What is the Real Cause of Most Riots?

December 9, 2015

When the Western media reports that a riot happened in China don’t mistake this unrest as a demand for a Western style democracy as the media did when the Tiananmen Square protests took place in 1989. Just because a few young people were captured on camera in China saying they want a democracy doesn’t mean the majority of Chinese do.

For example, CNN reported a June 10, 2011 riot in Xintang located in southern China.  Witnesses and media reports said local officials beat up a pregnant migrant worker and her husband, pushing the woman to the ground. Mass protests ensued, quickly spiraling to violent clashes with government forces that spread to other parts of Xintang, a city of 400,000 residents, almost half of them migrant workers.

The result was the arrest of 19 men, which included nine teenagers.

If you read the CNN report, you’ll discover that a slowdown in economic growth (caused by the 2008 global financial crises, which started in the U.S. due to greed and lax laws) in China caused social tensions between rural versus urban, ethnic minority against majority, and haves versus have-nots, which caused several riots in different areas of China.

The same thing happened in 1947 when General (and dictator) Chiang Kai-shek ordered his army to quell a riot in Taiwan. The result was the 2/28 Massacre in Taiwan where 30,000 civilians were killed by the military.

The reasons for riots around the world seldom have to do with a demand for a Western style democracy. Even in the Middle East where there have been riots and calls for democracy, according to the Western media, most of the people involved don’t know what a democracy is or how to set one up. They just want some form of social justice.

In 1992, in Los Angeles, there was the Rodney King riot caused by ethnic strife, which ended with about $1 billion in property damages in addition to 53 people killed and thousands injured. The U.S. Marines and Army had to be called in to regain control and there were shootings between the military and civilians.

In Oakland, California there were several riots caused by the 2009 killing of an unarmed black man that took place at a BART station.  Hundreds took to the streets to protest while looters broke into stores and set cars on fire.

In 2001, England had riots in three cities due to tensions in the South Asian Islamic community. It was estimated that the riot in Bradford, England involved about a thousand youths and eventually it took a thousand police to end it.

A 2011, a riot in Vancouver erupted after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup.  After the game, many teenagers went on a rampage attempting to shatter windows and loot stores.  When one man tried to stop them, he was jumped by no fewer than 15 people, who beat and kicked him until he was left a bloodied heap on the ground.

Wikipedia lists many of the reasons for riots, which may stem from the unlawful use of force by a group of police against civilians, prison riots, race riots, religious riots, student riots, urban riots, sports riots, and food/bread riots that have taken place all over the world no matter what form of government a country has.

However, when the Western media reports about riots in China, it’s almost always mentioned that China’s central government is challenged to prevent widespread grievances from taking place as if riots in China are different than riots in other countries.

According to the history of riots, this challenge of an unruly civilian population is a problem all governments eventually face and the job of governments the world over is to end the killing and damage as soon as possible by whatever means to restore order.

______________________________

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 lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

#1 - Joanna Daneman review posted June 19 2014

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What’s the color of your flag? Part 2 of 2

October 28, 2015

Ai Weiwei was warned by representatives of the lawful government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to stop his illegal activities (according to Chinese law).

In such cases, it is common to receive an invitation to tea, which may not be refused, where the person responsible for what is considered counter-revolutionary activities (or another crime against the state) is told to stop or face the full might of China’s law.  China is not like Hitler’s Germany where the Gestapo showed up without warning and carried citizens off to be roasted or gassed by the millions.

The facts speak for themselves. Ai Weiwei refused to cooperate, and he violated Chinese law, and he was locked up in 2011, but he isn’t locked up now because he was released the same year.

CNN doesn’t mention Ai Weiwei was alleged to have been in violation of the 1982 Chinese Constitution, which says in Article 28, “The state maintains public order and suppresses treasonable and other counter-revolutionary activities; it penalizes actions that endanger public security and disrupt the socialist economy and other criminal activities, and punishes and reforms criminals.”


US Marines Marching

The PRC did not hiding anything except where Ai Weiwei was locked up and the details behind his crime. Even in the US, the authorities are often denied the right to talk about an alleged criminal and the facts behind a legal case to the press.

I’ve read in the past where some Western critics say that Chinese law is difficult to interpret and has loopholes that the PRC may use to the Party’s advantage.

Since when was any law in any country easy to understand?  If you aren’t an American lawyer, how easy is if to understand the U.S. legal system, and doesn’t the U.S. have loopholes that the wealthy and corporations take advantage of not to pay taxes in America? In fact, President Ronald Reagan didn’t pay any tax one year, and he said loopholes in the law allowed it.

Compare the language of the 1982 Chinese Constitution to the U.S. Constitution and anyone can see the differences.

In addition, Article 53 of the Chinese Constitution says, “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China must abide by the constitution and the law, keep state secrets, protect public property and observe labour discipline and public order and respect social ethics.”


PRC Troops and Flag Ceremony

An amendment to Article 13 was revised to say, “Citizens’ lawful private property is inviolable” and “The State, in accordance with law, protects the rights of citizens to private property and to its inheritance” and “The State may, in the public interest and in accordance with law, expropriate or requisition private property for its use and shall make compensation for the private property expropriated or requisitioned.”

In fact, nowhere in the CNN piece does it explain that no one owns land or houses in China as they do in the U.S. It’s more like a lease with the right to pass that property on to someone else in the family after death.

What happens in the U.S. if the property tax isn’t paid? Does anyone really own the house and land they live on?

China’s flag isn’t red, white and blue. Instead, it is red and gold.

The red of the Chinese flag symbolizes the communist revolution, and it’s also the traditional color of the people. The large gold star represents communism, while the four smaller stars represent the social classes of the people. In addition, the five stars together reflect the importance placed on the number five in Chinese thought and history. Source: World Atlas

Maybe Ai Weiwei forgot which flag flies over his country or is he color blind?

Return to or start with Part 1

______________________________

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 lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

IMAGE with Blurbs and Awards to use on Twitter

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China versus the U.S. when it comes to Women in Positions of Power

September 29, 2015

According to Forbes.com, Canada is the best country in the world to be a woman, and India is the worst.  The U.S. was ranked #6 of the twenty countries surveyed. The members of the G20 are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union.

Starting with the I Ching, The Book of Changes, almost five thousand years ago, the central focus of Chinese philosophy has been how to live an ideal life and how best to organize society.

When the Communist Party of China gained power in 1949, previous schools of Chinese philosophy, except Legalism, were denounced as backward and purged during the Great Leap Forward and during the insanity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Most Chinese think that true advancement and growth should only happen slowly, at a steady, measured pace, which means to grow but grow slow like an oak tree while following a well thought out plan to bring about change.

Even the United States doesn’t change that fast.

In fact, it took almost ninety years to free the slaves, and women first sought the right to vote in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention. Then seventy-two years later in 1920, American women finally earned the right to vote when the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted by Congress and was ratified by the states becoming a national law.

Global map showing womens rights

The last time women had relative freedom in China was in the seventh century during the Tang Dynasty when Emperor Wu Zetian, a woman, ruled the country.

Since 1982, when China ratified its Constitution, women in China have gained more freedom, power and rights than at any other time in China’s history including the Tang Dynasty when Wu Zetian ruled as the only female emperor in China’s history.

Anyone that does not consider this progress is stupid, blind and deaf.

Critics in the West have pointed out that under the Communists, no woman has ruled China, and I’d counter that no woman has ever ruled the United States—yet.

In 2013 Lin Yandong, a senior Party official responsible for winning over non-Communists, was elected Vice Primer of China, one of the country’s senor leaders. She’s now one of China’s four vice premiers making her not only the most powerful woman in China, but also one of the most powerful in the world. She is one of two women in China’s 25-member Politburo. The other woman is Sun Chunlan.

Chinese women’s participation in politics has grown since 1982. For instance, in 1952 only 12% of China’s National Congress (NPCC) was women. In 2014, of the 2,959 seats in the NPCC, more than 23% of the seats (699) were held by women compared to about 19% in the United States Congress. Out of 190 countries, China is ranked #58 versus the U.S. that’s ranked #76. – Women in national parliaments

“Chinese women leaders have much in common. They generally all have a good education background, being mainly science majors, and solid experience in government. They are of a caliber equal to that of their male counterparts,” an All-China Women’s Federation expert said. For the United States, I’m thinking of Sarah Palin—enough said.

If you hear anyone demanding faster change in China, be cautious. After all, China seems to be moving faster than the United States when it comes to women holding positions of power.

Why do so many of China’s critics in the West expect China to move faster than the United States?

______________________________

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 lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

#1 - Joanna Daneman review posted June 19 2014

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Who has the bloodiest hands—China, the United States or India?

September 2, 2015

Back in 2006, China was crucified in the Western media due to one unarmed Tibetan being shot dead attempting to illegally cross the border into India. It was called the Nangpa La Pass Shooting Incident. If you Google it, you’ll find a lot of anger and allegations about what happened.

USA Today reported, “China said Thursday that soldiers posted near its border with Nepal clashed with some 70 people attempting to flee the country, killing one person on the spot and injuring two others, including one who died later of altitude sickness.” io9.com says, “Altitude sickness is relatively unstudied because of how quickly and unpredictably it goes from nausea to coughing up blood to death.”

Another headline shouted: “International Anger Grows Over Tibet Shooting. Human Rights groups are calling for a UN Investigation into the killing of a nun by Chinese border patrol guards, writes Jonathan Watts in Beijing.”

Then I read another story I’d never heard of before that the U.S. media has ignored.  I read this in The Economist, a publication in the UK, of another border where similar killings happen often, but I couldn’t find any demand of a UN Investigation in the Western media or from human rights groups for those killings. Even The Economist, that reported the story, didn’t call for an investigation.

Maybe the difference is that the border killings reported by The Economist took place between two democracies—India and Bangladesh. After all democracies are special, aren’t they?


I couldn’t find a report of this India-Bangladesh incident in English on YouTube

The Economist reported, “On January 7th India’s Border Security Force (BSF) shot dead Mr. Nur Islam’s 15-year-old (daughter) Felani, at an illegal crossing into Bangladesh from the Indian state of West Bengal. Felani’s body hung from the barbed-wired fence for five hours. Then the Indians took her down, tied her hands and feet to a bamboo pole, and carried her away. Her body was handed over the next day and buried in the yard at home.”

“The BSF (India’s Border Security Force) kills with such impunity along India’s 4,100-kilometer (2,550-mile) border with Bangladesh that one local journalist wonders what the story is about. According to Human Rights Watch, India’s force has killed almost 1,000 Bangladeshis over the past ten years.”

Should we conclude from this that the one Tibetan killed attempting to illegally cross China’s border is worth more than the 1,000 who were shot dead attempting to illegally cross the border from Bangladesh to India?

What about deaths along the US border?

According to Rodolfo Acuña, Professor Emeritus of Chicano Studies at California State University, “Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported 117 cases of human rights abuses by US officials against migrants from 1988 to 1990, including fourteen deaths. During the 1980s, Border Patrol agents shot dozens of people, killing eleven and permanently disabling ten.”

On May 28, 2010, Anastasio Rojas, a 42-year-old Mexican migrant worker, was tased and beaten at the San Ysidro border crossing by more than a dozen U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. According to the witnesses, he was face down on the ground and handcuffed.

On June 2010, a 15-year-old Mexican citizen was shot to death on the Mexican side of the border near El Paso, Texas. The U.S Border Patrol reported that the officers responded to a group of suspected illegal immigrants who were throwing rocks at them.

Hey, China, did you get that? China’s border guards are not allowed to shoot anyone who is illegally crossing its borders, but the United States and India can kill as many as they want—sort of like the fictional character James Bond, who has a license to kill from another democracy.

______________________________

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 lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

IMAGE with Blurbs and Awards to use on Twitter

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Korean War POWs compared to America’s Illegal Wars in Laos and Cambodia

August 5, 2015

Chinese history shows that since the time of Qin Shi Huangdi, China’s first emperor (221 – 207 B.C.), the standard practice in war was to execute POWs because they were a burden that might lead to defeat.  An army that doesn’t have to feed and guard POWs is more effective at fighting and winning.  Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan knew this fact too.

Some time ago I watched a documentary on the Korean War that mentioned that 87% of United Nations (U.N.) troops captured by the People’s Liberation Army or North Korean troops during the war died in captivity, but it doesn’t explain how they died.

In fact, while there was strong evidence that North Korean Troops executed U.N. POWs, the Chinese rarely executed prisoners like their North Korean counterparts did. Instead, mass starvation and diseases swept through the Chinese POW camps during the winter of 1950-51. “About 43 percent of all U.S. POWs died during this period.” The Chinese defended what happened because Chinese troops during this period also suffered mass starvation and diseases due to an incompetent logistics supply system. Even the civilian population behind the Communist lines didn’t have enough to eat. – wikipedia.org

Surviving U.N. POWs, however, have disagreed with this claim. Click on the previous link to see what the POWs had to say.

Even though the Wiki piece claims “both the Communists and United Nations forces were committed to the terms of the 1949 Geneva Conventions III, regarding the treatment of POWs,” China didn’t join the United Nations until October 25, 1971 — twenty years later, and North Korea wouldn’t become a member of the U.N. until September 1991.

The International Treaties on the Laws of War written in Geneva and the Hague in 1938 by the League of Nations was meant for the “Protection of Civilian Populations Against Bombing from the Air in Case of War,” but during World War II, the US Air Force killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Germany and Japan. Many of the bombs dropped were napalm (jellied gasoline) and the innocent along with enemy troops were roasted alive and that included the elderly, women and children.

In addition, the Geneva Convention for the treatment of Prisoners of War was written in 1949, the same year the Chinese Communists won the Civil War in China, but the U.S. had been an ally of the Nationalist Chinese since well before World War II and protected Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in Taiwan after 1949 in spite of the fact that Chiang Kai-shek was a brutal dictator who ruled Taiwan with martial law and was responsible for the killing of more than thirty-thousand civilians in 1947 in the 2/28 Massacre in Taiwan.

While the behavior of Chinese and North Korean troops when it came to POW’s was unacceptable by Western humanitarian written standards, US forces are just as guilty when it comes to killing innocent civilians. It is estimated that the US killed between 1.5 and 3.6 million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (note that the US bombings in Laos and Cambodia were illegal and were not approved by the U.S. Congress), and left behind a horrible legacy due to the use of Agent Orange.

“Not only did Nixon and Kissinger not seek the necessary approval from Congress to bomb Cambodia, (and Laos 1962-1969) they tried to conceal the bombing not only from the American public but Congress as well.” – Third World Traveler

In conclusion, written agreements seldom are practiced in war, and it is obvious these agreements do not save innocent lives. To learn more about the illegal US bombing in Laos, read National Geographic Magazine’s recent Life After the Bombs. “The total weight of the bombs dropped was many times greater than the weight of the people living in Laos, which at the time had a population of perhaps two million. It worked out to as much as a ton of bombs per person. … The bombs didn’t distinguish between communists and anticommunists any more than they distinguished between soldiers and children.”

______________________________

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 lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

IMAGE with Blurbs and Awards to use on Twitter

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