On October 30, 1938, H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was broadcast in the style of a radio news story with bulletins from reporters played by actors in the Mercury Theater, which resulted in hundreds if not thousands believing the earth was being invaded by Mars.
The excuse used to invade Vietnam and escalate the Vietnam War was the Tonkin Gulf Incident, which never happened as President Johnson claimed. This hoax led to the long war in Vietnam (1955 – 1975) with millions of troops and civilians killed and injured. Sources: The National Security Archive, Shakesville, and American USSR
Since 1950, when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China invaded and reoccupied Tibet, we have been told repeatedly by our leaders, Hollywood celebrities and the Western media that Tibet was never a part of China before 1950, which was proven to be a lie by letters written in the 19th century by Sir. Robert Hart.
More evidence (that we do not hear of in the media) was published in the October 1912 National Geographic Magazine.
Now, Wiki Leaks reveals that the Tiananmen Square incident may be one of the biggest hoaxes in Western Media history or manipulation of the media by the U.S. government on a grand scale.
This revelation of the Tiananmen Square slaughter “that never happened” is big news in China, but in the West it is almost non-news.
After doing a Google search, it appears that only one Western media source published this story on June 4, 2011, and that was the UK’s The Daily Telegraph (to read the story click on the link).
To learn of this, I had to receive an e-mail from friends (American citizens) visiting China as tourists.
Wiki Leaks obtained cables that originally came from the US embassy in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square Incident, which partially confirms the Chinese government’s claim that PLA troops did not massacre demonstrators inside Tiananmen Square.
I wonder how many more Western media and U.S. government lies will be discovered in the future.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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.
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.
If you suspect China is under a biased Western microscope being watched for every hiccup, the answer is “absolutely” yes and the evidence is overwhelming, while most of the world – especially the United States – is often ignored for the same sins and flaws.
On Saturday, July 23, 2011, China had its first railroad accident of the year, and it was reported globally with much criticism.
The Los Angeles Times shouts, “Deadly Chinese bullet train crash spawns anger, safety concerns”, and then reports that at least 43 people were killed and at least 200 injured.
The LA Times only had a few comments from readers and all that I read were insulting and negative of China.
MSNBC’s headline said, 32 die in China high-speed train crash and reported, “The total power failure rendered useless an electronic safety system designed to warn following trains of stalled trains on the tracks up ahead, and automatically halt them before a collision can occur.”
Comments such as this one followed the piece in MSNBC, “Anytime the Chinese get hosed by their own doing I just can’t feel bad for them… Better them than anyone else getting screwed by their quality control and reverse engineering.”
However, to be fair to MSNBC’s audience, there were many comments attacking ones such as the example I copied. It was a lively debate worth reading.
Yahoo News was much more critical of China than MSNBC by focusing on safety and previous train wrecks in China dredging up as much dirt as possible.
One comment of many said, “the traffic safety in china is a joke. a very big joke. they don’t care about people, they care about face, they only interested in propaganda and fighting the big imperialist empire. they struggle to show the communism is working. guess what, is not working. so next time when you reverse engineering something do it completely. ever heard of Line blocks ? and throw the CTCS down the toilet and flush. twice.”
What causes such cruel and often evil reactions such as these from the Western media and readers?
Is it resentment because China is fast catching up to the United States as a global economic superpower?
Is it ethnic/racial hate because they are Chinese?
Is it envy because the quality of life is improving in China while life in the West is crumbling and burdened by debt?
Is it because they have a government run by China’s Communist Party?
One example of the “always beat up China” syndrome is a flawed and misleading opinion piece written by Charles Lane for The Washington Post.
Charles Lane wrote, “China’s bullet-train experience shows what can go wrong when an unelected elite, influenced by corrupt opportunists, gives orders that all must follow — without the robust public discussion we would have in the states.”
I wonder if Lane would include the “robust public discussion” we had in the states leading up to the 2008 global financial crises caused by American and Western greed and corruption.
I wanted to put Charles Lane’s Washington Post opinion to the test and I Googled the “history of global train wrecks” and found a detailed history going back to the early 19th century.
To save time and space, I decided to compare rail accidents starting from 2007 for only two of the world’s largest democracies and China.
It should be mentioned that both India and China rely on trains to move people much more than the United States, so we should expect more injuries and deaths from rail accidents in those countries. For that reason, I will compare the number of rail accidents to see which country has the best safety record.
The lowest score wins.
In 2007, there were thirty-three rail accidents listed for the world, and the United States had nine (27% of the total) killing seven and injuring more than a hundred, while India had three accidents killing 80 and injuring twelve.
China (ruled by what Charles Lane calls the unelected elite) had two rail accidents killing four and injuring two.
Score: United States 9, India 3 and China 2
In 2008, there were thirty-four rail accidents listed for the world, and the United States had eight (24%) with twenty-nine deaths and almost 300 injured, while India had one rail accident with no deaths or injured listed.
China (ruled by what Charles Lane calls the unelected elite) had one rail accident killing seventy-two and injuring 416.
Score: United States 17, India 4 and China 3
In 2009, there were thirty-nine rail accidents listed for the world, and the united States had seven (18%) with seventeen killed and five injured, while India had four accidents with thirty-two killed and 280 injured.
China (ruled by what Charles Lane calls the unelected elite) had two rail accidents killing seven and injuring 280.
Score: United States 24, India 8 and China 5
In 2010, there were fifty rail accidents listed for the world, and the United States had three (6%) with 32 injured, while India had fourteen rail accidents with hundreds killed and injured.
China (ruled by what Charles Lane calls the unelected elite) had one rail accident killing nineteen and injuring 71.
Score: United States 27, India 22 and China 6
This year by July 23, 2011, twenty-one train accidents were listed for the world, and the United States had eight (35%) killing eleven and injuring eighteen, while India had five accidents killing seventy-one and injuring two.
China (ruled by what Charles Lane calls the unelected elite) had one rail accident with at least 35 dead and 200 injured.
Score: United States 35, India 27 and China 7
From 2007 to July 23, 2011, the world had 177 rail accidents. The United States had 20% of the total, India 15% and China 4%. Source: List of Rail Accidents (Wiki)
When I Googled “train accident in China 2011” there were 55 million hits. It seems that popular “bad news” about China spreads fast and then the Western blame game begins, which represents Charles Lane’s “robust public discussion” in a democracy.
A few more interesting facts to know before judging China’s rail system is that the average number of people traveling daily by train in China is 2.4 million, and in 2008, 1.456 billion people travelled 772.8 billion kilometers by rail.
I’d say with confidence that the odds are very good that if you travel by rail in China, you will reach your destination on time and without an accident.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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.
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.
In another e-mail, this “old” friend questioned China’s behavior in Asia and mentioned the disagreement between Vietnam and China over some offshore oil fields that both countries claim.
He felt this was a sign that China would wage war on other countries and inferred this would not happen if China were a democracy similar to the US, since “no democracy has ever gone to war with another democracy” (his words).
White says, basically, it depends on the definition of democracy and that individuals will shift the meaning of the definition to fit what he or she wants to believe.
To come up with a set of probabilities, White studied the wars that took place in 1967 and came up with these results:
White wrote, “Now, 1967 is just a single year, but I’ve spent a good deal of this Atlas counting democracies. I can state with reasonable certainty that 44.5% of mapable sovereignties during the WW2-Y2K Era were full democracies. This calculates out to…
The odds of 2 random democracies going to war: 19.8%
The odds of 2 random non-democracies going to war: 30.8%
The odds of a random democracy going to war with a random non-democracy: 49.4%
He also mentions an interesting theory that “no two countries with a McDonald’s Restaurant have ever gone to war with one another”, which seems to indicate that as countries are incorporated into the global economy by trans-national corporations, they stop waging war on one another.
This theory is an individual truth that most of us might want to believe since there then should be no worry that the US and China will ever wage war.
In 2009, the US had 13,381 McDonalds and in 2010, China had almost 1,000 with thousands more planned. In addition, China has thousands of Pizza Huts, KFCs, Starbucks and the Chinese love to drive Buicks and Fords. Wal-Mart is even building stores in China.
However, I discovered the McDonald’s theory might be another false truth.
Pakistan has 25 McDonalds and the first one was built in 1998. India has 192 with the first built in 1996, and the last Indo-Pakistani War was in 1999.
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.
Then the first alternating current (AC) power plant opened in 1885 and transmitted power 200 miles from the plant.
By 1927, forty-five years later, the first power grid was established in Pennsylvania.
However, it wasn’t until 1933 that Congress passed legislation establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority, which now produces 125 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year.
Then in 1935, FDR issued an executive order to create the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to bring electricity to millions of rural Americans.
It took six years after the REA was launched in 1941 to help 800 rural electric cooperatives to string 350,000 miles of power lines.
Click on the link for America’s electrical grid and learn more about what it took to build the most extensive electric transmission system in the world— that is until China completes construction of its electrical transmission grid.
The biggest difference between modern China and America in the 1950s is the size of the population.
America electrified a nation with a population of about 160 million people.
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.
Access to electricity is the key to developing a country into a modern state with the potential to grow a large, consumer driven middle class.
Poverty reduction is also linked to access to electricity.
In fact, to reduce poverty, China has introduced electricity access to over 900 million rural residents in over 50 years and has achieved an electricity access rate of as high as 98%. Source: Stanford.edu
August 15, 2010
In 1949 when the People’s Republic (PRC) was founded, there were only 33 small hydropower stations in rural China, with a total installed capacity of 3.63 megawatts, and total electricity consumption in rural areas was 20 million kilowatts. Today, there are thousands of hydropower stations, and the PRC has more than any country on the earth.
In 1979, China’s Xinhua state run news agency reported a serious electric power shortage. The agency said China produced about 150,000 million kilowatts of electricity a year and ranked about seventh among the world’s electric energy producers.
In the last post, China’s Goals to Go Green, we discovered that China now produces more electricity than the US.
To understand what China has accomplished since 1979 when it was ranked seventh among the world’s electricity producers instead of first, it helps to discover the time it took for America’s electrical grid to be built, which will be continued on June 20, 2011 in Turning on the Lights in China – Part 2
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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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