Enough, Already!

December 2, 2010

Christopher Bodeen of the Associated Press reported that a Chinese father was punished for food safety activism.

The AP wasn’t the only Western media to go ballistic with this story.

Amnesty International jumped in along with BBC News, Forbes, and CBS News among others. 

In the West, this type of story sells newspapers and boosts ratings for the five and ten o’clock news.

Be assured, this story will be “milked” for all it is worth.

The father of a three-year old child that was sickened by melamine-tainted milk, Zhao Lianhai, was convicted and sentenced Wednesday to 2 1/2 years in prison for inciting social disorder (in China), his lawyer said.

Bodeen’s lead in the AP piece was a masterpiece to appeal to Western anger. “A father who organized a support group for other parents whose children were sickened in one of China’s worst food safety scandals was convicted and sentenced…”

However, if you grew up in a Western culture and are capable of not seeing red, I suggest you read the rest of Bodeen’s piece before you start shouting. 

It also helps to understand how the Mandate of Heaven has affected Chinese civilization for more than two thousand years. Chinese history is filled with bloody rebellions and insurrections that were allowed to get out of hand.

In China, it is often better to make a mistake by throwing someone in jail than risking another Cultural Revolution or Taiping Rebellion where an estimated fifty million died.

What the government did sounds more like “Enough Already!”  The guy just wouldn’t get the hint and had to be hit upside the head.

After all, the event happened in 2008. Lianhai has had almost three years to protest before the government sent him to jail to shut him up.
 
In fact, there was a trial for the people behind the tainted milk and justice was served.
 
Three people got the death penalty.
 
The general manager and chair woman of Sanlu, the company at the heart of the scandal, was given a life sentence.
 

Dozens of officials, dairy executives and farmers were punished for allowing the contamination to take place.

When this type of tainted food scandal happens in the US, few go to prison and sometimes there is no justice even in court.

What China should do is free Linahai and send him and his family to the US where he can protest all he wants about tainted American food.

In fact, we need Linahai here.

Sarah Francis at MomsRising.org says that each year in the U.S., more than 76 million people get sick and more than 5,000 die from food-borne diseases.

The problem is that there are so many people protesting in the US, few listen unless you belong to the Tea Party.

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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, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese food, cultural differences, food, legal system, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Internet Security in China

November 24, 2010

We must be careful not to allow the “free” Western media, which often practices the exaggerations of Yellow Journalism to gain a larger audience share, to turn us into virtual on-line paranoid freaks.

In fact, Americans seldom hear that other nations around the globe also have the same challenges with Internet Security as the US does.

The following newscast from CCTV proves that we are not alone. The Chinese also suffer from virtual viruses and crimes.

It doesn’t take a government-funded agency to create a virus or other Internet threats. Any hacker may do so, and China Internet Watch reported 420 million Chinese Internet users on-line in 2010.

China has a National Computer Network Emergency Response Center. In 2009, the Center said, “Internet security cases have been on the rise in recent years posing severe challenges to information safety (in China).

“Hackers can profit from renting or selling computer information.… This crime has caused over 4.5 billion yuan in losses.”

The Center says, “The number of viruses and assaults launched by hackers number in the tens of thousands and the number of attacks is rising by one-third each year.”

The Ministry of Public Security and State Information Center has launched an exclusive campaign to protect Internet security.

For example, in December 2009, China found eleven guilty in a virus case and sent the defendants to jail for up to three years for their role in creating on-line viruses in east China. This on-line gang reportedly made illegal gains of 646,000 yuan or about 94,600 US dollars.

It was reported that 80 people across China were involved in this crime and more trials were expected.

Learn more from Tom Carter about Crime in 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.

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

Death by Execution or Murder

November 23, 2010

The Huffington Post and other media reported that Ambassador Mark Sedwill, NATO’s Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan, said that youngsters living in Afghan’s capital probably are safer than in other big cities like London or New York.

The knee jerk reaction of the virtual mob judged Sedwill wrong without evidence.

However, he was right!

Between 2001 to June of 2010, direct deaths of “all” civilians killed in Afghanistan as a result of insurgent actions was estimated to be 4,949 to 6,499 or an average of 550 to 722 a year.

In the US, total murders 2001 to 2009 were 137,840 people. Forcible rape was about a million. Aggravated assault was about eight million. Source: FBI

About 260,000 children die globally each year in motor vehicle collisions and ten million are injured. That’s more than all the roadside and suicide bombings in both Iraq and Afghanistan since the wars started.

In the US, Child Help reported that 10,432 children died from abuse 2001 to 2007 and over 3 million reports of child abuse are made annually.

That leads me to the Western mob’s criticism of China’s convicted criminal execution rate.

Amnesty International estimated that 1,718 executions took place in 2008 in China.

The big difference is that most people executed in China at least get a trial and a chance to prove innocence before death. In a motor vehicle collision, murder or child abuse, the innocent victim has no chance.

It is wrong that criminals serving life sentences in the US without a chance for parole or execution cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

KPBS did a special on The Cost of Life in Prison. For 2,600 serving life sentences in California, the projected cost was about $6.4 billion.

Criminal Justice says, 140,610 people are serving life sentences in the U.S. and more than 40,000 are serving life without parole.

China’s justice system is doing the right thing. China has executed convicted child molesters. Source: Dream Catchers for Abused Children

Discover The Founding Fathers had it Right about the Death Penalty

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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 | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese police, crime, cultural differences, family values, legal system, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Tiger Woods smiles big while golfing in China

November 21, 2010

Lisa Mason shows a gallery of photos of Tiger Woods smiling big at the WGC-HSBC Champions at Sheshan International Gold Club in Shanghai, China on November 3, 2010.

She says, “He looks truly happy in these photos. Maybe he is finding some happiness again.”

China is building golf courses and China’s growing middle class is taking up golf.

The Golf Travel Gurusays that Hainan Island in the South China Sea is China’s answer to Hawaii and is one of Asia’s finest golfing destinations, with several world-class courses.

Golf Todaysays the first thing one notices about golf in China – after marveling at the game’s sudden popularity – is how many players seem to have decent swings.

In fact, Golf Today says, golf is the latest fashion in Beijing and it is estimated there are 100,000 golfers in China.  “The number should double in five years,” T. K. Pen, a Taiwanese-American investor says.

Meanwhile, officials in China are being careful. Golf Today says there are so manygolf courses in China the government is losing count.

Golf courses take up a lot of land. With more than 1.3 billion people to feed, the central government has declared a moratorium on course construction.

However, Slate says, “Almost all of the nation’s 600 or so completed golf courses are illegal in some way.”

Since China grows food on about 10% of its land, turning croplands into golf courses may not be the best way to make a profit.

Discover the Winemaker from Shanxi Province to learn how others are using farmland in China.

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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 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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Hong Kong Triads

November 19, 2010

After China lost the first Opium War, started by Britain and France, Hong Kong was awarded to the British in January 1841.

Soon after the British established Hong Kong as a colony, the number of Triad members grew considerably.

In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion even had allies among some of the Hong Kong Triads.

Britain returned Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997.

Today, Hong Kong, like Macao, is a Special Administrative Region and Hong Kong basic law runs the region instead of the law of the People’s Republic of China.

Beijing calls it the most democratic legal system in the PRC. Pro-democracy activists say it is not democratic enough.

As in Macao, the Chinese Triads have been very active for more than a century.

In fact, when China fell to the Chinese Communists in 1949, hordes of Shanghai triads fled for their lives to Hong Kong, establishing the British colony as the world headquarters of Chinese organized crime. Source: Partners in Crime

Chinese Triads have members in nearly every country in the world and are especially strong in China, Southeast Asia, and the United States.

In the early 1980s, when China opened to global trade, the Triads started to return to the mainland.

Triad criminal activity includes but is not limited to street-level crime such as gambling, extortion and prostitution, and international activities such as narcotics trafficking, counterfeiting and smuggling goods and people.

It is estimated that there are 50 Triad societies in Hong Kong with a total membership of about 80,000.

Of these societies, about fifteen are criminally active… Sun Yee On is the largest Triad in Hong Kong with an estimated 25,000 members. In addition to criminal activities in Hong Kong, intelligence reports since 1994 indicate Triads dominate the government of Guangdong Province on the mainland. Source: Illuminated Lantern.com

Learn more about organized crime in Macao

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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

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