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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

An Erhu Master Captures a violent slice of China’s history

September 5, 2017

To understand another country’s history and culture, one should listen to its music, read that country’s novels, and see its films.

For instance, Reflection of the Moon about Ah Bing (1893 – 1950), a master of the Chinese Erhu, who in 1950, shortly before his death, became a national sensation as radios throughout China started to play his music.

Fortunate for me, this Chinese film had English subtitles, but were not the best quality and true to form for a Chinese movie filmed in 1979 (shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976), the plot was melodramatic with traces of propaganda that favored the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

However, to be fair, the brutal Civil War between the Communist and Nationalist Parties raged from 1927 – 1950 (with a short break during World War II to fight the Japanese invaders), and the CCP, with support from several hundred million peasants, won.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution would not begin for years and for those that survived the purges in 1949 and 1950 (the victims were allegedly abusive land owners and drug dealers accused of crimes by the people they allegedly abused and victimized), Mao fulfilled his promise of land reform. Many of the landowners lost their lives, and the land they had owned was divided among the peasants collectively and not individually.

To understand the era of Ah Bing’s life, much of China (including Tibet) was still feudal in nature, and the upper classes often took advantage of the peasants and workers as if they were beasts of burden treated as slaves. At the time of his death, he was 57, and the average lifespan in China was 35. Today the average lifespan is 75.5 years.

Ah Bing’s real name was Hua Yanjun. His knowledge of traditional Chinese music and his talent as a musician went mostly unnoticed until the last year of his life in 1950, shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

In 1950, two musicologists were sent to his hometown of Wuxi to record and preserve his music. At the time, he was ill and hadn’t performed for about two years. Six of his compositions that are considered masterpieces were recorded by those musicologists. It is said that he knew more than 700 pieces and most of them were his compositions.

The lyrics of some of his music criticized the KMT (Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government), and he was often punished for speaking out through his music. If you have read of The Long March, you know that the peasants did not trust the KMT, but they did trust the Communists, and most rural Chinese from that era still think of Mao as China’s George Washington.

Before the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China’s Communist Party treated the peasants and workers with respect while the KMT didn’t.

China Daily reported that Ah Bing’s story and music is still popular, and that the Performing Arts Company of China’s Air Force performed Er Quan Yin, an original Western-style Chinese opera, in 2010. The performance was “Based on the story of legendary Chinese erhu performer, Hua Yanjun, or Blind Ah Bing, the opera tells the story of an erhu performer, Ah Quan and his adopted daughter Ah Li, who struggle to make a living in the 1950s.”

Discover Anna May Wong, the American actress who died a thousand times.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases and get a free copy of my award-winning, historical fiction short story “A Night at the Well of Purity”.

Return to or Start with Part 1

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

How the Past Determines the Future: Part 2 of 2

August 30, 2017

When the Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1911, ending imperial rule after more than two thousand years, chaos and anarchy ruled China, while foreigners, Americans included, lived in luxury in the treaty ports that were the result of the Opium Wars and these foreign enclaves were protected by modern, foreign military forces on Chinese soil.

Imagine how Americans would feel if China deployed several of its army divisions in the United States to protect the Chinese living in America.

Then there was Mao surviving Chiang Kai-shek‘s crack down on the labor movement led by the Communist Party. During World War II, Mao’s army not only fought Chiang Kai-shek’s troops but also the Japanese, who killed between ten to twenty million Chinese in their attempt to conquer China.

The peasants trusted Mao’s troops but did not trust Chiang Kai-shek’s army. Do you know why (watch the next video to learn the answer)?

Then there were the wars in Korea (1950 – 195) with an estimated 2.5 million killed/wounded, and Vietnam (1955 – 1975) with an estimated 3.8 million killed/wounded, in addition to America’s necklace of military bases surrounding China to this day.

Mao believed that socialism was going to create a better life for the Chinese people. His failures were attempts to make China strong enough to defend itself against the foreign meddling and invasions that had plagued China since the Opium Wars.

Regardless of all the horrible facts the U.S. media keeps reminding the world about when it comes to China, there are a few facts that are not well known. When Mao became the leader of mainland China in 1949, the average lifespan was age 35. When Mao died in 1976, the average lifespan increased by twenty years to 55. Today the average life expectancy is 71.5 years. In addition, the population of China was 400-million in 1949. Twenty-seven years later when Mao’s died, China’s population had increased to 700-million. How did that happen if Mao allegedly murdered an estimated 60-million or more people?

In addition, forty-one years after Mao’s death, China has done more to reduce poverty than any other country. Ninety percent of poverty reduction in the world took place in China. When Mao came to power in 1949, 95-percent of the Chinese people lived in extreme poverty. By the time Mao died, the quality of life had improved for most Chinese and they were just poor instead of extremely poor.

Imperial records show that China had famines annually for more than 2,000 years where people in one or more provinces suffered and died of starvation. Since 1949, there has only been one famine in China and that was more than fifty-five years ago.

These facts call into question many of the alleged and inflated claims of deaths and suffering caused by the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward and the insanity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Mao was not perfect but even the Chinese people, after he died, graded his leadership as 70% good and 30% bad. The Chinese people that voted lived through the Mao era. Why should their opinions count less than people that never lived in China during that time?

In 1775, Patrick Henry, one of the U.S. Founding Fathers, said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Is there anyone in China today foolish enough to stand up and say, “Give me liberty so we can return to the good old days of chaos, drugs, war, poverty, and starvation”?

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

1AA - 244 Positive Reviews - Hall of Fame Reviewer - August 26 - 2017

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Part 2 will continue on August 30, 2017.

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese history, history, Maoism | Tagged: How did the Opium Wars in China influence Mao, What caused Mao to launch his Cultural Revolution, What caused Mao to start the Great Leap Forward, What do the Chinese people think of Mao, Why did Mao rule China the way he did? | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

How the Past Determines the Future: Part 1 of 2

August 29, 2017

Before we get to Mao, we’ll discover why #FakePresident Donald Trump lives in the U.S. White House. It started when Richard Nixon declared war on drugs and caused the U.S. prison population to explode until the United States has the largest prison population in the world. China with more than four times the population has the 2nd largest prison population on Earth but it is a distant 2nd to the United States. Then President Ronald Reagan doubled down on Nixon’s war on drugs and the prison population more than doubled. Reagan also ended the use of the Fairness Doctrine in the media giving birth to the conspiracy-theory generating; hate promoting Alt-Right lying media that generates its own false facts. Reagan claimed the Fairness Doctrine violated free speech. What the Fairness Doctrine did was make it difficult to lie in the media and get away with it.

Why does #FakePresident Donald Trump want to punish immigrants and treat alleged criminals harshly? Watch the video for a possible answer.

The first paragraph is a snapshot of how history leads to what happens in the future.

In fact, understanding how the past determines the future will also help you understand why Mao caused so much suffering with his failed Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution.

How many millions of Chinese were addicted to Western opium forced on China by Great Britain; France and for a short period even the United States during the Opium Wars , 1^st war 1839-1842, and 2^nd war 1856-1860? To the credit of the U.S., the Congress eventually voted to pull America’s troops out of the 2nd Opium War and gave back the reparations ($$$) China was forced to pay its invaders after losing the war.

“During the nineteenth century, Britain fought two wars of choice with China to force it to import opium. The opium grown in India and shipped to China first by the British East India Company and after 1857 by the government of India, helped Britain finance much of its military and colonial budgets in South and Southeast Asia. The Australian scholar Carl A. Trocki concludes that, given the huge profits from the sale of opium, “without the drug, there probably would have been no British empire.” – 5th World.com

Historians think that 20-to-100-million may have died due to the Taiping Rebellion (1850 – 1864). The Taiping Rebellion was led by a failed Confusion scholar who converted to Christianity and then claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He even wrote his own gospel and added it to the Christian Bible.

More than 100,000 Chinese were killed during the Boxer Rebellion (1899 – 1901), which was a popular peasant uprising against Christian missionaries, and the meddling and exploitation of foreigners in China to make money.

Could these wars and rebellions all linked to Christianity and opium forced on China by Western countries have motivated Mao to launch his Great Leap Forward and to declare war on religions in China during his Cultural Revolution?

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases and get a free copy of my award-winning, historical fiction short story “A Night at the Well of Purity”.

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese history, history | Tagged: How did history put Donald Trump in the White House, How successful was Mao?, What caused Mao to launch his Cultural Revolution, What caused Mao's Great Leap Forward, Why did the Chinese people support Mao | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China is Leading the World in Alternative Energy

August 23, 2017

The United States Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970 because of polluted rivers, lakes, and dense, visible smog in many U.S. cities and industrial centers. I grew up in the Los Angeles basin in the 1950s – 60s and was a witness and victim of that air pollution.

A 2016 Report of the Trends in Global CO2 Emissions said, “top emitters China (1st place) and the United States (2nd place) set an example by effectively reducing their CO2 emissions over 2015 by 0.7% and 2.6%, respectively, compared to 2014 levels. … The largest decreases in coal consumption were seen in the United States and China.”

But all of the gains made by the United States since the 1970s are being reversed by #FakePresident Donald Trump and his extremist administration.

Yes, the United States is listed as the second largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions in the world, but if the U.S. had China’s population, the pollution generated would dwarf China. In 2015, China’s global share of emissions was 29 percent vs 14-percent in the United States, but if both countries had equal populations, the U.S. share would be almost twice China’s.

China’s first Clean Air Act was signed into law in 1987. In 2006, Greenpeace was consulted by China’s CCP on an early draft of a renewable energy law by China’s National People’s Congress. Now China is the world’s leader in the production of renewable energy. DW.com reports, “China is one of the driving forces behind the solar power boom. Last year, around 45 percent of the world’s new solar installations were built there. The United States, Japan and India were also top adopters of the technology, albeit significantly behind China.”

China’s one-party system has demonstrated the ability to get things done quickly and, yes, mistakes are made but so are course corrections. For instance, I witnessed China’s ability to get things done in Shanghai. At the time, we were staying in what was once the French concession. The stately mansions that once housed wealthy French families and their Chinese servants had been converted to communal multi-family homes still surrounded by high walls. When we went to sleep one night, the walls were there. In the morning, the walls were gone.

An army of workers arrived at night, took down the walls and trucked out the debris without making enough noise to wake people.

History already shows us that when China’s leaders set a goal to achieve something, they get it done even if it takes centuries.

Need proof? China is responsible for two of the largest engineering projects of all time: The Great Wall and the Grand Canal.

China Highlights reveals that “Over 2,000 years, many imperial dynasties and kingdoms built, rebuilt, and extended walls many times that subsequently eroded. The latest imperial construction was performed by the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), and the length was then over 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles). This is the wall often referred to when we talk about the Great Wall.”

Britannica.com says, “The Grand Canal was built to enable successive Chinese regimes to transport surplus grain from the agriculturally rich Yangtze (Chang) and Huai river valleys to feed the capital cities and large standing armies in northern China.”

Global Securtiy.org says, “The Grand Canal is composed of the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal, Sui-Tang Canal and Zhedong Canal, and is over two thousand years old. It starts in Beijing and passes through Tianjin and the provinces of Hebei, Shandong, Zhejiang, Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu. It is 21 times longer than the Panama Canal, and surpasses the Suze Canal by 10 times … the Grand Canal of China is the longest waterway in existence and one of the most ancient.”

When someone thinks China can’t replace coal with renewable green energy sources, remind them of The Great Wall and the Grand Canal. All China needs is time to get the work done. Want another example? About thirty years ago, China decided to seriously deal with poverty and led the world by reducing global poverty by 90-percent but only in China. The rest of the world was only responsible for 10-percent of that reduction.

Discover China’s First Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, the man that unified China more than 2,000 years ago.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases and get a free copy of my award-winning, historical fiction short story “A Night at the Well of Purity”.