synagogue, which was finished in 1163 AD.

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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.

6 Comments | Buddhism, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Christianity, Confucianism, cults, cultural differences, family values, history, Islam, religion, Taoism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Building an Empty City

December 17, 2010

In November 2009, Al Jazeera English reported that part of China’s stimulus plan was to create jobs for Chinese losing work due to the 2008 economic crises (caused by New York’s greedy Wall Street and US banks).

To do this, Beijing pledged $585 (US) billion in stimulus spending.  Some of that money went to encourage social development and domestic spending.

Rural residents received up to 17% in rebates for buying televisions and refrigerators.

However, about $220 billion went into building roads and other public infrastructure. Two hundred billion dollars went into expanding the railway system.

The theory was to keep people working and spending.

For example, China built the empty city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia in just five years for a population of one million.

One reason was to increase GDP by spending more money. Since the more a country builds, the more its economic activity increases and the higher the GDP will be.

Al Jazeera’s Melissa Chan reported that most of the residential apartments in Ordos have been sold but remain empty since the buyers bought them as investments.

The reason that Ordos was built in this location of Inner Mongolia was because the region is China’s Texas (oil country), which has created many millionaires.

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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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China’s PISA Pride

December 17, 2010

When I first visited China in 1999, my wife warned me that the Chinese men I might saw peeing or defecating in public parks (there weren’t many public toilets then—China started building public toilets to get ready for the 2008 Olympics) in Shanghai were peasants from rural China.

In fact, where my wife grew up in Shanghai (in the picturesque French sector), there was one toilet in a three-story house where several families lived and the stove was next to the toilet.

Since then, I learned that China is one country with many cultures and languages. Even rural and urban China is different as the US is to rural Mexico.

Rural China until recently is or was almost a kingdom from the Middle Ages while much of urban China was modern.

However, after the 1980s, hundreds of millions of rural Chinese migrated to the cities to find jobs that paid better than being a peasant still stuck in the Middle Ages.

Unfortunately, these people sometimes called Stick People brought their (uncivilized by Western standards) rural habits with them.

In 1999, I witnessed rural Chinese near Xian living in huts made of straw with dirt floors and no plumbing meaning no toilets.

This is what the Communist Party inherited when it came to power in 1949. The Party did not create this situation. After Mao died, the Communist Party had to rebuild an educational system that had been devastated by the Cultural Revolution and before then there was little or no educational system in rural China.

Most of the schools in China up until 1950s were in the cities and focused on educating the ruling class.

It wasn’t until the 1980s, that the Party Rebuilt China’s education system. Over time, the education system spread from urban to rural China where it is still being developed.

I don’t recall the exact stats I used in previous posts about the literacy level in China when Mao died, but I believe it was about 20% in 1976.

Imagine what the effort must have been for the Party to educate a population that was at least 80 percent illiterate in 1976 to today when randomly selected Chinese students in Shanghai earned the highest scores in the world on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test beating 65 other nations. See: Time

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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, cultural differences, education, family values | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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