China’s Modern Dynasty

February 21, 2010

In 2012, the new rulers of China will “all” have been educated in the West.

After Mao died, Deng Xiaoping and his supporters “rebuilt” the government. The party instituted term limits, two five-year terms for any political position and an age limit of sixty-seven.

Mao

These changes were implemented to avoid having another modern emperor like Mao. Those who spoke out against Mao while he ruled China were usually killed, went to prison or fell out of favor. Deng Xiaoping’s son was dropped from a high rise and paralyzed for life—the message to Deng was to “shut up or else”.

A high-ranking, retired Communist who fought with Mao during World War II and the revolution told me that the seventy million party members (like America’s Democrats and Republicans) do not always agree on issues.

The difference is that the world hears little of what goes on behind the scenes in China. Doing business that way has little to do with the party. That type of behavior is classically Chinese—not to talk about the elephant in the room or to hang out your dirty laundry for everyone to see as the West does. Behaving like that goes against what “face” means 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. 

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6 Comments | Chinese Culture, government, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

February 21, 2010

An American friend who taught English and lived in China for several years once said that it was possible to get around the government censors and reach sites that have been blocked.  It just takes time.  With that in mind, pointing fingers, as Google and Secretary of State Clinton did over the Google hacking episode, was a blunder and an insult to the Chinese people and their government.

Catching clever, cyber criminals on the Internet is not easy—especially if those criminals are Geeks getting thrills hacking into protected Websites. From what I’ve learned, organized Internet criminals are worse and harder to catch.

Shadow Land, the post before this one, is a case in point.

To understand more, I suggest you read How Prisoners Are Using Facebook to Harass Their Victims , and remember, next time you decide to blame the Chinese government for everything that happens in China, hold your tongue with forceps until the evidence—not opinions—proves guilt.

Consider that China has 1.3 billion people and only seventy million belong to the Communist party that rules the country. And regardless of popular Western opinions, the Chinese government does not control everything the Chinese people do with their daily lives and they never will.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Shadow Land

February 21, 2010

It seems that students in China may be modeling themselves after a Jackie Chan movie and playing catch-me if you can.  Harking back to a piece I wrote about Google being hacked, more evidence has been revealed that the real perpetrators may be high school students.

Now, the New York Times says, “the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.”

The NSA traced some of the attacks to servers in Taiwan.  Then a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has also led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at a vocational school in east China’s Shandong Province. Last week, in another hacking incident, the trail led through China to Germany where that other attack originated.

What is most disturbing is the knee jerk reaction that took place when shortly after Google went public with its accusations against China without evidence, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting China’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.

This is not the way to build trust with other governments. The wise thing to do would have been to wait until all the evidence was in before deciding who was guilty. It’s also interesting to know that this vocational school is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and Google’s competitor.

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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.

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3 Comments | America, China, education, government, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Wheezing for Profits

February 20, 2010

Thomas L. Friedman wrote in an OP-ED column for the New York Times, “China, of course, understands that (about Global warming), which is why it is investing heavily in clean-tech, efficiency and high-speed rail. It sees the future trends and is betting on them. Indeed, I suspect China is quietly laughing at us right now.”

It is obvious from Friedman’s OP-Ed piece that there is a benefit when Chinese engineers run the country instead of lawyers, accountants, corporate CEO’s with next quarter’s profits in mind, lobbyists, professional politicians and people like Rush Limbaugh, who confuses his ditto heads with bogus opinions.

If China’s engineers and scientists are laughing, it is because of the American fools that preach that carbon emissions are not the cause of global warming as if they are fighting a crusade against the infidel while ignoring all the other reasons why oil and coal are bad.

coal burning power plant - how would you like to breath this?

Let’s examine some other reasons why carbon emissions are not good and why humans should wean themselves from this dirty source of energy as quickly as possible.

1. Living near a freeway is not healthy
2. Carbon emissions and asthma
3. Dirty power from coal
4. Ocean acidification
5. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Because of China’s Return

February 19, 2010

I just read Facing up to China, The Economist, February 6th-12th, 2010, and I thought, “Who is the fool (sorry) person who wrote this?”

a) a neo-conservative
b) a Nazi sympathizer
c)  a believer in nation building using the military to shoot anyone that stand in the way
d)  a throwback to the age of imperialism (maybe a born again 19th century citizen of the defunct British, French, Spanish or German Empires)
e) all of the above

If the majority of Americans agreed with the opinion stated in this piece, why the masquerade that we actually care about human life? We should declare that America is the last Imperial Empire that serves corporations spanning the globe looting for profit.

Like Alexander the Great, Americans knew how to win wars once. During World War II, we firebombed cities in Germany and Japan roasting tens of thousands of non-combatant civilians nightly. In one final blow, we dropped nuclear bombs on Japan killing hundreds of thousands in two blasts ending that war. Along the way, we’d send a strong message to the world that we own it or at least the credit card companies and banks that own our government does. The last two sentences in “Facing Up to China” were the only ones that made sense.

The answer to the multiple-choice question is (e).

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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