China still has millions of poor people — poor by U.S. standards where many that live in poverty often drive cars and have TVs.
However, contrary to the belief of many gloating China bashers and Sinophobes, the Communist Party did not create this situation and has been working hard since the early 1980s to solve this challenge.
The Guardian.co.uk says, “The report, by authors from the China Institute for Reform and Development and other think tanks, describes the nation’s progress over the past 30 years of reform as a miracle in the history of poverty reduction….“
In fact, in 1949, most of China still lived in an environment similar to Europe’s middle ages.
To escape this poverty, many Chinese still immigrate illegally to the US. The reason so many do this is because there is a myth in China that America is “Gold Mountain”.
Golden Venture, a documentary about the US immigration crises, says, “The first major waves of Chinese immigrants came to the U.S. after hearing of the “Golden Mountain” or “Gum Saan” when California’s Gold Rush began in 1848.”
However, the US is not the mythical Gold Mountain.
Steve Lendmansays, “On September 16, the Census Bureau reported that US poverty rose to 43.6 million in 2009, an increase of 3.8 million in the past year – the largest total since the first 1959 estimates. It shows one in seven Americans are impoverished, the official 14.3% rate the highest since 1994, by the Bureau’s conservative measures.”
Of China, the United Nationssays, “Both national and international indicators show that China has already achieved the goal of halving the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015 set by the UN as one of eight Millennium Development Goals. Remaining poverty is however becoming increasingly difficult to address, as the rural poor are now concentrated in remote regions with difficult natural conditions.”
“China also accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in poverty. Excluding China, (global) poverty fell only by around 10%.” Source: Global Issues
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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The Yongle Emperor’s father, Zhu Yuanzhang (Emperor Hongwu) would have seen his son as unfilial, which means not observing the obligations of a child to a parent—even after the parent is dead.
When Yongle opened China, he demonstrated disrespect for his parent. Instead, he should have continued supporting the closed-door policy his father had instituted.
In Chinese society, to maintain a well-controlled country or a peaceful world requires the children to love and respect his or her parents even after death.
In fact, filial piety is not only a foundation of morality in China but also a fundamental basis of Chinese culture.
This also explains why each of China’s current presidents continues supporting the policies of the former president and Deng Xiaoping.
For change to take place in China, it usually comes slowly. Filial piety is the reason the People’s Liberation Army did not remove Mao during the Cultural Revolution and waited until he was dead to act.
Mandarin with English subtitles
However, when the Yongle Emperor acted against his father’s wishes, he demonstrated courage because he knew many in the imperial court would consider him unfilial.
Emperor Yongle commissioned building the great fleet that Admiral Zheng He sailed as far as Africa.
Admiral Zheng He was selected to command because he was an organizer, a diplomat and could be trusted. He was not a merchant or a conqueror.
Although during this time, many Chinese immigrated to Southeast Asia, the Yongle Emperor had no interest in establishing colonies outside China.
In the north, it was a different story. Emperor Yongle had to deal with ceaseless attacks by the Mongolian tribes.
For the first time in centuries, an emperor sent a Chinese army of 100,000 beyond the Great Wall to end this threat and bring peace to China.
When the nomadic tribes retreated, a larger army was raised and sent after them.
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.
Emperor Hongwu wanted to stabilize the country and strengthen Confucian Piety in the family. To achieve this, Hongwu centralized the state’s power and used spies to watch his political rivals and supporters.
Hongwu founded the Jin Yi Wei, the secret spy agency and bodyguard of all the Ming Emperors responsible to watch public officials. Anyone caught talking about rebellion would be arrested.
The worst aspects of Chinese feudalism had Hongwu’s full support.
Before Emperor Hongwu died, he arranged for his oldest grandson to become emperor. To make sure this would happen, he had all potential enemies killed.
However, Hongwu’s grandson did not get the crown. Instead, Hongwu’s fourth son became the next emperor through drastic measures that resulted in many deaths.
Hongwu’s fourth son would become Emperor Yongle (ruled 1402 – 1424).
Mandarin with English subtitles
Emperor Yongle had been sent by his father to guard the north against the nomads and was given the title of King Yan. Due to his success at driving back the Mongols, he had the support of China’s nobility to become emperor.
As Emperor, he reversed his father’s decisions and opened China to world trade. In 1404, Yongle decided to move the capital from Nanjing to Beijing since Beijing was situated in an important strategic position between Mongolia and the plains of northern China — 20 miles from the Great Wall.
Beijing had been the capital of the Yuan and Jin (1115 – 1234) Dynasties. Though Beijing was far from the areas of China with the most population and agriculture along the Yangtze River, Emperor Yongle was still determined to move his capital north.
He wanted to move so he would have more control over China’s northern minorities such as the Mongols and the Manchu.
Before moving from Nanjing, he had Beijing rebuilt with a new palace, The Forbidden City. The materials for this construction came from all over China with most being carried on barges along the Grand Canal, which stretched more than a thousand miles from Beijing to Hangzhou in the south.
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.
China’s longest lasting dynasties survived due to one or more great emperors.
After China was unified by Qin Shi Huangdi (221 – 207 BC), there were only five dynasties that survived for long periods — the Han, Tang, Sung, Ming, and Qing Dynasties.
Although China’s civilization survived, the country’s history is rampant with rebellions, palace coups, corruption among palace officials, and insurrections. Between the five longest dynasties, the country usually fell apart into warring states as it did after 1911.
The most successful emperors managed to stabilize the country while managing wisely as the Communist Party has done since 1976.
EmperorHan Wudi (ruled 141 – 87 B.C.) of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 219 A.D.) was fifteen when he first sat on the throne.
Wudi is considered one of the greatest emperors in China’s history. He expanded the borders, opened the early Silk Road, developed the economy, and established state monopolies on salt, liquor and rice.
After the Han Dynasty collapsed, China fell apart for almost 400 years before the Tang Dynasty was established (618 -906). The Tang Dynasty was blessed with several powerful emperors.
The first was Emperor Tang Taizong (ruled 627-649).
According to historical records, Wu Zetain, China’s only woman emperor also ruled wisely.
Emperor Tang Zuanzong , Zetain’s grandson, ruled longer than any Tang emperor and the dynasty prospered while he sat on the throne.
After the dynasty fell, there would be short period of about 60 years before the Sung Dynasty reestablished order and unified the country again.
The second emperor of the Sung Dynasty, Sung Taizong (ruled 976 – 997) unified China after defeating the Northern Han Dynasty. The third emperor, Sung Zhenzong (ruled 997-1022) also deserves credit for maintaining stability.
The Sung Dynasty then declined until a revival by Sung Ningzong (ruled 1194 – 1224) After he died, the dynasty limped along until Kublai Khan defeated the last emperor in 1279.
After conquering all of China, Kublai Khan founded the Mongol, Yuan Dynasty (1277-1367). Not long after Kublai died, the dynasty was swept away.
In 1368, a peasant rebellion defeated the Yuan Dynasty and drove the Mongols from China.
The Ming Dynasty (1271 – 1368) is known for rebuilding, strengthening and extending the Great Wall among a list of other accomplishments.
Historical records show that the rule of the third Ming Emperor, Ming Chengzu (ruled 1403 – 1424), was the most prosperous period.
After Chengzu, the dynasty would decline until 1567 when Emperor Ming Muzong reversed the decline.
His son, Emperor Ming Shenzong, also ruled wisely from 1573 to 1620.
After Shenzong’s death, the Ming Dynasty quickly declined and was replaced by the Qing Dynasty in 1644.
The Opium Wars started by England and France and the Taiping Rebellion led by a Christian convert in the 19th century would contribute to the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.
The Qing Dynasty was fortunate to have three powerful, consecutive emperors: Emperor Kangxi (1661 – 1722), Yongzhen (1722-1735) and Qianlong (1735-1796). For one-hundred-and-thirty-five years, China remained strong and prosperous.
After the corrupt Qing Dynasty was swept aside in 1911 by a rebellion led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, China fell apart and warlords fought to see who would rule China.
When Sun Yat-sen died, the republic he was building in southern China fell apart when Chiang Kai-shek broke the coalition that Sun Yat-sen had formed between the Nationalist and Communist Parties. Mao’s famous Long March shows how the Communists survived.
Then Japan invaded, and China would be engulfed in war and rebellion until 1945 when World War II ended. After World War II, the rebellion between the Nationalist and Communists ended in victory for the Communists in 1949.
This victory was made possible because the Communists were supported by China’s peasants that hated, despised and distrusted the Nationalist Party, which represented China’s ruling elite.
The Communists gained the support of the peasants by treating the peasants with respect and promising reforms that would end the suffering.
Then Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution extended the peasants suffering.
However, since the early 1980s, the Communist Party has been working to fulfill the promises made during the revolution, and the lifestyles of China’s peasants are slowly improving.
There are many impatient voices in the West and a few in China that are not happy with the speed of China’s reforms or how the Party has handled them.
In fact, China has modernized and improved lifestyles in China since the early 1980s at a pace that has never been seen before in recorded history.
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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.
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves.
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What Richard Fernandez wrote about the current situation in Korea for Belmont Club of Pajamas Media was wrong. He wrote,” Barack Obama … is beaten before he starts” as if the only response is to declare total war on North Korea to punish them for what they did.
Anyone who studied and understands Sun Tzu’s The Art of War knows that retaliation of North Korea would be a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.
What was lost? Two South Korean soldiers were killed and a dozen injured. There was no invasion or huge loss of life.
Let us not forget that the Korean Conflict never ended in the 1950s. North and South Korea are technically still at war and these flare-ups are a continuation of that conflict.
The problem with invading or bombing North Korea is that millions of Koreans on both sides of the DMZ would die.
Then Fernandez spends time on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and writes about nonproliferation indicating that if Obama doesn’t use force to punish North Korea, then Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore will eventually take steps to acquire nuclear weapons making the world a more dangerous place.
Obama is not a cowboy from the neoconservative, nation-building hawks of the Bush Whitehouse.
Instead, Obama has borrowed a tactic from President Theodore Roosevelt. Obama talks softly but carries a big stick, and America’s enemies and allies in Asia know this.
After all, in 2010, President Obama sent another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and you seldom win shooting wars without shedding blood.
The Nationsays, “The Obama administration is trying to kill its way to victory in Afghanistan.”
In fact, Obama still uses the infamous Blackwater to find insurgent targets in Pakistan. The Nation says, “These are not people that believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, these are not people that kill innocent civilians. They’re very good at what they do.”
“Since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, The United States has expanded drone bombing raids in Pakistan,” The Nation says. “Obama first ordered a drone strike against targets in North and South Waziristan on January 23, and the strikes have been conducted consistently ever since.”
“The Obama administration has now surpassed the number of Bush-era strikes in Pakistan and has faced fierce criticism from Pakistan (without Obama backing down) …”
One comment to Richard Fernandez post about Korea says China would come across the Yalu River as it did in the 50s. That’s also wrong since America could destroy North Korea without a ground invasion. It could all be done from the air. Then we could ignore North Korea.
In fact, Mao ruled the China of the 50s. When Mao died in 1976, revolutionary Maoism was repudiated and the Maoists swept from power.
Then in 1982, China wrote a new Constitution with term and age limits for politicians. Since Mao died, China has had four presidents because the law says the president of China may only serve two five-year terms. The 1982 Constitution also has an article of impeachment.
Today, China is an open market, hybrid capitalist, socialist republic that spent the last three decades building a modern China. That could all be lost by sending troops across the Yalu River to support North Korea as Mao did.
Imagine what would happen if the US destroyed the Three Gorges Damn with cruise missiles.
Then there’s what Time said last year. “South Korea, backed by the U.S., doesn’t want war, because the North has some 13,000 artillery tubes aimed at Seoul and more than 10 million South Koreans living within 30 miles of the DMZ.
“North Korea, backed by China, doesn’t want war because if it comes, it all but guarantees the collapse of Kim’s regime, which is also the family business.“
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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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