Lovell’s reason for writing this book was to “see whether things really were as black and white as the Chinese textbooks seem to say it was.”
“Seem!” Doesn’t Lovell know what the Chinese textbooks say?
If you check to see who runs ACN Newswire, you will discover it is an associate company of Japan Corporation News K.K., which may mean nothing or everything when it comes to a nonfiction book that aims to make the Chinese look as guilty as the British regarding the Opium Wars.
Julia Lovell says, “It wasn’t a clear-cut story of innocent Chinese on the one hand, and the British invaders on the other.”
British author Julia Lovell talks about writing her book.
“But even if you look at the time, what’s going on during the time of the war itself, the Chinese are supplying the British, they are navigating for the British, they are spying for the British, for a fee of course, so there is an extraordinary pragmatism,” Lovell says in the ACN Newswire press release. “They don’t necessarily feel the loyalty to the idea of the Chinese imperial centre or the emperor or anything else, they will go with where the smart money is. And the British couldn’t have won the war without this assistance.”
There are two key phrases of Lovell’s proving her theory is more complicated than she makes it sound. The first phrase says, “for a fee of course” and the second, “They didn’t necessarily feel loyalty to the idea of the Chinese imperial center or the emperor or anything else…”
In fact, little is “clear-cut” about the Opium Wars. Since the Qing Dynasty was not ruled by the Han Chinese(which represents 90% of the population), but was ruled by a brutal Manchuminority, many Han Chinese probably felt little or no loyalty to the Qing emperor.
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.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
If you read Part 1 of this two part series, you may be thinking it isn’t safe to eat in China.
However, Wall Street Journal.com says, “Struggles with food safety are not a specifically Chinese problem. Many countries, including the U.S. and Japan, have gone through similar growing pains in the food industry, says Wu Ming, a professor at Beijing University’s school of public health.”
Professor Ming is correct. Down to Earth.org reports, “Every day in the US about 200,000 people become sick, 900 are hospitalized and 14 die (that’s more than 5,000 annually) due to food borne illnesses (and few if any are punished for these deaths). According to the Center for Disease Control, about one quarter of the American population suffers from food poisoning each year.”
New U.S. Laws for food safety cover all food except meat, poultry and some egg products and there are other exceptions too.
If you believe China is not doing anything about food safety, think again. I Googled total arrests in China over food safety and the result was more than 1.5 million hits. The first one mentioned 191 officials (in 2010 — meaning government employees) that were punished for failing to do their duty in food safety,” and some were sent to prison.
The second hit mentioned 774 (in 2007) arrested in China over food safety.
Helena Bottemiller of Food Safety News.com recently reported, “Current statutes (in the U.S.) do not provide sufficient criminal sanctions for those who knowingly violate our food safety laws,” said Leahy, who has become an outspoken advocate of food safety reform. “Knowingly distributing adulterated food is merely a misdemeanor right now, and the Sentencing Commission has found that it generally does not result in jail time.”
In conclusion, if you are in the food industry in China and want to take short cuts regarding food safety to boost profits while possibly killing people along the way, the U.S. is a safer place to commit murder. In China, you might go to jail or even be executed.
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.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
This is how capitalism works. Wall Street Journal.com reports, “Ink, dye, bleach and toxic chemicals … have been found recently in food products in China, reigniting fears over food safety despite repeated government pledges to crack down on tainted eats.”
Sounds bad, but do not judge the Chinese before reading this entire two part series to find out that China is not alone in the struggle to make food safer to eat.
It isn’t as if China’s government is not trying to improve food safety. Al-Jazeera’s Melissa Chang reports from Beijing about China’s government vowing to improve food safety laws. In fact, according to Melissa Chang, more than 2,000 people across the country have been arrested for failing to meet food safety standards.
The Wall Street Journal says, “One of the biggest issues is the drive to make a buck at any cost, says Lester Ross, a Beijing-based attorney with U.S. law firm WilmerHale. Some companies see that by using additives, they can cut overhead costs or boost profit margins, and they merely aren’t thinking about the affects the additives will have on consumers, Mr. Ross says.”
Melissa Chang demonstrates how a chemical sauce to turn meats such as pork into beef can change any meat that isn’t beef into beef so the enterprising capitalist can charge more and increase profits.
Since living in China means awareness of such trickery, “Many Chinese,” Chang says, “pay a premium to know exactly where the food they eat comes from.”
Chang then talks about an organic food cooperative in the suburbs of Beijing, which was established by families to buy directly from organic farmers and the project has proven to be very successful.
However, Chang says, “Even the best intentions (may) go awry.” Organic in China doesn’t mean the food would qualify as organic outside China since so much of the air and water is polluted there. It is a challenge to grow quality produce.
“Achieving better standards will take years,” Chang says.
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.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
The Diary of a Wimpy Catholic gives a brief history of London Riots, and what he says may be applied to most countries, even China, which has more to do with anarchy and chaos than a desire to have a multi-party democracy.
The London “unrest” flared on Saturday, August 7, 2011 and the latest headline (as I’m writing this post) says, “London under siege as violence spreads across UK. Ugly scenes of violence, rioting and looting have spread across the length and breadth of London and beyond since trouble began three days ago.”
This latest “unrest” in England started in the low-income, multiethnic district of Tottenham where many are unemployed. By August 9, sixteen thousand police had been deployed on the streets of London, and Prime Minster David Cameron said, “People should be in no doubt that we will do everything necessary to restore order to Britain’s streets and to make them safe for the law-abiding.” Source: Yahoo.com
The correct way to handle this sort of “unrest” may be how quickly the US ended the Rodney King Riots of 1992 in Los Angeles, which started on Wednesday, April 29, 1992 and officially ended on May 4 — six days later.
On the second day, the state’s governor sent in 2,000 California National Guard troops.
On the fourth day, President H. W. Bush ordered 4,000 heavily armed US Marines and Army troops to quell the riots, martial law was declared, roadblocks were set up and there were firefights between the military and the looting rioters that were setting fire to the city.
Although LA’s Mayor Bradley lifted the curfew on May 4, signaling the official end of the riots, sporadic violence and crime continued for days afterward. Federal troops did not stand down until May 9, and the National Guard remained until May 14 with some troops staying as late as May 27
The LA riots caused more than $1 billion in damage and saw 53 people killed and thousands injured.
“Contrary to what has become conventional wisdom outside China, the protesters were not demanding Western style politics and an end to Communist Party Rule.”Source:BBC DocumentaryProduced and Directed by Rob Coldstream(2009), which I wrote about on this Blog June 30, 2010 asChina’s Capitalist Revolution – Part 1 of 9
However, when unrest takes place in China and the Chinese react as the United States did in 1992 and England’s government today, the Western media, Blogs and Internet Forums often claim the unrest was caused by the fact that China is not a multi-party democracy.
Explain why China’s people should want a multi-party democracy since many democracies are broke, in debt and mired in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
In fact, in the last few decades, China has reduced severe poverty more than any country, increased literacy from 20% to more than 90%, increased the lifespan from age 35 in 1949 to more than 70 today, and created a modern consumer middle class approaching the size of the US population, while poverty, unrest and unemployment has increased in England and the United States.
In addition, in contrast to the 6 days it took to end the violent unrest in Los Angeles in 1992, The Tiananmen Square protests in the People’s Republic of China occurred between April 15, 1989 and June 4, 1989 (seven weeks — not six days), centered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. If you Google this unrest, most likely you will read the lie that it was a democracy movement, which it wasn’t (watch the embedded BBC video with this post to discover the facts).
When troops of the People’s Liberation Army arrived in Beijing to deal with the unrest, they were “actively opposed” by protesters. There were “battles” during the entry of the troops into the city with military casualties, and extensive roadblocks constructed by the protesters slowed the army’s progress.
How is this different from America in 1992 and London in 2011 except that the Chinese had a lot of patience to let the unrest go on for seven weeks before applying force?
More Western riots to explore, which took place in freedom loving, multi-party democracies.
1981 England riots – West Indian race riots across London, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool
2001 England riots – South Asian race riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford
2010 Berkeley California riot – protesters damaging UC Berkeley’s Durant Hall and then spilling over into the city streets, igniting trash cans and Dumpsters, smashing windows and clashing with police.
1934 San Francisco Riot – Two men were killed by bullets, another by injuries, 31 others were shot and an untold number, including police, were clubbed, gassed, beaten and stoned.
Recent Oakland Riots – On January 7, 2009 a protest march in Oakland involving about 250 people became violent. Demonstrators caused over $200,000 in damage while breaking shop and car windows, burning cars, setting trash bins on fire, and throwing bottles at police officers.
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.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Life is a Miracle with Zhang Ziyi (twenty-two films including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – 2000, and Memoirs of a Geisha –2005) and Aaron Kwok (45 films) was released in China 2011 and as a DVD in the US. For those interested in seeing what life is like in a remote area of China, I recommend this movie but as a film about HIV/AIDS it fails compared to Philadelphia (1993 – Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington).
The film, adapted from a novel, tells a tragic love story between two AIDS-afflicted lovers. Kwok develops a crush on Zhang Ziyi’s character, also an AIDS patient.
Changwei Gu (the director) did not capture the horror of HIV/AIDS in this film. However, in Philadelphia the true reality of HIV/AIDS is depicted dramatically through Tom Hanks’ character. In Life as a Miracle, the stars are just as healthy and sexy at the end as they were early in the film.
Instead, the film seems to be a story of two thirty year olds spurned by their spouses and the healthy villagers. The two turn to each other to fulfill the need for companionship, love, youthful lust and much sex. If you enjoyed Zhang Ziyi in Memoirs of a Geisha and her other work, then you may enjoy watching her in this film. She does not disappoint.
There was one obvious flaw in the film. The only people infected with HIV/AIDS got it while sharing the same needle giving blood. The symptoms of the disease then come on so fast, that their spouses were never infected. This is unrealistic since HIV often hides for years or decades before it becomes AIDS. For most, it would have been impossible to realize they carried the virus until it was too late and their spouses were infected, which is the main reason the disease has become a global epidemic.
I also found that the subtitles were too small and difficult to read. However, I managed to understand what was going on.
I easily get teary eyed in films that tug at the heart. In fact, my wife and daughter know me well enough that when a dramatic scene of this nature comes on screen, they usually glance in my direction to see if the “compassion” bug has kicked in.
That didn’t happen once while watching Life is a Miracle. In addition, when I lose interest in a movie, I often fall asleep. That did not happen with this film. For me, the rural Chinese setting and the supporting actors mostly carried the movie.
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.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
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