Republics of Asia — Part 1/3

November 13, 2010

This three part series will focus on three Asian Republics — South Korea, Singapore and Thailand, which will be compared to China. All three are staunch allies of the United States.

The first report will be on South Korea.

In 1998, the BBC News produced a special report on South Korea: A Political History.

With US support, Syngman Ree was the President of the “Republic” of South Korea in the 1950s until April 1960. His government was autocratic and the country had limited political freedom.

In fact, South Korea would be an autocratic state with limited political freedom (fancy words for a dictatorship) from 1948 to 1987.

There was a military coup in 1961 and General Park ruled until he was assassinated in 1979.

Mao ruled China eight years longer than Park Chung Hee ruled South Korea.

In 1980, martial law was declared after the army killed 200 during student demonstrations. Recently, South Korea’s constitutional court upheld a controversial military ban (censorship) on 23 books considered subversive. Source: Time

However, the Western media seldom reminds us of those democracy demonstrations in South Korea. 

Instead, we are annually reminded of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident in China.

Of course, it helps to forget the 1980 killings when South Korea is now the world’s second largest source of Christian missionaries (after the United States) with a government that favors Christianity.

I wonder if China’s government suddenly decided to favor Christianity, would we stop hearing about the students killed in Tiananmen Square.

It wouldn’t be until 1986 that South Korea’s constitution was changed and in December 1987, Roh won the first direct presidential election since 1971. The first free parliamentary elections took place in 1988.

China revised their Constitution in 1982. Instead of becoming a democracy that favors Christianity, China remained a one-party Republic with tight controls over the political influence of religions, which remains very unpopular with the Christian majority in the West.

South Korea ranks 39th among 178 countries when it comes to corruption. China ranks 79th and we often hear about corruption in China but little about South Korea and the hundred countries with more corruption than China. Source: Transparency.org

Discover more about the Two Republics of America and 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.

5 Comments | America, China, history, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Censorship Perception

November 13, 2010

I read Don’t Call China’s Internet “Censored”, at Good Magazine.  It’s rather brief and biased, which is usual from a Western media source that judges China from a Western cultural perspective.

However, what I found interesting were two comments to the post.

Shaun Pen’s comment was, “Chinese people in China don’t consider it censorship, much the same way we Americans don’t consider anti-child pornography laws “censorship.”

Nathan Heath says, “But Shaun is also missing a few things.  The average Chinese internet user uses the internet completely differently than Americans do.  In fact, I honestly think it would take a long time for Chinese internet usage to change in China even if the “Great Firewall” were lifted tomorrow.  The vast population just doesn’t care. (Except Facebook. We want FB back.) THAT is the cultural difference between China and the West.”

Then there is The Economist, which had opinion pieces about China’s censorship in two recent issues.

The Oct. 23 issue had Gagging to be free, which claimed if Marx lived in China today he wouldn’t have been able to publish the Communist Manifesto. 

Not true.

There is a thriving underground in China that translates and publishes censored books into Mandarin, and I’ve often found books in Beijing and Shanghai’s English language bookstores that are on China’s censorship list. If the books are in English, China doesn’t seem to care.

Considering that learning English is mandatory in China’s public schools, why bother to censor anything. If there is money to be made, there are Chinese that will figure a way to earn it.

The Oct. 30 issue of The Economist had another go at China’s Net Nanny with Breaching the great firewall. The complaint here focuses on Twitter being blocked and replaced with a popular copy-cat called weibo, which is heavily monitored for “subversive” content.

When you discover what the West is doing to monitor subversive content on the Internet, you’ll see the hypocrisy.

Wired says, “In the US, American spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.” 

In fact, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community is putting cash into software that specializes in monitoring social media.

If these agencies are developing and buying this software, you can be sure they are using it.

In addition, if most Chinese don’t consider the Net Nanny censorship, then it isn’t. There is software available in the US so parents may censor and monitor their children’s’ activity on the Internet. That’s how most Chinese see the so called “Great Firewall”.

Those in the West who complain the most are probably the same people who want to influence and subvert Chinese thought until the globe is filled with Western clones.

Discover why Internet Censorship May be Going Global

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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, cultural differences, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Hit-and-Run and the “Free” Virtual News

November 11, 2010

A friend sent me two e-mails about hit & run killings in China.

ChinaSMACK said a foreigner driving drunk and without a license, hit a 23-year old Yiwu girl crossing a street in a crosswalk. 

If you believe the Chinese media is completely controlled and censored, you may be surprised to learn that ChinaSMACK is a daily-updated collection of translated Internet content from the Chinese-language Internet.

ChinaSMACK covers stories, pictures, videos, and topics that have become very popular and have spread across China’s major BBS forums, social networking websites, or through forwarded e-mails sent between normal Chinese people every day.

Since starting in July 2008, ChinaSMACK now attracts over 930,000 visits and over 2,300,000 page views each month featuring a vibrant community of commenters.

ChinaSMACK did not identify the foreigner (laowai), who was driving drunk without a license. The victim was thrown over 20 meters (more than 65 feet), and she died in the hospital.

The laowai sped away from the scene to avoid being caught, but the Chinese police tracked him down and arrested him.

The victim’s family is poor and her father died three years ago.

The first two comments to the ChinaSMACK post said, “If you had hit a person, you too would be arrested and administratively detained first and then what should be done will be done. Laowai cannot escape Chinese legal punishment.”

“Our country’s criminal law does not put foreigners outside of our country’s criminal law. As long as the foreigner does something that matches a crime in our country’s criminal law, then the foreigner cannot escape the criminal laws punishment.”


This news clip talks about drunk driving and hit-and-run accidents in China

The next story is about the killing of a 20-year-old college girl in another hit-and-run.  When confronted, it was reported that the drunk driver yelled, “My father is Li Gang!” 

Li Gang is a high-ranking police officer and a member of the Communist Party. The victim was the daughter of a 49-year-old peasant from rural China.

The father of the victim said in an interview, “I’m just a peasant.  If it is unfair, let it be.”

However, an angry Chinese public on the Internet overruled the victim’s father and refused to “let it be.”  Although there have been many hit-and-run accidents in Hubei province, there was anger at China’s powerful elite and the arrogance of some children of money and power.

Arab News and the Washington Post both reported that the fathers met and Li Gang offered compensation to the victim’s father. The other choice was to have a trial, which may result in a death sentence for Li Gang’s son.

Now that the hit-and-run by Li Gang’s son is international news and all over the Internet in China, there are people in the Communist Party with more power than Li Gang that may want to see justice done. I am thinking of people such as Bo Xilai, a member of China’s Central Committee, and a man famous and popular for cracking down on crime.

However, the rich, powerful and famous often escape punishment for horrible crimes. For an example, I offer you Senator Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick incident of alleged drunk driving that caused the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

Then there is a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about Dominick Dunne and his 22 year old daughter that was murdered by her estranged boyfriend.

“When I attended the trial of the man who killed my daughter, what I saw was appalling,” said Dunne. “I realized that the rights of the defendant on trial exceeded the rights of the victim who had been killed…”

If you want to learn more about the rich, powerful and famous escaping punishment for horrible crimes, read about Claus von Bulow or William Kennedy Smith.

Is there a difference between China and America when it comes to justice for the rich and powerful?

Learn more about 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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Two Worlds on the Same Planet

November 6, 2010

Martin Petty at Reuters writes an interesting piece about Suu Kyi in Myanmar (Burma) — not interesting as you might think but interesting in that it reveals an alien point-of-view.

China is mentioned four times and is referred to as Burma’s ally, a neighbor, between China and India, and that Myanmar could become “a province of China”.

However, Petty only mentions briefly (nine paragraphs into the piece) that Western sanctions on the Myanmar regime have failed because Myanmar’s neighbors China, Thailand and India and other Asian nations have been pouring investments into the resource-rich country.

Why didn’t Petty mention that one of those other Asian nations pouring investments into Myanmar is Singapore — one of America’s staunchest Southeast Asian allies and trading partners. 

Singapore is also rated by Transparency.org as one of the world’s least corrupt nations tied with Denmark and New Zealand for the number one spot, while the United States is ranked twenty-two with a score of 7.1 ( a C-) to Singapore’s score of 9.3 (an A).

It isn’t as if Reuters didn’t know what was going on. 

A 2007 Reuters piece says that Singapore was one of Myanmar’s biggest foreign investors with more than one billion dollars in trade that year.

Then later in the 2007 piece, Reuters says that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) admitted Myanmar as a member in 1997 even with international criticism.

Just what does “international” mean when the nine founding members of ASEAN do business with Myanmar.

Is “international” another way of saying “Western” or “America”?

Here’s the ASEAN list — Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.  I didn’t see China or India on that list, and India is often touted as the biggest democracy on the planet — both trade with Myanmar.

In fact, South Korea, another democracy, also trades with Myanmar. In 2009, South Korea granted imports duty free and quota free on 253 goods from Myanmar. Source: People’s Daily

Then The Myanmar Times reported that trade between Myanmar and Japan (another democracy) increased about 33% in 2006-07.

Taiwan also trades with Myanmar. Source: The China Post

Not wanting to miss out on the potential profits, Australia is on that trade list too (up 160%). Source: Democratic Voice of Burma

It is a fact that all of these Asian nations that trade with Myanmar were either occupied or victims of Western Imperialism going back to the18th century and lasting until the middle of the 20th century. 

During this era, Western nations imposed Western values and religions on all of Asia and China.

However, all of Asia (except for Australia) has roots reaching back more than two millennia to Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Taoism.

Western nations and the Middle East have roots to the three Abrahamic Religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Is it possible these different cultural trees are worlds apart on the same planet?

Instead of trying to understand those differences, the West keep thumping its hairy chest and roaring when the other world doesn’t behave with Western moral expectations and beliefs.

Learn more about The Collective Culture versus Individualism

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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 » | Buddhism, China, Christianity, Confucianism, cultural differences, Islam, media, politics, religion | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Speed on Rails and the Three Gorges Dam Makes News

November 2, 2010

While the Globe’s number one debt-ridden super power talks about building bullet trains and coastal wind farms and doesn’t plan to replace outdated coal burning, polluting power plants, China builds them.

From Yahoo News and the Associated Press comes news of the bullet train from Shanghai to Hangzhou.


Bullet Train from Shanghai to Hangzhou – Mandarin News

However, the big news was the mighty Three Gorges Dam, which holds as much water as Lake Superior in the US. The dam is capable of producing 18 gigawatts of electricity equal to about 40 nuclear power plants.

China is the world’s largest producer of hydroelectricity, followed by Canada, Brazil and the United States. Since no fuel is needed to run a hydroelectric plant, there is little pollution.

Although there was controversy about moving the 1.4 million people who lived in the area behind the Three Gorges Dam, those still waters may save many lives during times of drought and flood.

One example of the controversy comes from a 2007 piece in Time Magazine, which mentions the project has been mired in controversy ever since it was first proposed by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1866 -1925), the founding father of China’s republic.

In fact, floods along the Yangtze killed more than 300,000 people during the 20th century but there was no mention of that in the Time piece.

Taking into account the loss of life from floods and the threat of droughts in China, why did the Western media spend so much effort publicizing the controversial resettlement project without mentioning the potential benefits to hundreds of millions of Chinese?

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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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