Sinophobia and the Nation With the Soul of a Church

July 1, 2010

An old friend of mine once wrote in an e-mail that Communism was evil and if China didn’t do what America wanted, the US would spank them. That and his endless born-again preaching bruised about five decades of friendship. Now, we don’t communicate much.

The definition for Sinophobia is one who fears or dislikes China, its people or its culture—in other words, an ignorant, brainwashed bigot (my opinion).

This morning, I finished reading  An Exceptional Obsession by John Lee, which was published in The American Interest. On page 42, Lee wrote, “Above all, Chinese leaders are anxious about having to deal with a society so different from their own, and by different we don’t mean a superficial contrast between communism and capitalism.  China’s is a communal culture; America’s is individualist. China is rooted in its land longer and more deeply than any society on earth. America is an immigrant society and an unprecedentedly mobile one at that. China has never institutionalized the rule of law; America is fundamentally based on it. China has never experienced deistic religions; America, as Chesterton once said is “a nation with the soul of a church.”

Lee’s comparison reminded me of the few shallow Communist haters and Sinophobic people I’ve run into on the Internet, who live in this nation with the soul of a church. Occasionally, one crawls out of the woodpile on a thousand legs.

Discover Power Corrupts

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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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Greedy Buyers Beware

June 8, 2010

The China Law Blog posted a piece about China Product Beyond Your Worst Nightmare and pointed out that in China there are levels of quality five levels below anything you would think possible and for Chinese manufacturers those levels are normal.

For that reason, Dan, who posted the piece, blames US companies that have problems with the quality of Chinese manufactured products for failing to be specific in the contract’s language.

drywall disaster

One example used in the piece was about the tainted Chinese drywall that has been in the US news.  When the defect was discovered, the Chinese drywall manufacturer urged the U.S. customer, Banner Supply, to sell the drywall in other countries—not in the US.  Depositions unsealed Friday by a Florida court judge in Miami-Dade County shows that the US company refused the offer.

US companies that sign these flawed contracts are probably drooling at the low prices and imagined profits and stagger off giggling in a daze at all the money to be made. Greed for flawed products is the blinding motive. I understand because we had a problem with a greedy US contractor over an addition to our California house that had nothing to do with China. We ended up firing him and no addition was built.

Learn more—see China’s Labor Laws

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.


2-28 Massacre in Taiwan

June 1, 2010

By accident, I stumbled on a Blog about the “2-28 Massacre” in Taiwan in 1947 when Kuomintang soldiers under orders from Cheng Kai-shek, an American ally, slaughtered about 30,000 Taiwanese citizens. It was the first time I’d heard of this incident. Source Blog: Patrick Cowsill

Taipei, Taiwan

When I typed into Google “Tiananmen Square protest”, 1 million 260 thousand (1,260,000) hits came back condemning the 1989 Massacre in Tiananmen Square. “Several hundred civilians have been shot dead by the Chinese army during a bloody military operation to crush a democratic protest in Peking’s (Beijing) Tiananmen Square. Source: BBC

Then I typed a similar question about the massacre in Taiwan by an American ally and 21,200 hits came back.

Here’s what the BBC had to say about the Taiwan incident, “The event was an uprising sparked by the beating of a female vendor by authorities for selling untaxed cigarettes. Between 18,000 and 28,000 people are said to have been killed in riots and a subsequent crackdown.” Source: BBC

Compare the language.  When it was about the Communists, it was a “bloody military operation to crush a democratic protest” but when the killings were committed by an American ally, it was “an uprising…sparked by the beating of a female vendor by authorities….”

Of course, we will always remember the man standing in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square. Have you forgotten what happened in Taiwan yet?

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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 lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline


America Electrified — China’s Road Map (Part 1 of 2)

May 9, 2010

In 1952, China was producing 0.005 kilowatts of electricity. Now they need trillions of kilowatts. After Mao’s death and Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world, China seriously started building electrical power plants.

If you study the timeline for the growth of America’s electrical grid, you will discover that Thomas Edison designed and built the first direct current (DC) power plant in 1882. Then the first alternating current (AC) power plant opened in 1885 and transmitted power 200 miles from the plant.

By 1927, forty-five years later, the first power grid was established in Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t until 1933 that Congress passed legislation establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority, which now produces 125 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year.

Similar to China today, in the 1930s there was a huge gap between people in America’s towns and people on farms. About 10 percent of U.S. farm families had central station electricity in the mid-30s. Like China, almost all urban people had power. Source: Living History Farm

Go to Part 2 of America Electrified or discover Deng Xiaoping’s 20/20 Vision

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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.


Not One Less (1999)

May 8, 2010

In the movie Not One Less, a thirteen-year-old girl is asked to be the substitute teacher in a small Chinese village.  The teacher tells her that when he returns, if he finds all the students there, he will pay her ten yuan—less than two American dollars.

Although money is involved, it isn’t much. When one student, Zhang Huike, stops coming to school, Wei Minzhim, the thirteen-year-old substitute, follows him to the city.

There are several themes in this movie. The most powerful to me were the value of an education and not losing face. If Wei loses Zhang, she will fail the responsibility the teacher gave her. To succeed, she must keep all the students and teach them.

Confucius taught the Chinese that an education was the great equalizer and the key to leaving poverty behind. Most Chinese believe this with a passion.

Zhang Yimou was the director. He says, “Chinese culture is still rooted in the countryside. If you don’t know the peasant, you don’t know China.” Because of this, there is a strong message in this movie about the urban–rural divide, which is being addressed as China sews the nation together with high-speed rail and electricity.

This a powerful movie about children, education, and poverty that shows the challenges China faces in lifting the lifestyles of almost eight hundred million Chinese, who don’t live in the cities. The challenge is to do this without losing the values that made China what it is.

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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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