One of the greatest atrocities in history was the rape of Nanking. All humans are capable of great evil and this is an example. Thousand were murdered and tossed into the Yangtze River. There were so many bodies, the water turned red. Others were buried alive after digging their own graves.
For her book, Iris Chang went to China and interviewed the few hundred survivors still living to document the horrible crimes the Japanese committed. She talked to one man who, as a child, watched his mother and little brothers being murdered.
Another witness tells Chang how she found her dead grandparents, mother and little sisters naked and raped.
There is a scene showing Chang transcribing taped interviews and it is mentioned that she had nightmares from this project. Chang said, someone had to listen, to record and validate the experience of the survivors and make it public.
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.
I find it interesting and amusing to read this obsession in the West about China’s labor practices. Most of what I read in the media and comments to Blog posts have a superior tone as if these people come from a culture that is paradigm of virtue.
No one in the West has earned a seat to sainthood. In an Associated Press piece by Elaine Kurtenbach, we see Western corporate greed dripping dollar signs from hungry vampire fangs in these quotes about China, “Many companies are striving to stay profitable by shifting factories to cheaper areas farther inland or to other developing countries, and a few are even resuming production in the West.… I have 15 major clients. My job is to give the best advice I can give. I tell it like it is. I tell them, put your helmet on, it’s going to get ugly,” said Goodwin…”
From BindApple.com comes this statement as if no one else in the world works these hours, “Foxconn and Inventec are two powerful brands that not many of you heard of. When Apple signed a partnership with these manufacturers, the average worker, lived and worked in the factory, doing more than 60 hours of work in a week.”
America and most Western nations are not paradigms of virtue. Labor in the West didn’t get where it is today without a struggle. All one has to do is look at history to discover what it took to earn more for less hours and be treated with “some” respect in the workplace.
If you spend time at the AFL-CIA’s Labor History Timeline in America, you will discover that in 1791, the first labor strike in the building trades took place in Philadelphia demanding a 10-hour workday bill of rights. In 1835, there was a general strike for a 10-hour workday in the same city.
When there was a national uprising of railroad workers in 1877, ten Irish coal miners were hanged in Pennsylvania and later nine more were hanged. Then in 1914, there was the Ludlow Massacre of 13 women and children and 7 men in a Colorado coal miners’ strike. In 1934, during the Great Depression, there was an upsurge in strikes, including a national textile strike, which failed.
Click on the Child Labor Public Education Project and you will learn that “Forms of child labor, including indentured servitude and child slavery, have existed throughout American history.” In fact, “(American) factory owners viewed them (children) as more manageable, cheaper, and less likely to strike.”
This situation in the US didn’t change until, “Child labor began to decline as the labor and reform movements grew and labor standards in general began improving, increasing the political power of working people and other social reformers to demand legislation regulating child labor.” Even then, it wasn’t until 1938 that child labor laws were enacted to protect America’s children from exploitation.
So, if you are one of those paradigms of virtue who feels the need to criticize what is going on in China today, consider America’s labor history before you open your mouth or finger dance your computer keyboard.
It took more than two-hundred years for the US to reach the place it is today with a standard 40-hour workweek with benefits and overtime pay for many workers, while removing child labor from the workplace.
China didn’t start until 1950, when Mao created laws that made women equal to men. Progress stopped during Mao’sGreat Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, which went on for almost thirty years.
Since 1980, China has had about thirty years to evolve, while in America the income gap between the rich and poor widens as if the US is taking backward steps while union membership shrinks.
In fact, Chinese manufactures may be building plants in the US to take advantage of cheaper labor. After all, Japanese companies like Toyota and Honda have already done that.
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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In October 2008, Stephen Yao, talked about the evolution of the Chinese legal System. During the Cultural Revolution, for ten years, China had no law or legal system. Then in 1979, Deng Xiaoping initiated the “Open Market Policy”.
Law schools, the ministry of justice and legal services were started in the early 1980s. Another milestone was in 2001, after China joined the WTO (World Trade Organization). The economic changes were taking place faster than the legal system was developing.
In 2008, the Chinese legal system had the minimum standards as recognized by the WTO.
In the video, Stephen Yao displays a chart for China’s Legal System and explains briefly what it means. The second slide shows China’s legal market overview and the multilayered legal structure.
Yao says that the death penalty must be referred to China’s higher court and the lower courts do not have the power to apply the death penalty.
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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Sulfur is the main ingredient for gunpowder. It was first developed during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD). During the Northern Sung Dynasty, in 1044 AD, the book “Essentials of Military Art” published several formulas for gunpowder production. It is ironic that the Sung Dynasty (960 – 1276 AD) used a Tang Dynasty invention to defeat them.
Several ingredients for gunpowder were in wide use for medicinal purposes during the Spring and Autumn Period of China’s history (722 – 481 BC).
According to the famous book “Records of History”, Chang Sangjun, shared secret prescriptions with Pien Ch’iao (around 500 BC), who promised not to give the secret away then became famous as a doctor of Chinese medicine.
Gunpowder was discovered a thousand years ago by accident. While mixing ingredients to find an elixir for immortality, Chinese scientists stumbled on the formula. Fireworks and rockets came first to scare away evil spirits. The irony is that gunpowder, which has killed millions used as weapons, came about during the search for eternal life.
One theory says that the knowledge of gunpowder came to Europe along the Silk Road around the beginning of the 13th century, hundreds of years after being discovered in China. It is also ironic, that Britain and France used advanced gunpowder weapons to defeat China during the 19th century in the two Opium Wars.
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.
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.
I worked in a meat market once in the early 1980s. I was the maitre d in a nightclub called the Red Onion in Southern California. The kind of meat I’m talking about is the two-legged kind where men are looking for women.
Danwei has an interesting post about a similar meat market in China without the nightclub. In China, marriage is often based on how much a man earns. Since there is a growing shortage of women in China, men have to compete. The winner is usually the one who earns the most. Danwei posted a letter from a university student in China, who is attracted to a beautiful girl in one of his classes, but he has nothing to offer and is ready to give up before asking her for a date.
This Video emphasizes that fact. A Chinese laborer who doesn’t earn much and doesn’t own a home wants a wife but he can’t find one because men who earn more than him are getting all the available women.
Even if a girl likes a guy, the parents are going to get involved at some point to make sure the man earns enough to provide for their daughter. If the parents are against the marriage, the odds are it will not happen.
Don’t forget, the biggest reason for divorce in the US is due to money problems—something Chinese women want to avoid. This is a case where love loses to money.
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.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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