The meaning of Democracy’s Freedoms and the Nature of the Western Media Beast – Part 1/5

July 9, 2012

China is often criticized for not offering the same freedoms of religion, the media, and expression that the United States offers its citizens.

However, no one seems to question what these freedoms mean and are they real? Do these freedoms put food on the table?  Do these freedoms pay the rent or mortgage? Do these freedoms provide jobs and financial security?

Many eligible Americans don’t vote and America’s next president will be decided by a few hundred people in the U.S. Electoral College, so why are these freedoms so important?

I subscribe to Poets and Writers magazine and a line in the March/April 2012 issue caught my attention.

Stephen Morison Jr. wrote a piece called Middle Eastern Rhythms. He interviewed several authors and poets in the middle east where these freedoms Americans take for granted do not exist.

Nourredin Zuhair, a traditional Arabic poet, said, “America was good because it encouraged individuality, but because of capitalism there is only one kind of individuality now… In the contemporary, globalized world, a new kind of censorship means you can never say democracy is bad.”

There is some truth in Zuhair’s words. We may have freedom from government interference in what we say or write, but we are not free from other critics and the special interest mobs that use the media to push political and/or religious agendas causing this form of globalized individuality that Zuhair talks of.

In fact, the so-called free media contributes the most toward the growth of this cloned globalized individual.

Ask someone what these freedoms mean and see what he or she says. Ask if it makes life better

Continued on July 10, 2012 in The meaning of Democracy’s Freedoms and the Nature of the Western Media Beast – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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.

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29 Comments | America, capitalism, China, Communism, democracy, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Reinventing China through Synergistic Cultural Innovation – Part 2/2

June 26, 2012

Through microblogging, there is a strong connection between Yang Lan and China’s next generation, since Sina.com owns Sina Weibo, a sort of Facebook-Twitter social network with more than 56% of China’s microblogging market. Sina Weibo adds 20 million new users monthly. Ten thousand are overseas Chinese in North America. It is estimated that the site has about three billion page views daily.

Yang Lan says, “My generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate in the historic transformation of China that has made so many changes in the past twenty to thirty years.”

In the video, she uses several examples of how microblogging is changing China. She says the public’s reaction shows a general distrust of government, which lacked transparency in the past. She explains how the younger generation, which calls itself a tribe of ants, is different. Most of this generation is well educated with a literacy rate better than 99% and 80% of city Chinese go to college.

In addition, social justice and government accountability is what these young people care most about, and the power of microblogging gets the word out — any accusation of corruption or backdoor dealings between authority or business arouses a social outcry and unrest.

“Fortunately,” Lang Yan says, “we see the government responding more timely and more frequently to the public’s concerns.” She closes her lecture with, “Our Younger generation is going to transform this country while at the same time being transformed themselves.”

Return to Reinventing China through Synergistic Cultural Innovation – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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.

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14 Comments | business, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese women, cultural differences, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Reinventing China through Synergistic Cultural Innovation – Part 1/2

June 25, 2012

In a recent post, Oprah Times Four in China, Yang Lan (born March 31, 1968—her father was a college professor and her mother an engineer) was quoted saying China’s younger generation was turning away from television and using the Internet for entertainment and information.

In fact, on Ted, where she lectured in July 2011, Yang Lang offered more insight into China’s next generation of young citizens and how they are changing China.

Forbes lists Yang Lan as one of China’s 100 richest worth $120 million. Forbes says she started out as a TV presenter for a popular variety show in 1990 and became one of China’s most recognized TV interviewers. Together with her husband, Wu Zheng, she launched a diversified company called Sun Television Cybernetworks; recently Sun took over Sina.com, China’s leading internet portal.

Yang Lan says China’s younger generation of citizens and leaders are urban, connected (via microblogs) and alert to injustice. The video embedded with Part Two is from her presentation on Ted. Although it is about 18 minutes long, it is worth the time if you want to learn where China is headed and what is powering the innovative cultural changes taking place.

Yang Lan says, “The traditional media [in China] is still heavily controlled by the government; social media offers an opening to let the steam out a little bit. But because you don’t have many other openings, the heat coming out of this opening is sometimes very strong, active and even violent.”

Continued on April 25, 2012 in Reinventing China through Synergistic Cultural Innovation – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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.

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Recognizing Good Deeds in China

June 11, 2012

In October 2011, when a young child was run over by a van in the Chinese city of Foshan in southeastern Guangdong province, many China critics leaped on that one isolated example in a country about the size of the US in area with more than four times the population to stereotype all Chinese as insensitive monsters. I wrote about the incident in Litigation Nation Virus Spreading West to East.

Now, in 2012, we have an example of heroism from a Chinese man in Guangzhou, China where he risked his life to save a Chinese toddler.

The UK’s Daily Mail reported, “Chinese toddler dangling over 40 foot drop plucked by rescuer who scaled side of building to save him.” The Daily Mail ran four photos of the incident, which clearly show the danger to the hero and the child (click on link to see dramatic photos).

My question is, “Will the same China critics that used the Foshan incident to crucify China and the Chinese for apathy spend the same amount of time and effort to laud this hero as a positive role model?”

In fact, this hero risked his life and did not act alone. The Daily Mail said, “Within minutes of the terrified toddler being spotted, a crowd had assembled at street level with a large yellow blanket at the ready to catch him if he fell.”

I suspect that most China critics will claim this was a fluke instead of giving credit where credit is due. However, there is evidence that others also are willing to risk life and limb. For example, in July 2011, Wu Juping, 31, saved a two-year-old girl that fell out of a 10th floor window and Juping suffered a broken arm for her act of heroism. Source: China Daily

The truth is that the Chinese are just as diverse as most people in the world. For example, a recent study of human nature revealed that it is normal (for most of humanity) to lie and cheat—not just the Chinese as many China critics claim.

In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves, Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University said, “Our behavior is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. On the other hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money as possible. Human behavior is the balance between those two forces.”  Source: The Daily Ticker at Yahoo Finance

Moreover, if dishonesty is part of human nature, it stands to reason that people will be subconciously dishonest when they demonize something they fear or do not understanding, which means critics will filter the facts to fit personal beliefs—known as Cherry Picking and turn to the Ad Hominem Fallacy to slander an entire nation. Source: Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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.

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Searching for Impurity – Part 3/3

May 23, 2012

On page 23, Worst Polluted.org reported, “Almost every country in the world has some kind of industrial estate, with Vietnam and Sri Lanka estimated to each have 50 to 60 industrial areas, and India and China reaching hundreds of industrial clusters…”

On page 32, the report said, “Studies in China have found that certain crops, such as corn, are particularly susceptible to lead accumulation when grown in close proximity to smelters.”

There was also a list of four countries at the top of page 32 on regions most impacted by lead pollution and lead smelting. China was in last place with seven sites impacting 158,100 people. The other three countries/areas totaled more than 1.8 million people impacted by this type of pollution.

On page 43, there was a picture of a lead-zinc mining facility in China.

On page 59, there was a picture of a chemical manufacturing plant in China.

That was it. In seventy-six pages, China was only mentioned five times. What a disappointment. I was expecting so much more considering the amount of criticism heaped on China by its enemies and critics.

One city in China was listed as the most polluted in the world in 2006. I wondered why it didn’t make the list for 2011.

Linfen, China is situated in China’s southern Shanxi province along the banks of the Fen River.  In 2010, this city had a population of about 4.3 million inhabitants.

Then in 2007, Times Magazine said that China was home to 20 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities, and said, “Only 1% of China’s 560 million urban residents breathe air that is deemed safe by European Union standards.”

However, it was tragic to learn that China is now leading the clean economy race. The Chinese government is “going for the gold” and “taking this challenge much more seriously than others … doing things differently, making longer-term, sustained commitments that are much larger,” wrote Andrew Winston in the Harvard Business Review. [ Harvard Business Review “China Leads the Clean Economy Race” Sept. 23, 2010 ]

China is investing about US$75 to $100 billion EACH year in clean energy for the 10 years between 2010 and 2020, according to the “country’s ten-year plan that made some jaws drop”. [ Harvard Business Review “China Leads the Clean Economy Race” Sept. 23, 2010 ]

China retained the top spot in 2010 as the world’s leading investor in low-carbon energy technology, according to a report by the US Pew Environment Group, which wrote that China’s “ascendance has been steady and steep … With aggressive clean energy targets and clear ambition to dominate clean energy manufacturing and power generation, China is rapidly moving ahead of the rest of the world.” [ Pew Environment Group report “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race 2010?”; BBC News “China tops global clean energy table” March 29, 2011 ]

On an end note, Worst Polluted.org mentioned the United States three times, Canada once and India twenty-three times. I didn’t check for any other countries on this report. As I finished posting this series, I realized that I could not score any points with China’s enemies and critics, since it was a country that many in the West love to hate. In addition, I suspect India is mostly ignored by these same people because it was a Western style democracy.

Return to Searching for Impurity – Part 2 or start with Part 1

For more on the topic of pollution, see The cause of China’s pollution or Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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.

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