Is it possible to gain more freedom in China through Confucianism?

December 31, 2013

It is obvious that the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] had been moving cautiously and slowly toward implementing a participatory form of government but slower than they have done to build the highly successful market economy that is driving China’s prosperity today.

I read Moving China Toward Democracy: A Confucian Framework written by Kyle Baxter.  It is a thoughtful piece. It is still to be determined if Baxter’s ideas will work, but evidence suggests that the CCP is moving in that direction.

What has been historically the cornerstone of most Chinese governments has been a legal system known as Legalism that comes with harsh punishments. Recent signs of movement away from Legalism toward more freedoms and transparency might be seen in the open and televised trial of Bo Xilai, a popular and powerful figure in the CCP.

If Confucianism were to be the bedrock of a representative government in China, China’s critics in the West would have less to complain about.

China has never really adopted Confucian principles for political rule. Since Confucianism values individual rights along with family values, this transition would pave the way for China to retain its cultural identity and join the world as a country with more freedoms for its people—but not necessarily a democracy by definition.

Some evidence that this is happening may be seen in the next video about China easing the one-child policy and ending labor camps.

Under Confucianism, Baxter says, “Government, then, becomes an institution to protect the people, and not to control them; to encourage them toward a proper way of life, and not a totalitarian state. … Confucianism is a viable framework for a constitutional democracy, and uniquely positions China for success as a modern nation.”

Deng Xiaoping said it best, “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”

Discover the Influence of Confucius

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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 latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

4 Comments | China, Chinese Culture, Confucianism, cultural differences, democracy, government, human rights, politics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The influence of Complex PTSD on Mao as China’s Leader: Part 1 of 2

December 3, 2013

Who was Mao? Was he the demon the Western media often makes him out to be, or was he just a product of his environment?

Mao has been judged by a Western value system that did not exist in China or the United States during his lifetime. In addition, it is now known that who we grow up to become as adults is partially due to genetics but mostly from environmental and lifestyle influences.

Mao grew up in a world nothing like most in the West have ever experienced, but he has been judged by Western humanitarian beliefs—also known today as political correctness—that did not exist when he was born into China’s collective culture where the reverse was true and the individual was not more important than the whole.

There is a strong possibility that Mao also suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and this may have influenced his behavior and decisions during the years he ruled China [1949 – 1976].

Helping Psychology says, “PTSD victims tend to be in a continuous state of heightened alertness. The trauma that precipitates the disorder essentially conditions them to be ever-ready for a life threatening situation to arise at any moment … But the continuous releases of brain chemicals that accompany this reaction time – and their inability to control when this heightened reactivity will occur – take psychological and biological tolls on PTSD victims over time.”

And Medicine Net.com says, “Complex posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) usually results from prolonged exposure to a traumatic event or series thereof and is characterized by long-lasting problems with many aspects of emotional and social functioning.”

American combat veterans are not the only people on this planet to suffer from PTSD. Every person is susceptible to the ravages of a violent trauma and if we examine Mao’s life, it could be argued that PTSD may have played a strong role in the decisions he made as he aged.

We will examine Mao’s long history as a victim of violence in Part 2.

Continued on December 4, 2013 in The influence of Complex PTSD on Mao as China’s Leader: Part 2

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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 latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

5 Comments | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, cultural differences, disabilities, history, human rights, politics, propaganda, United States | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Republic that Wasn’t

October 23, 2013

Taiwan was a republic in name only until its first open democratic election in 1996; Chiang Kai-shek [1887 – 1975], the president-for-life that the United States supported, was a brutal dictator and a mass murderer.

I knew about Chiang Kai-shek being responsible for the Shanghai massacre of 1927—also known as the White Terror. It was this atrocity that launched the Civil War [1927 – 1936; 1946 – 1950] between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Nationalist Party. Before then, both parties were part of Sun Yat-sen’s Chinese republic. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, and it was his death that marked the beginning of the end of the republic he was building with several political parties.

Sun Yat-sen believed that three different political systems could co-exist: Nationalism, Democracy and Socialism.

Then by accident, I stumbled on a Blog about the “228 Massacre” in Taiwan in 1947 when Kuomintang soldiers under orders from Cheng Kai-shek slaughtered 30,000 Taiwanese citizens. It was the first time I’d heard of this incident. Source Blog: Patrick Cowsill

In comparison, when I Googled “Tiananmen Square protests”—about the so-called 1989 Massacre in Tiananmen Square—I discovered that, “Several hundred civilians have been shot dead by the Chinese army during a bloody military operation to crush a democratic protest in Peking’s (Beijing) Tiananmen Square. Source: BBC

However, the Tiananmen Square protests did not start as a democracy protest—democracy was not a subject of the incident until college students joined the protests a few weeks into the incident started by Chinese workers protesting corruption in the government.

The “228 Massacre” was also a protest about government corruption in Taiwan.

Here’s what the BBC had to say about the Taiwan incident, “The event was an uprising sparked by the beating of a female vendor by authorities for selling untaxed cigarettes. Between 18,000 and 28,000 people are said to have been killed in riots and a subsequent crackdown.” Source: BBC

Compare the language.  When it was about the Communists, it was a “bloody military operation to crush a democratic protest” but when the killings were committed by an American ally ruled by a brutal dictator, it was “an uprising…sparked by the beating of a female vendor by authorities.”

Of course, we will always remember the man standing in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square. Have you forgotten what happened in Taiwan yet?  If that man had stepped in front of a tank in Taiwan, he would have been road kill.

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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 latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

8 Comments | China, Chinese history, crime, history, human rights, politics, propaganda, Taiwan, United States | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Tragedy Museum

October 8, 2013

The atrocities committed in Europe during World War II are well known except maybe in Iran where former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once claimed the Holocaust never happened.

However, recently Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, said the Holocaust did happen and what Ahmadinejad said in December 2005—and again on April 24, 2006; May 30, 2006; December 11, 2006; June 2009; September 2009; and September 2010—was taken out of context.

Regardless of Lame Brain Ahmadinejad, the Global Directory of Holocaust Museums tells us how widespread this knowledge is. It’s when we forget about history that we tend to repeat it.  Simon Wiesenthal said, “Freedom is not a gift from heaven … you must fight for it every day.”

Admitting the truth is the first step toward healing and avoiding similar tragedies again. “There is Chinese proverb which says you should use history as a mirror,” said Peng Qian, a former deputy mayor of Shantou.

The official Communist Party line is that Mao was 70 percent good and 30 percent bad—you may disagree with these ratios but don’t lose sight of the fact that the CCP admitted publicly that Mao was not perfect. And there is a museum in China that focuses on the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. This museum was built near the industrial port city of Shantou in the Guangdong district. Sources: Frum Forum, The Independent; the Washington Post, and on August 18, 2012 the South China Morning Post.

If you think the CCP is ignoring the Shantou museum, you would be wrong because on February 8, 2013, China’s national state-run news service reported that the museum keeps Cultural Revolution memories alive. The museum consists of outdoor and indoor exhibitions.

Xinhua said, “The indoor exhibition, housed in a three-story, traditional-style building that resembles the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, displays 1,100 historical photographs chiseled into granite slabs. Some of the exhibits show gruesome scenes where victims are tortured and humiliated, while others bear insults that persecutors used to describe their class enemies.”

This museum demonstrates how far China has come since Mao’s death in 1976. As China continues to open to the world like a flower, one day there may be a list of Cultural Revolution Museums spread across China to equal the Holocaust Museums of World War II.

In fact, the Voice of America reported that some accounts of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution have been published in the Chinese media, a sign of an increased willingness to revisit painful memories that are still very much alive for both victims and their tormenters.

Discover China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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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 latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

3 Comments | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Communism, history, human rights | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

A World of Cyber Spies & Crooks

September 12, 2013

The internet is a crowded battleground and no one is safe. On April 7, 2010, it was reported that the Yahoo email accounts of 10 Beijing-based foreign journalists and the IFJ’s Hong Kong-based coordinator were infiltrated. Source: Scoop

China is not the only player in the cyber-spy game. The German Police and Intelligence Agencies hired a company to create Trojans capable of capturing traffic from Skype and SSL, and the recording industry wants the right to hack into your computer and delete stolen MP3s.

After a Chinese fighter collided with an American surveillance plane in April 2001, Chinese hacker groups cyber-attacked American businesses causing millions of dollars in damage.

“The Carders“, cyber-criminals that specialize in using a sophisticated and automated process to steal information from credit cards, have made off with billions.

When the “Cult of the Dead Cow” gains access to a computer, they spy on you through your own webcam and microphone. Imagine what the “Dead Cows” see if that webcam is in your bedroom. Good thing they consider themselves “Dead”.

The American National Security Administration’s (NSA) Red Team is suspected of distributing malicious software across the web acting as illegal hackers, but they do it under the protection of the law.  In 2008, an elite U.S. Military Unit shut down a Saudi-CIA Website that was seen as a threat to US security. Source: CBS News

America’s NSA has the ability to listen to the phone calls of US citizens and capture e-mails, and the US is not alone because Britain’s NSA [the GCHQ] listens its citizen’s phone calls too. Source: Mother Jones

China isn’t alone on this battlefield where a mix of authoritarianism and anarchy wages war, so why does China get more than its share of media attention?

Discover China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

_______________

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 latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

About iLook China

China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

2 Comments | America, censorship, China, crime, government, human rights, media, politics, propaganda, United States | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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