Jack London in China

November 1, 2010

This October at the Northern California Independent Booksellers Trade Show (NCIBA), I stopped at the University of Georgia Press booth searching for a book about Jack London (1876 – 1916).

In fact, Jack London, Photographer (ISBN 978-0-8203-2967-3) by Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Sara S. Hodson and Philip Adam was there, and I have a copy in front of me as I’m writing this post.

It is a beautiful book and proves that London had talent beyond writing stories such as White Fang or Call of the Wild.

London took photos in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War in Korea and Manchuria.

On page 57, the caption says, “London had his camera confiscated in Japan and was often detained by Japanese officials when he got too close to the front lines, especially as the war spread to the Yalu River, the boundary between Korea and Manchuria.” 

The experiences London had in Korea and China would lead to an essay and a story that ignited a debate that he was a racist.


Jack London, Socialist-Capitalist

He wrote the The Unparalleled Invasion, which takes place in a fictional 1975, when the West decides to destroy China (for no good reason) by using biological warfare. I guess the West couldn’t sell opium to China anymore.

While at the NCIBA, I had two conversations about London. One editor said she had heard that London was a racist and she had trouble believing that.  Later, another editor from the University of George Press also said he didn’t believe London was a racist.

London’s 1904 essay, The Yellow Peril, may have contributed to the claim that he was a racist. Using Google, I found sites that support this theory.

However, after seeing the pictures in Jack London, Photographer (Amazon link), it is hard to believe he was a racist.

There have also been rumors that London committed suicide but there is no evidence to support that theory either.

If London were a racist, why did his Japanese servant Tokinosuke Sekine stay loyal to the end even after London was bankrupt and his “fair weather” friends had abandoned him?

See China: Portrait of a People

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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 » | America, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, expatriates, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Global Ignorance of Innovation

October 31, 2010

Many who live in Western democracies love patting themselves on the back and feeling superior to the rest of the world.

In The Economist for October 16, I found Innovation in China — Patents, yes; ideas, maybe, which demonstrates how ignorant some are about China. 

Since The Economist’s home office is in London, the magazine represents more than the American media—it represents the Western media and this piece was written in Hong Kong.

This isn’t the first time I’ve read about China’s reputation for trampling intellectual-property rights and that an authoritarian government couldn’t possibly compete with a democracy when it comes to innovation.

However, the conclusion points out that China is becoming more innovative and is starting to be serious about protecting intellectual property rights through China’s changing legal system.

What The Economist piece misses is that democracies do not hold a patent on innovation. For more than two millennia, innovations were rampant in an authoritarian China ruled by emperors without much of a legal system. The usual form of punishment was decapitation.

In fact, the list of innovations from ancient China is long and historians are starting to revise the textbooks to show that most of what we have today came from an authoritarian China.

To learn more about the innovations that originated in Imperial China then found a way to the West centuries later, I suggest reading Paper, Printing, Gunpowder, Crossbow and other Inventions, Machines of China, and China Points the Way.

I’m sure there are those who will deny the West “borrowed” these innovations from China and claim that the West reinvented them, but the evidence shows that these ideas traveled West along both the north and south Silk Roads as early as the Roman Empire more than two millennia ago. It just took time for the West to learn how to copy what the Chinese invented then claim it was the West that came up with the ideas.

Too bad that the patent laws, lawyers and courts of today didn’t exist then. Imagine the settlements over these ancient Chinese innovations, which revolutionized the world we live in today.

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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

Maoism Alive

October 27, 2010

Caution—do not confuse Maoists with the Communist Party that currently rules China.

The Maoists in China want a return to the Cultural Revolution and pure socialism with no capitalism. Chinese Maoists consider the current leaders as traitors.

After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping repudiated revolutionary Maoism and embarked on the path toward a socialist-capitalist economic model that has led to the prosperity in China today.

However, Maoism did not vanish. The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) was founded in 1984 and included the Communist Party of Peru (also known as the “Shining Path”).

Recently, the Chinese “Maoist” Communist Party thought they had a leader in Bo Xilai because of the crackdown on crime in Chongqing until Bo had thirty members of the Maoist Party arrested and locked up.  Source: Serve the People


China’s last Maoist village

Then there is the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal that formed a coalition government in Nepal in 2009, which collapsed a few months later as different rebel factions fought with each other. The Maoist’s goal was to turn Nepal into a Marxist Republic. Source: Nepal Assessment 2010

In India, there is an ongoing Naxalite-Maoist rebellion against the democratic government.

The Maoist influence in India comes from the lack of progress to end starvation among rural Indians, who have had no improvement in their lifestyles for decades. See: Naxalite-Maoist insurgency

In the US, the Black Panthers (1967) were a militant Maoist organization. In Paris in 1968, the National Liberation Front, another Maoist group, caused street combat.

Maoism, known as Mao Zedong thought, is a variant of Marxism derived from the teachings of the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong. 

Maoism was widely applied as the political and military guiding ideology in the Communist Party between 1949 and 1976, which led to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.

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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 history, Communism, history, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Democracy in Exile – Yea, Right!

October 21, 2010

I read a misleading post at Global Voices that was titled China and Tibet: Democracy in Exile. My first thought was, “When was Tibet ever a Democracy?”

I also thought about double standards and hypocrisy, which I’ll get to later.

Here’s what the author said in the first sentence at Global Voices, “Being a Tibetan in exile is a loss that manifests in many forms: the loss of homeland and natural rights fall within that.”

What were those natural rights that were lost?

Most Tibetans in exile gave up land and millions of serfs who were treated no better than slaves. What was lost were positions of power and wealth.

Before 1950, when Mao’s Red army occupied Tibet, there had been no democracy or republic in Tibet – ever.

The next quote shows Tibet before 1950.

“Lamaism is the state religion of Tibet and its power in the Hermit Country is tremendous. Religion dominated every phase of life.… For instance, in a family of four sons, at least two, generally three, of them must be Lamas. Property and family prestige also naturally go with the Lamas to the monastery in which they are inmates.

“Keeping the common people or laymen, in ignorance is another means of maintaining the power of the Lamas. Nearly all of the laymen (serfs) are illiterate. Lamas are the only people who are taught to read and write.”  Source: October 1912 National Geographic Magazine, page 979.

Between 1912—when those words appeared in National Geographic—and 1950, Tibet did not change.

What we have in Global Voices is clever manipulation to elicit support for the Tibetan separatist movement.

In fact, Tibetans have the same chance to be free from China as Hawaiians have of being free of the United States. There is a separatist movement in Hawaii and the circumstances of Hawaii and Tibet being occupied and ruled by nations that are more powerful is similar.

The only difference is that a reluctant Tibet was ruled over by the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties from 1277 to 1913 when Great Britain convinced Tibet to break from China at the same time the Qing Dynasty was collapsing.

See Why Tibet?

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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.

4 Comments | Buddhism, Buddhist, China, Chinese history, history, media, politics, Tibet | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Brutal Dictator and an American Ally – Chiang Kai-shek

October 21, 2010

Casey DuBose wrote a comment wanting proof for the claim that 30,000 were killed during the 2/28 massacre in Taiwan. Here is the proof and more.

Arts & Humanities listed Chiang Kai-shek with other dictators responsible for horrible atrocities and claimed he is responsible for at last one million deaths.

The Taipei Times published a piece on the front page of the paper on Tuesday, February 27, 2007, and said, Former dictator Chiang Kai-shek was a murderer and President Chen Shui-bian said Taiwan’s former authoritarian regime and its leaders were responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians slain in 1947.

On a site that lists the death tolls for the major wars and atrocities of the twentieth century, Chiang Kai-shek was given credit for 10,214,000 democides from 1921 to 1948.

In another post about Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, enotes.com says, “From 1927 to 1949, Chiang’s troops used murder, torture and other brutal tactics to wipe out the communists.”

Then Scaruffi.com lists a century of genocides from 1900-2000 and Chiang Kai-shek was credited with the deaths of 30 thousand in a popular uprising in Taiwan in 1947.

I read at the Boston Examiner that several thousand protesters marched in Taipei on February 28, 1947 against the brutality (that took place the day before) but were met with bullets. Martial law was declared and even though things had settled down by the time the Nationalist soldiers arrived the massacre began almost immediately.

East Asia posted an Austrian Perspective by Christian Schafferer, who said the infamous 1947 “2-28 Incident” resulted in ten to thirty thousand civilians killed and Taiwan’s governor executed.

I discovered a book on the topic, Representing Atrocity in Taiwan, The 2.28 Incident and the White Terror by Sylvia Li-Chun, who is the Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame.

The most powerful evidence comes from the monument in Taiwan to the incident, which says, “Within a few months, the number of deaths, injured and missing persons amounted to tens of thousands.  Keelung, Taipei, Chiayi and Kaohsiung suffered the highest number of casualties. It was called the February 28 Incident.”

Then from the Asia Times, “They slaughtered civilians at random to terrorize the Taiwanese into submission, and carried out a targeted campaign to wipe out the Taiwanese elite – local leaders and intellectuals – who represented the biggest threat to KMT rule. To this date the numbers killed are uncertain, but historians estimate 30,000.”

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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 » | Chinese history, history, Taiwan | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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