Everyone Cannot Be Rich – Even in China

October 18, 2010

I read an interesting piece from the Inter Press Service. Antonaneta Becker writes of growing resentment in China of the widening gap between the rich and poor.

She mentions talk of a revolution to redistribute the wealth.

What Becker fails to mention is that in India the poverty and corruption is worse. The Economist for October 2 says, “that China has done a better job than India of curbing corruption…”

China isn’t alone when it comes to bribes and corruption.

Earlier this year in Thailand, unrest over corruption turned deadly resulting in cancelled flights from 40 countries.


In fact, a report in the Asian Journal of Public Administration says, “Corruption is a serious problem in many countries. Indeed, in many parts of the world, corruption has become a way life…”

Becker may not be aware that in 1949 when the Communists came to power, about a million wealthy landowners were executed and land was distributed among the poor. 

With the landowners gone, agriculture broke down resulting in famines that led to the deaths of about 30 million poor Chinese.

Becker is right about China’s central government fearing an uprising among the poor. 

However, rebellions of this nature have happened in China before and most have failed.  During the 19th century, those failures cost more than 30 million lives when the Qing Dynasty showed the world that they still had the mandate to rule.

The best solution is to see that the poor have a house and earn enough to buy food since the price of challenging the mandate to rule is often chaos, anarchy and death.  No one wins.

See Global Censorship and Corruption

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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

The Founding Fathers had it Right about the Death Penalty

September 27, 2010

Moans and groans abound in the West about the hidden numbers behind China’s death penalties. 

I’m often baffled how anyone who claims to be a caring person could fight to keep murderers, drug dealers, child molesters and rapists from getting a swift death penalty.

The Death Penalty Information Center says that when the Constitution was written, the time between sentencing and execution could be measured in days or weeks (as it is in China today).

Today, the typical death row inmate in America spends a decade awaiting execution. Some have been on death row for over 20 years. In California, keeping him or her alive that long would cost about one million and that does not include court costs. The only ones who win are the lawyers.

I read a post at error bank.com that offers concerns about the death penalty.

One issue raised was of innocent people found guilty in court then years or decades later, he or she is found innocent but by then it is too late. However, I’m sure more criminal types are executed than innocent victims. Many times, the so-called innocent victim was also a career criminal with a long arrest record.

As for the cost, Amnesty USA, while arguing against the death penalty, makes a case to return to the time of the U.S. Founding Fathers.

Amnesty said that in Kansas the cost of a death penalty case was 70% higher than the cost of comparable non-death penalty cases. 

However, Amnesty doesn’t mention that it costs more because of all the appeals that drag cases out for years.

The median cost for a death penalty case in Kansas was $1.26 million.

In Maryland, a death penalty case costs 3 times as much as Kansas, and in California, it costs $11.5 million for each case.

K.D. Koratsky touched on this topic in Living With Evolution. On page 182, he says this of career criminals, “Over time, by consistently eliminating those who could not get along with others, populations were eventually left largely with the genes that promoted non-kin biocultural coevolution. … nations with the strict codes of law enforced by strong state apparatuses (like China) tended to prosper over others, all else being equal.”

Although a few innocents might die, China may be getting it right be ridding its population of serious criminal types who reproduce leading to more violent crimes by his or her progeny.

Murder of “innocent” people is cruel and inhuman!

Rape is cruel and inhuman!

Child molesters are cruel and inhuman!

Selling hard, illegal drugs for profit is cruel and inhuman!

Destroying lives for profit is also cruel and inhuman!

See Cultural Differences and China’s Changing Legal System

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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

Cultural Differences and China’s Changing Laws

September 27, 2010

A colleague and friend sent me a link to a post about a Chinese blind activist lawyer released from prison. Isolda Morillo, for the Associated Press, wrote the post that appeared on CBS.com.

Chen Guangcheng was the blind lawyer. In 2006, he was sent to jail after documenting forced late-term abortions and sterilizations and other abuses in his rural east China community.

Morillo wrote that Guangcheng was an “inspirational figure to others in China”.

According to the AP reporter, Guangcheng is under house arrest and, along with his family, is watched closely.  The piece points out how horrible he was treated by Chinese authorities.

One fact stood out, “He expanded his activism after hearing complaints from people living in nearby villages that family planning officials were forcing women to have late-term abortions and sterilizations to enforce the government’s one-child policy.”

I’m sure there will be people who will see me supporting China’s government when I do not condemn China for how Guangcheng was treated.

With more than 1.3 billion people and only 16% of the land capable of growing food crops and a looming shortage of fresh water, China is facing a possible melt down in a few decades that could dismantle all the progress made since the 1982 Constitution.

To understand China better, it would help to learn that China’s legal system is reinventing itself.

Up until 1911 when the Qing Dynasty collapsed, Chinese law leaned heavily toward Legalism influenced by Confucianism.

Near the end of the Qing Dynasty, efforts were made to reform the law by mainly importing German codes with slight modifications.

After 1911, the Nationalists continued this effort. When Mao and the Communists came to power in 1949, the ranks of intellectuals and legal professionals was devastated during the purges. A Soviet-style legal system was then adopted but that system suffered due to political turmoil that ended with the Cultural Revolution.

It wouldn’t be until 1982, that the idea of individual rights would reemerge as a signify influence on Chinese Law. Even then, business law developed much faster than civil law, which is the laws of a state or nation that deals with the rights of private citizens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEkWrW9Po58

In an interview with James Zimmerman, about China’s Changing Legal System, Megan Rhodes wrote, “China is transforming its legal system at an amazing rate.” 

When Rhodes asked Zimmerman if foreign law has influenced Chinese law, he answered “Yes, absolutely.”

At the end of the interview, Zimmerman says, “China is going through remarkable times, and should be proud of its ongoing judicial and legislative reforms. It has developed—and continues to develop—a legal system from scratch in just over 30 years.”

American law also evolved and reading Law and History: The Evolution of the American Legal System might give you a better understanding of what is going on in China. 

In 1783, America signed a peace treaty with the British Empire and the U.S. officially became a nation state. However, slavery wouldn’t be abolished for eighty-two years in 1865, after the bloody American Civil War.

In addition, women in America even after the Civil War, were still second-class citizens. Source: Women’s history in America

Forms of child labor, including indentured servitude and child slavery, have existed throughout American History. In fact, it wasn’t until 1938 that the US had, for the first time, Federal regulations for minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children. Source: Child Labor in U.S. History

Then Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

China has had about thirty years to change since 1982 while America took 182 years to cover the same ground. However, there may be another reason why the American media and so many Americans condemn China so often, and that can be explained by the history of Discrimination Against the Chinese in America. Maybe that discrimination is not dead yet.

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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

Journalists and Jail Time

September 22, 2010

China isn’t the only country where reporters go to jail.

In September 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that two Chronicle reporters were sent to prison for as long as a year and a half for not revealing their sources.

In July 2005, Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist, who worked for the New York Times at the time, was jailed for contempt of court for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury.

In fact, the First Amendment Center has a list of U.S. reporters who have gone to jail. 

The first case was in 1848 when a Senate committee confined John Nugent, a correspondent for the New York Herald.


An example of how one law is different around the world.

Then between 1848 and 1897, there were five more cases.

Starting in 1911 and through the 20th century, the “free” press in America had more than 30 collisions with the law.  

I stopped counting at thirty.

When I started to research the China side of this topic, I learned that Yahoo’s Hong Kong office helped China catch journalist Shi Tao for “divulging state secrets”.  Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Source: BBC

In fact, The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that in 2008, 125 journalists went to prison around the globe. Twenty-eight were in China.

 China’s laws and sentences tend to be longer and harsher, but China does not have America’s legal system or Constitution, which were designed to protect American citizens from the government and criminals in the U.S. – not China.

Every country has different penalties for crimes.  For example, what is the worst that could happen if you were caught in Turkey with illegal drugs?  Up to 20 years in prison.

However, in Singapore and Thailand, there is a death penalty for this crime. Source: Drug laws abroad

See Growing China’s Legal System

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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, crime, cultural differences, legal system | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Global Censorship and Corruption

September 21, 2010

Gordon Ross at Global Geopolitics & Political Economy reports that in spite of “overwhelming obstacles” in China, a few courageous reporters are exposing official corruption and criminal behavior and it is dangerous.

Why doesn’t Ross’s piece mention that there are crime fighters in China like Bo Xilai, who may be China’s number one crime fighter?

Bo’s much-publicized crackdown on gangsters in Chongqing resulted in the arrest and conviction of thousands of gangsters, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Source: The Diplomat.com

How about crime and corruption in America?  UCLA Professor of Public Affairs Mark Kleiman is “angry about having too much crime and an intolerable number of people behind bars.”

The United States is home to five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, yet, says Kleiman, our high incarceration rate isn’t making us safer. Source: Reason.com

Threats and fear or reprisals and lawsuits in the U.S. have put witnesses, police, reporters and whistle blowers in danger.

For example, Serpico, the true story of an honest New York cop who blew the whistle on rampant corruption in the force only to have his comrades turn on him.

Being a witness in the United States can also be dangerous, which is why the U.S. Government has the United States Federal Witness Protection Program.

Due to many of the same problems China faces today, America also has the U.S. Department of Labor Whistleblower Protection Program.

Then Serendipity says that censorship exists to some extent in all modern countries, including the U.S.A., the U.K., Germany, France, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

Crime and corruption is a global problem and is not exclusive to 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.

Leave a Comment » | America, China, crime, legal system, media | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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