It it hadn’t been for Go Daddy’s CEO, Bob Parsons, shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe and stirring up PETA, a Politically Correct gang of animal lovers in the US, I may have never been curious to see if China had elephants.
I discovered China may offer a safer haven for elephants than most nations that still have pachyderms living in their natural environment.
Wild Kingdom – China’s Wild Elephant Valley
Elephant Aid says, “Most people associate China and elephants with the demand for ivory but although China only has a small number of elephants it is one of the only range states where numbers are on the rise.
“China’s elephants can only be found in the extreme south of the Yunnan province bordering Burma and Laos. Their range includes Xishuangbanna (XSNB) and the Nangunhe Nature Reserves.”
BBC – Wild Elephants in China
“The elephant is a protected species in China,” Elephant Aid says, “and the government has taken steps to conserve areas of elephant habitat including moving people out of the reserves in a bid to minimize human-elephant conflict.
“Chinese official have reported that the population is growing through both reproduction and immigration of herds from Laos. This is attributed to the lack of a threat from poachers in China and the abundant availability of fodder.”
According to Elephant.se, there are about 450 captive elephants in the US and less than 4,000 captive elephants globally. China has about 30 captive elephants.
All About Wildlife.com says there are 40 to 50 thousand wild Asian elephants and between 470,000 and 690,000 wild African Elephants.
Two hundred or more wild elephants live in China.
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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.
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The world’s biggest country is going through the world’s largest sexual revolution. From the Internet to corner sex shops, China is changing. However, lost in the mix, millions of single men cannot find a date much less a mate.
Changes are talking place as China goes through the West’s 60s rebellion. Mao’s Little Red Book has been replaced with a black book filled with phone numbers and date info.
Mao’s taboos against capitalism and sex are gone. With these changes comes the dark side—drugs, prostitution, HIV and STDs. Under Mao, sexuality was almost done away with. Everyone wore the same baggy colored clothes. Everyone had the same haircut. Couples that fell in love and were caught were punished. Today, cosmetics, perfume and stylish clothes have replaced Mao’s uniforms.
Millions are learning about romance and love. However, millions of others have been left with sexual, psychological problems and are very ignorant about sex. They were victims of Mao’s Cultural Revolution‘s sexual repression.
According to a 2004 survey, only twenty percent of Chinese men know where to find the clitoris, while fifty percent of Chinese women haven’t had an orgasm. Sexual ignorance and dysfunction is common. Mao’s Cultural Revolution left invisible scars.
China also has a new, popular holiday,Valentine’s Day. On February 14, cupid and roses have become fashionable. Nightclubs hold Valentine’s festivals where couples meet, drug use is common and kissing leads to sex.
Private businesses that cater to romance and sex are flourishing in China. Some shops are a cross between a sexual education center that also sells adult sex toys. In Beijing, there are an estimated five thousand sex shops and business is booming. This industry is worth billions.
When the first graphic sex Blog came online, the server crashed and was down for days. When the government censors shut down a sex Blog, more replace it.
In China today, teen girls are living lives their parents never imagined and do not understand. The teens are very open about what turns them on in a guy. Many do not care what their parents think. They only want to have fun.
Listening to the conversation between this group of Chinese girls sounds like listening to spoiled kids in the US talking.
The teens often go out clubbing and the nightclubs are equal to or better than the best in the West. The nightclub featured in the video has life-sized wall paintings from Cultural Revolution posters while teens dressed in sexy clothes dance and grind to loud music. These changes started in the late 1990s.
Even in China’s rural villages, the sexual revolution has been felt as millions of young women leave the villages to the big cities and experience what the urban Chinese are doing. The first stop is the hair salon.
The media is even climbing on board this sexual revolution. Glitzy magazines, like the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan, feature the stylish, hot and sexy.
China’s one-child policy, created to control the growth of the population, is complicating the sexual revolution.
By ending the pressure on Chinese women to have many children, this has liberated them to do other things. Now Chinese women have the freedom to get an education and find a paying job.
The one-child policy also created another problem. Since Chinese families have always favored having boys, many women get abortions when the fetus is identified as a female. This has led to a growing imbalance between the number of men and women.
Now, millions of poor men cannot find a mate. With so many poor men unable to find women, gangs and crime have become a problem.
China now has the fastest growing sex industry in the world. A decade ago, there was little prostitution. Today, there are many brothels masquerading as massage parlors. Some are modeled after the brothels in Thailand.
Capitalism has arrived in all its guises, and the same problems the US has with sex slavery and drugs is now a problem for China too.
Most prostitutes are village girls and have no idea about safe sex. This is causing an increase in HIV. Many of the men refuse to wear condoms. Sometimes, when the girl says no, the paying customer will rape her.
The sexual revolution in China is a fragile one. While the new China supports it, the old China is afraid of these changes. Adultery and divorce are on the rise. Kids are leaving home. There is a growing generation gap.
One older Chinese man says that China is not used to this. Under pressure from the older generation, the police must crack down, raid bordellos and arrest prostitutes.
However, now that China’s sexual revolution is in the open, it will be hard to stop. At first, the government tried to stop what was going on but soon backed off. In addition, many parents, who grew up in Mao’s puritanical era, don’t want their children to experience the same repression.
These changes are talking place while women are gaining power and many families now value having female children. Few want to return to the way things were.
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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.
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I subscribe to Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College. While finishing my morning exercise routine on the stationary bike, I read an essay written by Sung-Yoon Lee of Keeping the Peace: American in Korea 1950 – 2010.
Professor Lee is an adjunct assistant professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and an associate in research at the Korea Institute at Harvard University.
He writes of the pressure North Korea has applied on the United States to sign a peace treaty that might require US troops to leave South Korea. Professor Lee feels this would be a mistake, and I agree.
He says, “It is important for Washington to hold quiet consultations with Beijing to prepare jointly for a unified Korea under Seoul’s direction, a new polity that will be free, peaceful, capitalist, pro-U.S. and pro-China.”
This is the first I’ve read anywhere in a Western media source (and Hillsdale College is decidedly conservative in its political stance, which I don’t always agree with) that it is possible a country could be both pro-U.S. and pro-China at the same time.
In fact, Hillsdale College is often anti-leftist (liberal) and anti-entitlement to the point that it has rejected accepting Federal aid even in the form of student scholarships since almost every entitlement dollar from the Federal government comes with strings.
By saying that a unified Korea under Seoul would be both pro-China and pro-U.S. admits China is not the evil dragon so many in the West believe.
When Mao ruled China, North Korea and Communist China seemed as if they were evil twins. However, today that is not true. In the 1980s, China emerged as a hybrid one-party republic with term limits and age limits so one man would never rule the Middle Kingdom again as Mao did for 26 years.
China became a hybrid capitalist-socialist economy while politically it was an authoritarian one party republic guided by the 1982 Constitution.
Prior to 1911, there was the imperial aristocracy, a “small” middle class (with an emphasis on small) and a huge peasant class living in severe poverty with hard labor and short life spans.
Today, China’s middle class has reached about 300 million and almost 500 million are connected to the Internet, and China’s attempt at censorship does not totally control the flow of global information to those that want it who then share what was learned through Chinese Blogs and e-mails with friends, fans and family.
North Korea is frozen in time, but South Korea and China have evolved and adapted to the global economy. It would be in China’s interest to see North Korea merge with South Korea and become a capitalist nation open to the world for trade.
In fact, China does more trade with South Korea than the North, which by all accounts is a burden since China often feeds many of North Korea’s citizens to avoid famine sending food grown in China that should have gone to Chinese consumers.
If Korea is unified under Seoul’s leadership, the threat of war in Korea will evaporate.
However, under Pyongyang’s leadership. Korea becomes a larger threat to both China and the US and more difficult to contain.
The US must maintain a military pretense in South Korea and I’m sure China agrees even if it never says so publicly since a war between Pyongyang and Seoul would not be in China’s interest economically.
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.
In 2006, China was crucified in the Western media due to a few unarmed Tibetans being killed attempting to illegally cross the border into India.
Buzzle.comrepeated this news that originally ran in the UK’s Guardian. I recall the incident because it was on the news in the US at the time.
Of these few border deaths in China, Buzzle says, “A Romanian cameraman, whose footage of the incident revealed that snipers shot the unarmed Tibetans as they waded through thick snow. The shaky video shows two figures in a column of refugees fall to the ground. “They’re shooting them like, like dogs,” says a witness next to the cameraman.”
The headline shouted “International Anger Grows Over Tibet Shooting. Human Rights groups are calling for a UN Investigation into the killing of a nun by Chinese border patrol guards, writes Jonathan Watts in Beijing.”
Recently, I read another story I’d never heard of before from The Economistof another border where similar killings happen often, but I found no demand for a UN Investigation in the Western media. Even The Economist, which reported the story, did not call for an investigation.
Instead, The Economist concludes with, “Shooting the people you claim to want to do business with is a poor start.”
Maybe the difference is that the border killings reported by The Economist took place between two democracies — India and Bangladesh.
I couldn’t find a report of this India-Bangladesh incident in English on YouTube
The Economist says, “On January 7th India’s Border Security Force (BSF) shot dead Mr. Nur Islam’s 15-year-old (daughter) Felani, at an illegal crossing into Bangladesh from the Indian state of West Bengal. Felani’s body hung from the barbed-wired fence for five hours. Then the Indians took her down, tied her hands and feet to a bamboo pole, and carried her away. Her body was handed over the next day and buried in the yard at home.”
“The BSF (India’s Border Security Force) kills with such impunity along India’s 4,100-kilometer (2,550-mile) border with Bangladesh that one local journalist wonders what the story is about. According to Human Rights Watch, India’s force has killed almost 1,000 Bangladeshis over the past ten years.”
How many were reported killed by witnesses of the China incident? Two or three?
What about deaths along the US border? The Snow Report says, “Border deaths for illegal immigrants hit record high in Arizona sector.”
The Snow Reportsays, “The discovery of record numbers of bodies along the Tucson sector of the US-Mexico border suggests that border crossings for illegal immigrants are becoming deadlier as heightened security forces migrants into remoter and more forbidding areas.”
Maybe democracies (which are billed as better places to live), sort of like James Bond, get a free pass from the Western media to kill.
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.
Due to China’s long history with Korea, China has been asked many times recently by the US to put pressure on North Korea to get them to back down and not be so aggressive.
However, China’s response has been for the “relevant parties” to “calmly and properly handle the issue and avoid escalation of tension.” Source: Politics News
One reason for this response might be that China has a history with Korea going back to the Tang Dynasty in 688 AD, when there was an alliance with Silla, a Korean state.
Then it could be because Chinese culture, written language and political institutions have had an influence in Korea since the 4th century.
In the 14th century, Korea came under the influence of Confucian thought influenced by Buddhism and Daoism (Taoism).
A 1,700-year old relationship might have more weight than the one China has with America that isn’t even forty years old yet. However, measuring that weight may also depend on the trillion or more US dollars China has invested in America.
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.
Note: This post first appeared with a different title on iLook China on May 27, 2010 at 16:00 PST as post # 361. This edited and revised version reappears today as # 1080.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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