Change taking place in China is not happening as fast as many Western critics want it to. To these critics, China should flip the feudal switch to democracy and the light should come on without effort.
However, in spite of Western pressure to speed things up, changes are taking place as planned by China’s government—one step at a time.
For example, foot binding was around centuries when the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1911) first attempted to end the practice that would continue until 1949.
In 1976 when Mao died, twenty percent of the population was literate. Today more than 90% can read with a goal to reach 99%.
In 1985, school reform was implemented making nine years of education mandatory for all children. Academic achievement became the new priority over the political consciousness of the Mao era.
An example of how China’s education policies have brought about change may be seen among the “Granite Women”, who live near the coast in southeast China.
For centuries, these women carried blocks of granite from the quarries where their husbands, brothers and fathers worked cutting the stone.
However, today, China’s economic reforms along with education are changing the old ways.
Younger women, who have now had an education, know what they don’t want to do with their lives.
For centuries, others such the Qing Dynasty and the Nationalists failed to improve the quality of life in China for women. Where these others failed, the CCP appears to be succeeding.
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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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Who would have thought that the future health of humanity might depend on China?
Fox News.com reported The Cases For and Against Stem Cell Research, “Opponents of research on embryonic cells, including many religious and anti-abortion groups (in America), contend that embryos are human beings with the same rights and thus entitled to the same protections against abuse as anyone else.… Anti-abortion groups also oppose research on stem cells derived from aborted fetuses.”
Croatian Medical Tourism.com reports, “China (a country that refuses to allow religions to have a say in government affairs) has pushed hard for years to become a world leader in the fields of stem cell research and regenerative medicine.”
And China’s efforts appear to be paying off.
Parent Dish.com reports that James Evans and Hollie McHugh, both 24, saved money for more than a year to send their daughter Isabelle Evans to China for stem cell treatment. Newspaper reports say the results of the treatments were soon worth the pain caused.
World Savvy.org explains why ethical and moral debates in the United States and other countries offered an opportunity for Chinese scientists to possibly come up with cures for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or other diseases in which stem cell therapies are suspected to be effective.
In fact, what started to look like a wild-west circus of stem cell research led to more than 200 hospitals in China offering therapies, some questionable, often to patients desperate and with few or no treatment options available in their home countries. Source: Science Progress.org, 2010
Then in January 2012, Bloomberg.com reported, “China will halt new applications for clinical trials of stem-cell products until July 1 as part of a year-long campaign to regulate the development of the industry, a Ministry of Health spokesman said… A more stringent regulatory system will allow Chinese institutions to sell products overseas…”
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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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In the first 122 pages of Country Driving, Peter Hessler sets out to drive the entire length of the Great Wall in a rented Chinese made Jeep Cherokee and he achieves his goal. In this section, I learned that the Wall was successful most of the time and not the failure historians claim it was. Yes, in several thousand years, the wall failed a few times but it served its purpose and did protect China’s heartland for centuries. Hessler says that there is no archaeologist in the world that has studied the history of the Great Wall but wrote there are amateur experts (we meet a few in this section along with a unique view of rural China) that have proven through historical research that the wall did work.
In Part II, Hessler takes us into a small village a few hours drive outside Beijing where he rents a house and becomes accepted by the insular-rural village community making friends and becoming involved personally with local families. The man that becomes his closest contact and friend in the village eventually joins the CCP (there are only about 80 million members in China) and then uses this to his advantage as he continues to improve the quality of his family’s lifestyle.
In Part III, Hessler travels to the city of Winzhou in Southern China where he spends time developing relationships with factory bosses and workers. In this section, the Chinese people he meets are open and friendly. Hessler sees a side of China that few witness and it is obvious that the factory workers are not victims because of low pay and long hours of work but see this new life as an opportunity.
Peter Hessler discussing his novel “Oracle Bones”
When I finished Hessler’s memoir, I walked away feeling as if I had experienced an in-depth taste of the dramatic changes that have taken place in China since Mao’s death in 1976. Since China’s critics mostly focus on the negative, which is the corruption and/or authoritarian one-party system, and never admit the good that the CCP has accomplished, most people would not understand what I discovered. To understand what I mean, one must compare China before 1949 with today by reading such books as those written by Hessler and his wife.
Before 1949, more than 90% of the people in China lived in severe poverty, more than 80% were illiterate, the average lifespan was 35, few people owned land, and the risk of death from famine had been an annual threat for more than two thousand years. In fact, most rural Chinese were treated as if they were beasts of burden and not human.
Today, about 13% live in severe poverty and those people mostly live in remote, rugged, difficult to reach areas of China. The lifespan is now about 73 years and Helen H. Wang writing for Forbes.com (February 2011) reported that China’s middle class is already larger than the entire population of the United States and is expected to reach 800 million in fifteen years (2026). In addition, no one has died of famine since 1959-1961.
I highly recommend Country Living for anyone that wants to learn more about today’s dramatically changing China from an unbiased perspective.
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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Most books that I’ve read of China cover its history up to Mao’s death and after 1949, it is difficult to trust almost anything one reads in the West or in China, since most of this work is either biased and/or propagandized in the West or propaganda in China since the mass media is owned by the State.
However, I’m glad that I read Peter Hessler’s memoir of China, Country Driving. Rarely does Hessler intrude with his own Western bias (if there is one), which appears to make a slight appearance near the end. I suspect that his editor at Harper Collins suggested that he add it to the story, and he complied, because the few opinions he expresses near the conclusion of his memoir do not match the experiences that he shares with his readers in the rest of the book. In fact, while reading the book, I grew to trust Hessler’s perspective of today’s China.
It is obvious that Hessler honestly loves/respects China and its people and this infatuation runs throughout the memoir. He also carefully or unintentionally avoids mention of what he thinks about his own culture, which made me wonder if there is a lot he doesn’t respect about his homeland.
Maybe the reason why he continues to return to China is because of this infatuation with a culture that values family more than most Americans do. In fact, in the memoir’s acknowledgements, I discovered that Hessler was married to Leslie T. Chang, which even my wife—a Chinese immigrant to the US, whose first book, a memoir of growing up during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year—didn’t know.
Leslie Chang discussing her novel “Factory Girls”
Hessler’s wife is the author of Factory Girls, which is also about today’s China. Chang is Chinese-American and a graduate of Harvard. She is also an accomplished journalist and was raised outside New York City by immigrant parents, who forced her to attend Saturday-morning Chinese school, which is so Chinese.
For example, our daughter speaks Mandarin fluently and she was born in Chicago and is a product of the US public schools but with an immigrant mother and an American step father (me), which may explain (in part) why she is completing her second year at Stanford currently majoring in biology instead of trying out for American Idol while waiting tables in a Hollywood coffee shop.
Both Peter and Leslie have published work that went on to be honored as New York Times Notable Books.
Anyway, back to Country Driving. Much of Hessler’s memoir was connected to projects he wrote at The New Yorker or National Geographic. The memoir is divided into three sections: Book I, The Wall; Book II, The Village, and Book III, The Factory.
Throughout the book there is a common theme: the independence and individuality of most Chinese and the failure of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda, which is there but often ignored by most of the people unless they can use the CCP to their own advantage. That doesn’t mean the propaganda has no influence but the people seldom let it get in their way as they work to improve the quality of their lives.
In fact, it becomes clear in Hessler’s memoir that there are three Chinas: there is rural China, urban China and the Chinese Communist Party and many shades of gray among them.
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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On page 23, Worst Polluted.org reported, “Almost every country in the world has some kind of industrial estate, with Vietnam and Sri Lanka estimated to each have 50 to 60 industrial areas, and India and China reaching hundreds of industrial clusters…”
On page 32, the report said, “Studies in China have found that certain crops, such as corn, are particularly susceptible to lead accumulation when grown in close proximity to smelters.”
There was also a list of four countries at the top of page 32 on regions most impacted by lead pollution and lead smelting. China was in last place with seven sites impacting 158,100 people. The other three countries/areas totaled more than 1.8 million people impacted by this type of pollution.
On page 43, there was a picture of a lead-zinc mining facility in China.
On page 59, there was a picture of a chemical manufacturing plant in China.
That was it. In seventy-six pages, China was only mentioned five times. What a disappointment. I was expecting so much more considering the amount of criticism heaped on China by its enemies and critics.
One city in China was listed as the most polluted in the world in 2006. I wondered why it didn’t make the list for 2011.
Linfen, China is situated in China’s southern Shanxi province along the banks of the Fen River. In 2010, this city had a population of about 4.3 million inhabitants.
Then in 2007, Times Magazine said that China was home to 20 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities, and said, “Only 1% of China’s 560 million urban residents breathe air that is deemed safe by European Union standards.”
However, it was tragic to learn that China is now leading the clean economy race. The Chinese government is “going for the gold” and “taking this challenge much more seriously than others … doing things differently, making longer-term, sustained commitments that are much larger,” wrote Andrew Winston in the Harvard Business Review. [ Harvard Business Review “China Leads the Clean Economy Race” Sept. 23, 2010 ]
China is investing about US$75 to $100 billion EACH year in clean energy for the 10 years between 2010 and 2020, according to the “country’s ten-year plan that made some jaws drop”. [ Harvard Business Review “China Leads the Clean Economy Race” Sept. 23, 2010 ]
China retained the top spot in 2010 as the world’s leading investor in low-carbon energy technology, according to a report by the US Pew Environment Group, which wrote that China’s “ascendance has been steady and steep … With aggressive clean energy targets and clear ambition to dominate clean energy manufacturing and power generation, China is rapidly moving ahead of the rest of the world.” [ Pew Environment Group report “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race 2010?”; BBC News “China tops global clean energy table” March 29, 2011 ]
On an end note, Worst Polluted.org mentioned the United States three times, Canada once and India twenty-three times. I didn’t check for any other countries on this report. As I finished posting this series, I realized that I could not score any points with China’s enemies and critics, since it was a country that many in the West love to hate. In addition, I suspect India is mostly ignored by these same people because it was a Western style democracy.
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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