Have the Tea Baggers in the United States been learning from China, or is it the other way around?
“Another strategy is manipulation. In recent years, local and provincial officials have hired armies of low-paid commentators to monitor blogs and chat rooms for sensitive issues, then spin online comment in the government’s (China’s) favor.
“Mr. Xiao of Berkeley cites one example: Jiaozuo, a city southwest of Beijing, deployed 35 Internet commentators and 120 police officers to defuse online attacks on the local police after a traffic dispute. By flooding chat rooms with pro-police comments, the team turned the tone of online comment from negative to positive in just 20 minutes.” Source:New York Times
Isn’t this what Fox Network’sGlenn Beck, thenRush Limbaugh—who is heard on more than 600 radio stations—have been doing for years. Filling the airwaves with their opinions controlling what people hear and think. The AmericanTea Baggersare doing the same thing with the same results—behavior control.
For an example of how the media twists facts to influence public opinion one only need look closer at the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin incident. What does the public really know about these two individuals?
Is America really that different from China and is there anyone we can believe?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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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The internet is a crowded battleground and no one is safe. On April 7, 2010, it was reported that the Yahoo email accounts of 10 Beijing-based foreign journalists and the IFJ’s Hong Kong-based coordinator were infiltrated. Source:Scoop
China is not the only player in the cyber-spy game. The German Police and Intelligence Agencies hired a company to create Trojans capable of capturing traffic from Skype and SSL, and the recording industry wants the right to hack into your computer and delete stolen MP3s.
After a Chinese fighter collided with an American surveillance plane in April 2001, Chinese hacker groups cyber-attacked American businesses causing millions of dollars in damage.
“The Carders“, cyber-criminals that specialize in using a sophisticated and automated process to steal information from credit cards, have made off with billions.
When the “Cult of the Dead Cow” gains access to a computer, they spy on you through your own webcam and microphone. Imagine what the “Dead Cows” see if that webcam is in your bedroom. Good thing they consider themselves “Dead”.
The American National Security Administration’s (NSA)Red Teamis suspected of distributing malicious software across the web acting as illegal hackers, but they do it under the protection of the law. In 2008, an elite U.S. Military Unit shut down a Saudi-CIA Website that was seen as a threat to US security. Source: CBS News
America’s NSA has the ability to listen to the phone calls of US citizens and capture e-mails, and the US is not alone because Britain’s NSA [the GCHQ] listens its citizen’s phone calls too. Source: Mother Jones
China isn’t alone on this battlefield where a mix of authoritarianism and anarchy wages war, so why does China get more than its share of media attention?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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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“An individual should not have too much freedom. A nation should have absolute freedom.” – Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1866 – 1925)
He is referred to as the father of modern China. If there were no Sun Yat-Sen and his revolution, there might not be a modern China as it is known today.
While attending a Christian school in Hawaii (1882), he converted to Christianity, which shaped his revolutionary future. It was obvious that his writing was influenced by American thought. With the support he received from the Hawaiian Chinese community, he networked with Chinese people all over the world.
He went on to publish revolutionary ideas seeking to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty and create the Republic of China. In 1904, he wrote that he wanted to model China’s government after America but by combining Western thought with Chinese tradition.
Yet, he was considered an idealistic dreamer—that his ideas were impractical. He said, “The whole world is one family.” (1910)
In 1882, when Sun Yat-Sen was exposed to American politics, the United States was a republic—not the democracy we know today—and women did not have the right to vote yet. What type of republic do you think he wanted for China—one closer to the America of 1882 or today?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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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Pearl S. Buck appeared on the Merv Griffin Show in 1966 and made a few predictions.
Buck said China will be what we make it to be. She meant that the United States will either make China its enemy or its friend.
Buck said the Chinese are marvelous friends and frightful enemies. If this is true, why are so many Americans and the US media demonizing China instead of cultivating friendship?
The Chinese have a marvelous sense of humor, Buck says. The Asian people are very human.
Communism will change. Buck said China will moderate and will modernize in time. She saw Communism arrive in China in 1921, and said it was an impractical, impossible scheme of life. She was right. China has changed and is now a hybrid, socialist-capitalist country with a market economy and an authoritarian, one-party (with more than 80-million members) government.
During her career as an author, Buck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Good Earth in 1932 and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938.
Only seven American authors have been awarded both the Pulitzer and the Nobel: Sinclair Lewis; Eugene O’Neill; Pearl S. Buck; William Faulkner; Ernest Hemingway; John Steinbeck; Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison—five men and two women.
Pearl S. Buck was born in America (1892 – 1973) and at the age of three months went to China. Except for attending college in the United States 1911 – 1914, she lived in China until age forty
Meet Pearl S. Buck in the following mini-documentary that runs 2:14 minutes.
“She was a builder of bridges between China and the rest of the world,” says Edgar Walsh of his mother, Pearl S. Buck.
In this mini-documentary, Walsh describes how his mother was “ideally positioned to write about China.” Buck was the daughter of missionaries and spent much of the first half of her life in China, where many of her books are set.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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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Recently three revealing news items caught my attention. The first was about Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese dissident who fled China to become a visiting scholar at New York University.
I understand Mr. Chen doesn’t speak a word of English and was self-educated in China. Therefore, his one-year job as a visiting scholar at NYU could be seen as a form of welfare offering him a way to earn money just by hanging around sharing his story of how horrible China’s government is.
Now that his one-year visiting scholarship job is ending, he is accusing NYU of being pressured by China to dump him. Is this an example of biting the hand that feeds you? I’m not surprised. Who wants to be unemployed?
“Chen, who has been blind from childhood and taught himself law, was a campaigner for farmers and disabled citizens. He exposed forced abortions in China before he was placed under house arrest in Shandong province. … NYU pointed to a PBS television interview in May 2012 with Cohen, who had said Chen would be at NYU for a year at most while he adjusted to a new country.” Source: Reuters
Then again, maybe the truth about Mr. Chen is that he’s just a paranoid guy with a wild imagination who likes to complain and now that he’s living in the US, he has to find something to complain about here. Maybe the Chinese really locked Chen up because they grew tired of hearing his unsupported, alleged complaints.
The second bit of news was China asking the United States to explain its Internet surveillance program: “China made its first substantive comments on Monday to reports of U.S. surveillance of the Internet, demanding that Washington explain its monitoring programs to the international community.
“Several nations, including U.S. allies, have reacted angrily to revelations by an ex-CIA employee over a week ago that U.S. authorities had tapped the servers of internet companies for personal data.” Source: CNBC
I think there has to be another reason China is making this demand. Either China wants the world to see that its biggest critic for Internet surveillance in China, the United States, also spies on its citizens and was keeping it a secret, or—then again—maybe China wants to learn from the United States how to build a better Internet surveillance system. After all, the US is known for its innovation.
The third bit of news was about China’s new supercomputer. CNBC reported that “China has built the world’s fastest supercomputer, almost twice as fast as the previous U.S. holder and underlining the country’s rise as a science and technology powerhouse.”
It’s no secret—I think (no leak intended)—that the United States uses supercomputers to monitor its Internet surveillance system and eavesdrop on citizens’ phone calls and e-mails. And now that China has a super computer twice as powerful as anything in the United States, China may want to put it to good use just like the US is doing to keep a closer eye on its citizens—and so-called paranoid dissidents like Chen Guangcheng.
That way China will be able to move faster and grant these dissidents immigration status to the US where they will seek political asylum and be given positions as visiting scholars who don’t have to teach classes and who get paid just to hang around and socialize badmouthing China.
That should help divert the attention of America’s citizens off of their own government’s Internet and phone surveillance systems and back on China where the US government wants it to be focused.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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.
His latest novel, Running with the Enemy, was awarded an honorable mention in general fiction at the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival.
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