On the “media menu” in America, there is “Hypocrisy” listed near the top of the front page, and it is cheap.
In a New York Times piece of China Cheers Rescue Halfway Around the Word, we learn that the state owned media in China has been covering the rescue operation to save 33 miners in Chile.
How the New York Times turned good news in Chile into a criticism of China is another story.
If you read the entire piece in the Asia Pacific section of the NYT, go to the bottom to see what I’m talking about.
Rush Limbaugh Lies
In the conclusion to the piece, David Barboza, the reporter, quotes someone identified as Mr. Guan, the poet and blogger, who wrote a few lines of verse about Chile’s rescue on the Web, “What the government (of Chile) did warms our hearts. They didn’t suppress the truth, they didn’t secretly pay anyone money, they don’t make irresponsible statements, they don’t forgive those who should be responsible for it. And they don’t laud themselves with clichés.”
If the NYT didn’t make a point that this was aimed at China, anyone could make a case that the same verse is about the media in America.
Glen Beck Lies
Have you listened to people like Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck or read Ann Coulter or how about lies and deceit in political campaign Ads?
In fact, who is Mr. Guan, the poet and blogger? I used Google Blog Search and Google and came up with zero. Did Barboza fabricate Mr. Guan?
The United States Department of Labor documented 1,546 average deaths for all mining fatalities and 81,341 injuries between 1936 to 1940 in the U.S. Between 2006 to 2007, they reported 69 deaths and 11,800 injuries.
Ann Coulter Lies
Then “In one of the most scandalous crises in workplace safety in the United States, over 10,000 coal miners have died needlessly from black lung disease (from the inhalation of coal dust) in the last decade.” Source: Chesapeake Climate
In addition, the NYT made no effort to mention that there is evidence that China is eager to lower the number of coal mining fatalities as reported by Internet Marketing Strategy for Business.
More research using Google shows that fatalities in mines are a global problem. I found a post in All Africa.comabout South Africa’s high mine fatalities.
However, what did David Barboza, the New York Times reporter do? He dug up a poet called Mr. Guan. The truth is that the media in America is free — free to lie.
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.
There is a lot I don’t know about China and the Chinese, but I know enough to recognize when someone is taking a sly dump on China’s government.
That’s what Peter Brunette does in a film review of Mao’s Last Dancer in The Hollywood Reporter.
However, my review of the film paints a different picture.
When Brunette writes “what the aspiring, ‘Rocky’-like, against-all-odds dancer is escaping is not working-class ignorance and poverty, but hard line Chinese communist officials,” he is wrong.
The Communists who ruled China in 1979 inherited that world, and we see what they have done with it in the last thirty years in China’s Capitalist Revolution.
In fact, life was that way when the Qing Dynasty ruled China (1644-1911), and after the Dynasty collapsed, the situation in China became worse—chaos, anarchy, famine, starvation, warlords fighting each other, then a rebellion between the Nationalists and Communists, interrupted by the Japanese invasion of China during World War II followed by Mao’s Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution, which ended abruptly when Mao died.
China’s descent into “Madness” didn’t start with the Communists. It stared in 1835 when the British Empire, and France (among others) launched the Opium Wars to force China to accept opium as a legal import.
With all that happening, when did China have time to become as glitzy and soft as the US? Even the US didn’t change that fast or against those odds.
The transformation of China that we see today had not started by 1979 when the eighteen year old dancer was one of the first students from the Beijing Dance Academy to come to the United States or in 1981 when Li Cunxin decided to stay in America and embarrass his family, friends and country.
Instead, he married an American woman he was having an affair with and claimed he wanted to stay with his wife. Soon after the event, they were divorced.
The fact that the Chinese embassy let him go shows that China was struggling to change the way things had been under Mao. Under Mao, there would have been no trip to the U.S. for the dancer.
Brunette was right about one thing when he says the director knew exactly what he was doing every moment, which was playing to a Western audience that sees China through a red-colored lens that blurs the picture.
Mao’s Last Dancer is a good movie. I recommend seeing it, but take off the rose-colored glasses first.
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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.
The lead paragraph says, “An imprisoned Chinese dissident who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was allowed to meet Sunday with his wife and told her in tears that he was dedicating the award to the victims of a 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters…”
When I wrote about part seven of a BBC documentary of China’s Capitalist Revolution, I said, “The protesters were not demanding Western style politics or an end to Communist Party rule as many in the West believe. They wanted the government to listen to their opinions about reforms and corruption.”
The banners the protesters carried said, “We support the Great Glorious Communist Party of China.”
There was no pro-democracy movement. The protest happened impulsively and got out of control like so many things young people do.
Since when has any country allowed hormone driven college students decide the course of a nation?
The reason those students became heroes in the West was because the Western media made them heroes and turned the fiction of a pro-democracy movement into a fact believed by hundreds of millions.
It seems that Liu Xiaobo believes that fiction too.
If Liu Xiaobo wants to dedicate his Noble Peace Prize to anyone, it should be to the victims of the 2/28 Massacre in Taiwan where almost 30 thousand were killed by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops.
However, the reason few in the West know of this massacre was that Chiang Kai-shek was not only a brutal dictator but a converted Christian and an American ally.
It is regrettable that hundreds of misguided college students lost their lives during the Tiananmen Square Incident, but that doesn’t compare to what happened in Taiwan decades earlier.
In fact, what those unorganized students in Tiananmen Square accomplished in 1989 almost stopped Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms from succeeding. Source: Chinese Pod
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.
The Al Jazeera commentator started by saying that relations between China and the West are complex not least by the way the West views China’s human rights record.
Among the major issues is the Tibetan struggle for independence, treatment of political dissidents and restrictions on the media and the Internet.
The commentator opened the second half with Andrew Leung in Hong Kong asking him to define the relationship between China and the U.S.
He replied that the relationship is mixed. On one hand, many countries are awed by China’s economic rise. He said that China was a reluctant world power because there are so many problems inside China that must be dealt with and that China cannot afford to be globally aggressive.
Then the commentator turns to Ze Xia, the Falun Gong reporter, who wastes no time mentioning that China controls the media and says the New Tang Dynasty TV signal has been cut off and censored in China.
She calls on the West to force China to change.
Note: What Ze Xia doesn’t say is that the Chinese media is part of the central government—the media in China is not independent as in the West, and what does the Falun Gong reporter want the West to do—start a war? Click here to discover more on global censorship.
Again, the commentator cuts the Falun Gong reporter off and turns to Bruce Reynolds at the University of Virginia, who says the worst thing the West could do in China was to apply pressure. He says that will not play well with the Chinese leadership or the Chinese people, who are very proud and nationalistic.
Reynolds says he is confident that in the next thirty years, many of the problems Ze Xia, (of the Falun Gong) points out will be resolved. He calls for patience.
Andrew Leung concludes the panel with a positive outlook on how much China has changed in the last thirty years.
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.
I laughed when I finished reading China Takes a Page from U.S. Playbook on The Heritage Foundation Blog.
It seems that China has launched a PR campaign similar to Voice of America, and The Heritage Foundation was bothered by the size of China’s effort.
The Voice of America, according to The Heritage Foundation, broadcasts in 32 languages from short-wave radio stations on 200 frequencies, while China Radio International now broadcasts in 45 languages using 284 frequencies.
The Heritage Foundation said the problem is China’s authoritarianism with a capitalist economic overlay, which reminded me of imperial governments such as the British Empire during the 19th and early 20th century.
What if America were an authoritarian state too? The facts make a strong case that the U.S. is a global authoritarian power.
I’ve always believed that if you want to learn what a person or nation is really like, pay attention to what they do and not what they say.
THE FACTS
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The United States has the most people in prison – about 751 for every 100,000 people, while China has 119 per 100,000 with almost five times the population of the U.S.
A CNN report cited a study that says 7.3 million Americans were in the U.S. prison system in 2007.
The US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military bases worldwide in about 63 countries, while China has no military bases outside China. Source: Global Research
China has about 1,900 combat aircraft and 760 naval ships, while the U.S. has about 18,000 combat aircraft and more than 1,500 naval ships.
China has about 240 nuclear warheads, while the U.S. has more than 5,000. Source: Global Fire Power
The PRC was founded in 1949 and the United States in 1776. How many wars has each nation fought since achieving independence?
China’s wars (I did not list China’s problems with Tibetan and Islamic separatists or the Falun Gong)
Korean War (1950-53) China entered the war in support of North Korea Sino-Indian War (1962) The cause of this war was a dispute over the sovereignty of a border region. In 1959, India sent troops and border patrols into the disputed areas. This created both skirmishes and deteriorating relations between India and China. After the war started, when Chinese troops reached the border that China claimed, the PLA stopped advancing, and China declared a unilateral cease-fire. India still has border disputes with China, Pakistan and Nepal that have not been resolved. Source: International Boundary Consultants A border-war with Vietnam (1979), which I covered in another post.
America’s wars (This list represents only wars. I left out the military operations that were not considered wars because there were too many to list)
Second Cherokee War (1776-1777) Chickamauga Wars (1776-1794) Northwest Indian Wars (1785-1795) Note: The complete list of wars against Native Americans was too long to list. Shay’s Rebellion (1786-1787) Note: Most of Shays’ compatriots were poor farmers angered by crushing debt and taxes. Failure to repay such debts often resulted in imprisonment in debtor’s prisons or the claiming of property by the government. A Quasi-War with France (1798-1800) First Barbary War (1801-1805) Tripoli declared war on the United States The War of 1812 (lasted two years – the U.S. Declared War on Great Britain) Second Barbary War, which is also known as the Algerian War (1815) First Seminole War (1816-1818) The U.S. started it. Mexican American War (1846-1848) Mexico attacked after the U.S. annexed Texas in 1845. Utah War (1857-1858) American Civil War (1861-1865) An American led revolution in the Kingdom of Hawaii (1888-1889) The Spanish-American War (1898) The U.S. declared war on Spain The Second Samoan Civil War (1898-1899) Philippine-American War (1899-1913) World War I (1917-1918) the United States Declared War on Germany World War II (1941-1945) Japan attacked the United States The Korean War (1953-1953) The U.S. responded to a North Korean invasion of South Korea, which was ruled by a dictator. The Vietnam War (1959-1975) The United States declared war to protect the freedom of South Vietnam, which was ruled by a dictator Persian Gulf War – Operation Desert Storm (1991) Started by the U.S. War in Afghanistan & the war on terror (2001 – ) The U.S. invaded in response to 9/11 Invasion of Iraq (2003 – ) The U.S. invaded due to suspicions of WMD that were never found.
Source: Timeline of United States Military Operations
What happens if China does copy the U.S. in all things 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.
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