China’s Rising Film Industry

November 27, 2012

“China is now the second-biggest box office territory for Hollywood films, eclipsing Japan,” says The Hollywood Reporter. Not only that, but Chinese production companies are releasing films for the home market.

In fact, a recent science fiction movie, Looper, became the first new Hollywood film to make more money in its opening weekend in China than in the US. Source: Guardian UK

It also appears that the Chinese government has done some forgiving. “Zhang Zhao fled China for the U.S. soon after the crushing of the 1989 student democracy movement. But Mr. Zhang returned to China in 1998, and now he’s the man with the money: As head of Enlight Pictures, a unit of Enlight Media and one of the new film companies aspiring to tell Chinese stories to a rapidly expanding domestic audience, he has plans for an initial slate of 40 movies, and no problem with financing.” Source: RealFilmCareer.com

A film produced by Huayi Brothers Media

Then there is Huayi Brothers Media, which the May issue of “The Hollywood Reporter” says raised 160 million in an IPO on the Zhenzhen stock exchange.  The Huayi brothers have already released over 50 films, most of them huge box office hits in China. Source: CNN: Is This China’s Harvey Weinstein?

“Five years ago,” Wang Zhongjun said, “we hoped (the Hollywood studios) could bring us support and investments. Now we’re helping them,” reports The Hollywood Reporter, which predicts box office gross in China could exceed 10 billion yuan by the end of 2010.

Discover Going to School with Dad on My Back

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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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1 Comment | business, capitalism, China, Chinese arts and music, Chinese Culture, cultural differences, media | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Scapegoating China and Manipulating the Opinions of Americans – Part 4/4

November 8, 2012

In conclusion, how many ignorant adult voters are there in America that a presidential candidate can fool to gain votes? I think the answer may be found from the number of adult Americans that do not read books and watch too much reality TV.

According to Mental Floss, Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix, in the United States:

1. One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

2. Forty-Two percent of college graduates never read another book after college.

3. Eighty percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

4. Seventy percent of U.S., adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

5. Children who watch four or more hours of TV per day spend less time on school work, have poorer reading skills, play less with friends, and have fewer hobbies than children who watch less TV. Source for #5: Reading.org

However, according to A. C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day, and the number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes. Source: csun.edu

No matter what we hear from an American politician running for election, the Bureau of Labor Statistics proves that education/literacy pays, because the unemployment rate for adult Americans with less than a high school diploma is 14.1% (medium weekly earnings in 2011 was $451) while unemployment for workers with a college BA degree is 4.9% (medium weekly earnings in 2011 was $1,053).

In fact, about 39% of voters ages 18 and older that do not have a high school degree vote, while 77% of college graduates vote. In addition, you may suspect that low-income voters would vote Democratic, but the top sixteen states with very high or high level of persons living below poverty (43% of adults with low literacy skills live in poverty), twelve  of these states vote solidly Republican. Source: Election 2012 Factors: Poverty Level Households by State

Answer this question: If you cannot read or understand what you read, where do you get information to help decide how to vote or what to think about China?

A. talk radio (dominated by conservative talk shows such as Rush Limbaugh)

B. television

C. reading informative Blogs such as this one

D. reading newspaper, books, and magazines to become better informed

E. other sources – for example, the barber shop or a bar

I think that Abraham Lincoln should have also said, “It is easier to fool someone that is uneducated and does not read than someone that is educated and reads.”

Note: If you want to learn about the impact of watching too much TV, I suggest you read TV Turns Kids Into Zombies, Retards Development, and eventually, these children grow up to be adults that vote.

Return to Scapegoating China … Part 3 or start with 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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3 Comments | America, American culture, China, economy, education, family values, media, politics, United States | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
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Scapegoating China and Manipulating the Opinions of Americans – Part 3/4

November 7, 2012

In Part 2, we discovered that China’s unemployment rate among rural Chinese working in manufacturing reached 16.4% in early 2009 (while unemployment in the United States was only 9.3%), and from Forbes on October 18, 2012 we learn: “Manufacturing jobs stand poised for a rebound as jobs get reshored from China — creating 2.5 million to 5 million U.S. jobs in manufacturing and support jobs. Worries about a severe job skills gap are largely misreported according to results from a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) analysis – part of the firm’s ongoing series entitled Made in America, Again.” 

In comparison, unemployment in the United States stands at 7.8% today. In another comparison, during 2007 – 2009 while China lost 23 million manufacturing jobs, the United States lost only 2 million in that job sector. Source: bls.gov

With numbers like these, would someone explain how China is stealing manufacturing jobs from the US?

In addition, the average credit card debt per household in the US (I’m not talking about the Federal national debt) is about $16,000 while total U.S. Consumer debt was $2.43 trillion as of May 2011.


The History of Economic Booms and Busts

US Mortgage Debt is more than $14 trillion and 40% of Americans have no retirement savings while 25% have no personal savings. In fact, 38% of American adults have no emergency funds to fall back on.

However, in China the average household saves almost 30% of its annual income. The average business saves about 45% of net profits and the government has a surplus savings rate of more than 50% of tax revenues instead of the US that has a national debt more than 100% of GDP–more than $16 trillion. The US has been spending more than a trillion dollars a year that it doesn’t have while China saves half of its tax revenues and invests in infrastructure and in other countries such as the US. Source: VoxEU.org

Does that sound as if China is a threat to the US and is stealing manufacturing jobs from America? Many in the US are self centered and do not consider that China trades with the world–not just America. In 2011, China exported about $1.6 trillion in goods to other countries while importing about $1.4 trillion. At the same time, China bought about $104 billion in goods from the US. Source: US-China.org

In addition, outside the US, the world sees China differently. The Pew Global Attitudes Project surveys thousands of people in 59 countries. For 2012 China had a 94% favorable rating while the United States had 40%.


The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis

Back to Abraham Lincoln, who said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

We will discover what that means today in the last post in this series.

Continued on November 1, 2012 in Scapegoating China … Part 4 or return to 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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Scapegoating China and Manipulating the Opinions of Americans – Part 2/4

November 6, 2012

Once we discover how many times the United States has had one financial disaster after another, we start to understand why China must be used as a scapegoat to distract many Americans and give them a victim to blame for lost jobs and low pay.

In another example, Business Pundit.com mentions the 10 Most Bizarre Economic Bubbles in History.  One example was US Dot-com Bubble that burst on March 10, 2000 resulting in a mild but long-felt recession, and the stock market crash of 2000-2002 caused the loss of $5 trillion in the market value of US companies from March 2000 to October 2002.

I’ve left out many other global financial disasters such as those taking place in Israel (1983), Sweden (1990s), Japan (1990), Mexico (1994), Russia (1998), Turkey (2001), Argentina (2001), Iceland (2008), etc.

Then there is the global financial disaster of 2007 – 2008. Total losses are estimated in trillions of U.S. dollars globally. Between January and October of 2008, owners of stocks in U.S. corporations suffered about $8 trillion in losses while losses in other countries averaged about 40%.


Financial Crisis History Lesson – Part 2

Global Issues.org says, “While the Western mainstream media has often hyped up a threat posed by a growing China, the World Bank’s chief economist, (Lin Yifu, a well respected Chinese academic) notes ‘Relatively speaking, China is a country with scarce capital funds and it is hardly the time for us to export these funds and pour them into a country profuse with capital like the U.S.'”

I think what Lin Yifu is talking about is not the US National Federal Debt but the fact that US corporate profits just hit an all-time high … Source: Business Insider.com

During the second 2012 Presidential Debate, Romney mentioned China seven times. He blamed China’s currency manipulation for the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US, and promised to “crack down on China when they cheat.” Source: The New Republic.com

However, what Mitt Romney did not say is the number of jobs lost in China due to the 2007 US financial crisis that swept the globe. “After August 2008, the number of orders filled by many export oriented enterprises dropped precipitously, and thousands of factories in the coastal region, especially in the Pearl River Delta, were closed. The impact was most serious on the rural migrant labor force. … In absolute terms, it corresponds to a loss of 23 million jobs. Rural migrant labor dropped from 140 million to 117 million with an unemployment rate of 16.4% in early 2009.” Source: The Global Economic Crisis and Unemployment in China

Continued on October 31, 2012 in Scapegoating China … Part 3 or return to 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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Scapegoating China and Manipulating the Opinions of Americans – Part 1/4

November 5, 2012

If the traditional media in the United States or politicians campaigning for election are not bashing China, he or she may lose votes and/or an audience.

Why? Because many people want to believe what they want to believe. It does not matter what the facts from reputable unbiased sources reveal.

“Older Americans and Republicans are especially concerned about China’s emergence as a world power. About six-in-ten people ages 50 to 64 (62%) and 65 or older (59%) consider this a major threat to the U.S., compared with 48% of 30- to 49-year-olds and 43% of people younger than 30. Similarly, 60% of Republicans consider the rise of China as a world power a major threat, while 48% of Democrats share this view.” Source: Pew Global.org

In fact, I still run into Blog comments where people bash China for the tainted drywall (2009) or infant formula (2008).  However, these same China bashers will not mention that “Foodborne illnesses kill 3,000 Americans each year. Nearly 130,000 more are hospitalized. The aggregate cost of foodborne illnesses to the U.S. economy in 2011 was $77.7 billion.” Source: The Daily Ticker


Financial Crisis History Lesson – Part 1

Another example is when the US media focuses on economic problems in China that may lead to a financial disaster there. “China’s economic model that delivered three decades of double-digit growth is running out of steam and the country’s next leaders face tough choices to keep incomes rising.” Source: Yahoo! Finance and the Associated Press

Is it possible that all this attention on China is to take American minds off problems in the United States?

For example, during the three decades of double digit growth in China, in the United States there was Black Monday on October 19, 1987 when stock markets around the world crashed. In the US alone, the value of stocks dropped 22.78%.

Then the savings and loan crises in the US led to the failure of 747 out of 3,234 savings and loan associations caused in part by the tax reform act of 1986 that removed many tax shelters, especially for real estate investments.

Continued on October 30, 2012 in Scapegoating China … 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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