Poverty and China’s Peasant farmers – Part 3/3

September 12, 2010

In rural China, the peasants do not earn much money.  They live in what the West calls poverty, but they have a home and a roof over their heads.  They are not homeless and seldom are hungry as the poor in India, which is touted as the largest democracy on the earth.

The peasant farmers in China grow most of the food they eat and sell what they do not need as the Amish do today in America and as 90% of Americans did before the Industrial Revolution.

If Chinese peasants, go to school, eat a nutritious diet and have access to basic medical care as China’s central government has promised, health will improve and life spans may surpass urban China where the air pollution is bad.

China is extending the electric grid and improving public transportation so rural China will have access to the same luxuries that urban people have. Before 1980, rural Chinese lived as most Americans did before the Industrial Revolution.

For thousands of years, the backbone of China has always been the peasant farmers and their collective lifestyle. What will happen to China if they all join the consumer oriented middle class?

Rural America must have been a collective culture before the Industrial Revolution. Consumerism and credit cards changed most Americans, except the Amish, into an individualistic culture where “I” is more important than “We”. 

The Amish are still a collective culture with free will to leave and become a modern American consumer. Why don’t they?

See Climbing the Dragon’s Back

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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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Leave a Comment » | capitalism, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese middle class, cultural differences, education, family values, food, health care | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The WHO’s War on Tobacco

August 17, 2010

Gillian Wong for the Associated Press wrote about a battle over tobacco heating up in China—pun intended. China also signed the global anti-tobacco treaty backed by the World Heath Organization to cut tobacco use.

However, in China, tobacco companies sponsor public schools.  Something similar happened in the US when Coke and Pepsi installed vending machines in the public schools where students could feed their sugar cravings and grow obese at the same time.

In fact, at Nogales High School in La Puente, California where I taught for years, I was told one morning by the truck driver filling the vending machines in the halls that more than two-thousand “cases” of Coke were selling a week there. 

The schools district made a nice profit from its share. Now, it seems selling sodas at school “may” be against the law.

Maybe the US was China’s role model, but the Chinese have gone one-step further by (according to Gillian Wong) taking elementary students on school sponsored tours of cigarette factories where the slogans say, “Talent stems from hard work, tobacco helps you become accomplished.”

Where’s Qin Shi Huangdi when China needs him most? After all, when the first emperor wanted to get something done, nothing stopped him. He unified China, finished building The Great Wall, mandated one written language and had the scholars who complained dig their own graves before setting them on fire and throwing dirt on the remains.

On the other hand, if China did nothing, the One-Child policy could be abolished pleasing Christians around the world.

Then China could encourage smoking to reduce the population. Estimates say that one in three young men will die early from tobacco use. Within fifty years, China’s population problems would be solved while making a profit.

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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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Fat Camps

August 7, 2010

The battle of the bulge has been launched in China. The overweight children of the Chinese rich are paying as much as $1,000 American dollars a month to lose weight at fat camps, which are appearing across China and this is taking place in a culture where, historically, being overweight was and sometimes still is considered a sign of wealth and success.

However, many Chinese are learning that being overweight will cause health problems such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and high blood pressure. For women, obesity may affect pregnancy

China’s single children, an urban product of China’s one-child policy to control population growth, have been indulged and spoiled leading to an obesity epidemic.

Many Chinese in urban areas have lived sedentary lifestyles leading to serious health problems and weight issues.

At the Fat camps, these overweight Chinese spend several hours a day involved in sports activities. Meng Qing Gang, one fat camp participant, says, “We are in a health conscious era and are here to lose weight.”

See The Challenge of Rural Health Care in America and 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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2 Comments | China, Chinese Culture, health care | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

An Invasion of Tasty Killers

August 7, 2010

Since the launch of China’s “Getting Rich is Glorious” generation, American fast food has become popular in urban China with plans to invade rural areas.

Currently, a study that received a “majority of its support from the Chinese people and Chinese government” called the China Project is being conducted to observe the relationship of disease patterns to diet, particularly the move from the traditional Chinese diet to US fast food. 

Professor T. Colin Campbell, an “outspoken vegan”, has implicated the increased consumption of animal protein in particular as having a strong correlation with cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other diseases that, while common in Western countries, were once considered rare in China. 

Diabetes Mellitus says that a diet rich in refined carbohydrates is a major factor responsible for diabetes. 

Obesity is also a major factor. Although no one has discovered how sugar contributes to diabetes, it is the most well known sugar related disorder. Source: Innvista

Wellsphere shows that as sugar consumption goes up, fatal diseases increase.

In fact, The processing of sugar follows the same trail as the opium poppy. It has habit-forming sensory pleasures just as heroin, opium, and alcohol, meaning that what opium did to China in the 19th century, Western fast food is doing today.

If you want to learn more about the dangers of sugar, see 76 Reasons Why Sugar Sucks.

See The Opium Wars

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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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1 Comment | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese food, health care | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
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From China to America with Love and Compassion

July 26, 2010

This post isn’t what you might expect. This is about one of the Lost Daughters of China being adopted by a loving American family.  I wrote a similar story in Earth to Earth, Dirt to Dirt, Ashes to Ashes. However, this story may have a different ending.

In this story, Gillian Wong, the Associated Press, writes in The Washington Post about another adopted girl from China. Katie is 16, and she might die from an aggressive form of leukemia.  Her only chance may be a donor. To find one, Katie’s American mother, Sherrie Cramer, traveled to China in an attempt to save her daughter’s life.

“In the industrial city of Liuzhou, where Katie once lived, the head of the local Red Cross office, Song Xianmin, organized meetings with reporters and visits to a blood donation bus and Katie’s old orphanage.

“We are very touched that you would come from so far away to try to find a match for a child of China, whom you have treated as your own family,” says Song, a thin, bespectacled man.”

Since I lost a close friend to leukemia, I’m aware of how heart wrenching this can be and wish the best for Katie and her family.

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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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