China’s Sensitivity over Tibet – Part 2/2

December 7, 2010

Since the two best-known spiritual rulers in the world are the Dalai Lama and the Pope, I’m going to compare the two.

The Dalai Lama seems to get about as much attention as the Catholic Pope in Rome, who rules over the Vatican in Rome. The Pope is also the spiritual leader of about one billion Catholics.

What about the Dalai Lama and Buddhism?


The working class peasants/serfs in old Tibet before 1950

Buddhanet says that it is generally agreed that about 6% (or 350 million) of the world’s population are Buddhists.

Then Adherents.com says, The number of adherents that follow Tibetan Buddhism is estimated to be between ten and twenty million, (which is about the same as the population of New York state in the US).

There are four schools of Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama is the temporal head of the Gelug(pa) “Way of Virtue” school, and Dalai Lamas have been the “spiritual” leaders of Tibet from the mid-17th to the mid-20th centuries.

The 2000 population census in China reported that about 2.62 million lived in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

If those facts are correct, today’s Dalai Lama is technically the spiritual leader of about 2 million in Tibet and between 8 to 18 million globally that are citizen of other countries.


The ruling class in old Tibet before 1950

The only explanation for the attention the Dalai Lama gets in the media is that a very vocal following of fanatics has grown around him turning him into a cultish godlike figure.  At best, the Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of about one third of one percent of the global population. 

At the low end, the Dalai Lama only represents about one tenth of one percent, which may represent the number of followers he has in China compared to the total population there.

Learn more About Tibet or return to China’s Sensitivity over Tibet – Part 1

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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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

A Road to the Hajj from China – Part 2/2

November 30, 2010

Another devout Chinese Muslim in Xian is proudly transcribing the Quran into Chinese using traditional Chinese brush calligraphy. He says it took him over a year to transcribe the entire Quran this way. Now he is working on a second copy.

He has also taught his son and his grandsons how to write with the Chinese brush wanting to pass down this tradition to the next generation.

His son says that every generation should try their best to transcribe the Quran with the Chinese brush, as it is also a good way to reinforce our faith.

The original copy of the Quran in this family is over four hundred years old, a priceless relic transcribed by the Chinese imams. There are only a few remaining copies left in the world.

Jia Wen Yi, a Hajj pilgrim, says the trip to Mecca is important to him and his wife, an elderly couple. They have done a lot of preparation for the hajj. Mr. Jia goes into detail about the planning.

Going on the hajj for Yi and his wife, Jia Wang Yi, has been a dream for over two decades as they saved to have enough money.

Mr. and Mrs. Jia will be part of a group of 250 pilgrims leaving for the hajj from the city of Xian. It was a matter of saving most of their lives until they could afford the trip.

Since these Muslims are considered a minority in China, they are not restricted by the one-child policy, as you would see in the video when the family and friends gather to say goodbye before Mr. and Mrs. Jia leave on the long journey to Mecca.

There is no direct flight from Xian to Mecca, so the pilgrims will take a train to Beijing where they will board a flight to Saudi Arabia.

Whenever pilgrims leave Xian to go on the hajj to Mecca, thousands of Chinese Muslims show up at the railway station to say goodbye. This is the first time Mr. and Mrs. Jia have left China. They have never been apart from their family before.

Return to A Road to the Hajj from China – Part 1 and/or discover The Kaifeng Jews

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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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

A Road to the Hajj from China – Part 1/2

November 30, 2010

This two-part post may come as a surprise to many in the West that believe there is no religious freedom in China.

In fact, China handles religious freedom similar to how Singapore does, and Singapore is seldom if ever criticized in the Western media for this practice.

The U.S. Department of State says that Singapore’s government has broad powers to limit citizens’ rights and handicap political opposition, which it uses. One of those restrictions is a limited freedom of religion.

However, the Constitution for the Republic of Singapore offers the same fundamental liberties China and the US does, which includes freedom of speech, assembly and association and freedom of religion.

For example, Singapore bans the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Unification Church by making public meetings illegal. The Falun Gong has also had problems in Singapore.

China, on the other hand, recognizes five religions — Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism but has banned certain new religious movements that are considered cults. China does not recognize cults as religions.

In the video embedded with this post, Al Jazeera follows Chinese Muslims as they prepare to undertake the hajj pilgrimage.

The ancient city of Xian in Shaanxi province is home to about 60,000 ethnic Chinese Muslims.

Xian claims it has a Muslim history going back thirteen hundred years when Islam was first introduced to China in 650 AD.

In fact, the oldest mosque in China was built in 685-762 AD in Xian during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty.

Chinese Imam Ma Yi Ping speaks both Chinese and Arabic. He studied at the Islamic University of Medina and has made the hajj several times. He was taught to be a devout Muslim by his parents during Mao’s time when the mosques in China were closed.

Despite the persecutions that took place during the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976), Islam survived in China.

Ma Yi Ping says that after Mao and the Gang of Four were gone and China opened for trade with the world, he did not have to study the Quran in secret anymore.

Since the 15th century, Xian Muslims have been going to Mecca in Saudi Arabia for the annual Hajj pilgrimage.

In the past, during the ancient days of the Silk Road, these journeys started and ended in Xian’s Muslim quarter. Today is no different.

Continued in A Road to the Hajj from China – Part 2

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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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Barbara Walters on North Korea and China

November 29, 2010

Recently, Barbara Walters talked to President Obama about North Korea’s shelling of a South Korean island near the DMZ.

Obama said South Korea was one of America’s most important alliances (in Asia), which has to be true since South Korea has many Christians (about a third of the population). It also has a strong open market, capitalist economy and a democratic government.

However, although China is considered North Korea’s only friend and ally, the two countries are different today.

First, China left the autocratic Maoist revolutionary form of government behind soon after Mao’s death.

Second, China is a republic that appears to be moving toward democracy and has an open market economy similar to South Korea’s.

I said in a previous post, “China’s reluctance to put public pressure on Pyongyang to step off the warhorse might be because the Chinese feel it would be like pressuring a family member.” Source: China and North Korea

That may no longer be the case.

Austin Ramzy writing for TIME says, “The news, delivered at a rare Sunday press conference, was that China was calling for emergency consultations between itself, North and South Korea, the U.S., Japan and Russia… it was a welcome call for calm by the North’s key ally.”

Many in the world should be glad of China’s relationship with the Hermit Kingdom. If it weren’t for China, there would be no one North Korea would listen to.

Walters also was in China with President Richard Nixon in 1972, and she paints a picture of China about thirty-eight years ago that vividly offers a contrast to today’s China.

Then in April 2009, Walters asked Jiang Zemin (China’s third president after Mao died) what happened to the famous “tank man” of the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989.

Walters says, “Did you execute him? We heard he was arrested and executed.”

Zemin replied that he did not know what happened to the man. Then he said he thinks the man was never killed.

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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 look China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Chasing Profits – Defeating Truth

November 26, 2010

Ted Koppel writes an interesting and revealing commentary for the Washington Post of how the US media reports opinions as if they were facts.

Koppel writes, “While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic.… But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster.”

For example, a Reuter’s piece on Yahoo had this lead paragraph in the morning, “China warning on Friday against military acts near its coastline…” as if China would retaliate if anything happened.

From comments I’ve read on the Internet, the US mob reacted as expected calling President Obama a loser for not retaliating in North Korea.

In the afternoon, the replacement lead paragraph said, “China said on Friday it was determined to prevent an escalation of this week’s violence on the Korean peninsula…” I’ve read what the Chinese minister said and this is closer to the truth.

It is obvious a hot-blooded reporter wrote the morning piece for the mob that wants war, since there are voices in South Korea and in the US screaming for blood regardless of the outcome.

Mobs seldom pay attention to history. It takes wiser heads in positions of power to prevail. In the US media and often in Washington DC, there is seldom this level of wisdom to be seen.

An example of a government reacting to what a nationalistic mob demanded led to World War I. By the time that war ended more than sixteen million had been killed, and this all took place because one man had been assassinated.

The same thing happened in Vietnam where more than three million died after the LBJ White House lied and the US media stirred the mob to action.

Over Iraq, opinions and White House lies repeated in the US media stirred the mob again and that led to a war where hundreds of thousands have already died and the violence in Iraq hasn’t ended.

This brings up another point raised from Koppel’s commentary.

Koppel aptly reveals that today’s “free” press has abandoned the truth, because there are millions of Americans that worship the opinions of people such as “Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly – individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.”

The opposite often happens in China between the state-run media and nationalistic mob.

For example, in May 1999, Chinese nationalism and anger ran high after the US bombing of the PRC’s embassy in Belgrade. Instead of fanning the flames, the state-run media calmed the mob.

Then there was the April 2001 Hainan Island incident caused by the collision of a US spy plane with a PLA fighter jet killing the Chinese pilot.  The same thing happened.

Next, there was the recent Senkaku Island dispute between China and Japan. 

In all three incidents, the state-run media in China calmed nationalist pride and the people’s demand for blood.

It is ironic that in America, the opinionated, biased voices from the so-called “free” media often feeds the mob’s frenzy and the mob signals what it wants to hear, which may lead to another war unless wiser heads prevail.

Discover more at Media Slugfest Using Taiwan

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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.

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