Second Question [Parfitt]: You (Lofthouse) mention Mao Zedong in your first question and reference his statement that women hold up half the sky. The Chinese Communist Party’s official line about Mao’s rule is that it was 70 percent good and 30 percent bad. What’s your assessment of Mao’s reign?
A Museum of Tragedy near China’s port city of Shantou offers evidence of why most Chinese decided Mao was 30%”bad”.
The “bad” refers to Mao’s Cultural Revolution [1966 – 1976] leading to the many suicides of those that could not cope, as Mao’s teenage Red Guard waged war on Confucianism and persecuted people accused of bourgeois tendencies.
In addition, there were millions of deaths by starvation mostly in 1960 caused by droughts and food shortages during Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
Opinions of how many died of starvation from 1959 into early 1961 vary dramatically, and it is a controversial hot-button issue. Claims range from 16.5 million to a high of 60 million.
For example, Henry Kissinger on page 184 of “On China” says, “From 1959 to 1962, China experienced one of the worst famines in human history, leading to the deaths of over twenty million people.”
Judith Banister’s work, China’s Changing Population [Stanford University Press – 1987], agrees with Kissinger’s quote.
In fact, Banister shows that the greatest loss of life took place in 1960 and returned closer to normal in 1961.
It didn’t help that the US had a complete embargo of China (1949 – 1963), which was designed to cause suffering among the people leading to an overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party and a return to power of Chiang Kai-shek.
If Australia, Canada and France had not shipped wheat to China in 1961, the loss of life would have been worse.
What Mao did to earn the 70% “good” rating is due to his early land-reform policies ending feudalism in rural China, in addition to improving health care, which led to dramatic improvements in life expectancy.
In 1949, the average life expectancy was 36 years. By 1970, during the Cultural Revolution, average life expectancy was almost 62 years — a 71% improvement.
Today, life expectancy is74.68 years.
Facts show that more people benefited from Mao’s “good” policies than those that suffered from the “bad”. However, critics in the West prefer to focus on a glass almost empty instead of admitting the glass was more than half-full.
Chinese people believe the reign of the former Communist Party chairman was 70 percent good and 30 percent bad because that’s what the Communist Party tells them.
Historian Jonathan Spence tells a different story, one not muddled by contemporary life-expectancy statistics or charges against America. According to Spence, Mao’s land reform involved the brutal seizure and redistribution of property, with Mao admitting 700,000 “evil gentry” were justly killed.
The program didn’t put a dent in private ownership, but was a violent failure resulting in Party scorn.
Mao responded with his Hundred Flowers Movement and Anti-Rightist Campaign, part one in his trilogy of campaigns, which, along with the Korean War, may have caused 70 million deaths. Since Mao’s death, the Party has made significant strides in material development, the welfare state, national security, and prosperity, but locating a valid academic source concluding Mao’s reign was more beneficial than not is impossible.
Proving China prospered [on average] under Mao at the same time it suffered due to his Anti-Rightist Campaigns was easy.
Professor Stephen Thomas [University of Colorado at Denver] wrote for the World Bank’s Forum on Public Policy, “In 1949, the newly established People’s Republic of China designed and carried out economic development policies that led to an annual average economic growth rate of about 4 percent from 1953 to 1978, among the highest in the developing world…”
Then, Compton’s Living Encyclopedia says, “After the Communist revolution in 1949… Private ownership of land was abolished, but each peasant family was given a small plot to farm. Health care improved. The fluctuations in the food supply leveled off and life expectancy increased.”
I do not dispute landowners were tried, convicted and executed by the peasants they allegedly abused and exploited.
As for Mao’s policies killing 70 million—”MAY HAVE CAUSED” proves nothing.
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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First Question [Lofthouse]: Since 1949, Taiwan and mainland China have followed significantly different paths. While Taiwan held onto the old culture, the mainland went through a painful metamorphosis to rise from the ashes of the Civil War (1926 – 1949) as if it were a phoenix to be reborn.
One example of these differences may be found in the written language. While Taiwan held onto the old style of writing Mandarin, which goes back thousands of years, Mao simplified the language and instead of writing vertically from bottom right in columns toward the top left, the written language on the mainland was simplified with fewer strokes and is written from the top in horizontal lines from left to right ending in the lower right corner as Western writing does.
In addition, Mao saw Confucianism as a weakness that led to China’s decline in the 19th century as the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation on the earth — a position it held for about two thousand years. To rid Communist China of this weakness, Mao declared war on Confucius.
However, piety, which is a result of Confucian ethics and morals since the Han Dynasty, remains strong in both cultures. Since you lived in Taiwan and taught ESL for ten years and then traveled as a tourist through mainland China, how would you describe the differences you observed between how piety is practiced in mainland China and Taiwan?
First, as the term pertains to Taiwan, there is no such thing as mainland China. There is China, and there is Taiwan. The word ‘mainland’ denotes a connection, but there isn’t one and never really has been. The Dutch, not the Chinese, were the first to establish controls over Taiwan. When the Dutch arrived, there were a few thousand Fujianese farming families living on the Western plains (they had fled China despite a Qing ban on emigration) and aboriginals living in the mountains. The Dutch were eventually sent packing by the Ming loyalist, Koxinga, who in turn was toppled by the Qing. The Qing asked the Dutch if they wanted Taiwan back. They didn’t, so, mainly to prevent the island from falling into other foreign hands, it was annexed in 1885. The Qing, remember, were Manchus, considered foreign rulers by the Han Chinese.
Even today, the Chinese commemorate their demise. The Manchus admitted they held no jurisdiction over half of Taiwan. The other half they ruled badly.
In 1895, Taiwan was ceded to Japan, and though the Japanese exploited it, living standards exceeded any province in China.
In Cairo, in 1943, Chiang Kai-shek argued that Taiwan had been stolen by the Japanese and ought to be returned.
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed, hence the mainland myth, perpetuated to this day by the Communists and the Nationalists. Approximately 90 percent of Taiwanese want nothing to do with China, and why would they?
In addition to retaining some of the finer aspects of traditional Chinese culture, such as complex characters, Taiwan has liberalized through democratization and represents a major step forward for Chinese civilization.
As for the Confucian concept of piety, it is a core cultural component, virtually identical in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macau. This is unfortunate because Confucianism is dogma. “The plague of heterodox theories can be eliminated by fierce attack,” says the Analects of Confucius. Until people realize the Analects represents only stone-age logic and dictums posing as wisdom, they will remain slaves to tyranny and history.
However, if history decides who rules a territory, the US would not exist, and Hawaii’s native population would still rule an independent country instead of being the 50th state.
Taiwan’s fate was decided by Chiang Kai-shek (a Han Chinese) when he ordered KMT troops to slaughter Taiwanese natives. He ruled Taiwan as a dictator before and after he lost China’s Civil War.
Taiwan’s history has been irrevocably altered by Chiang Kai-shek, but its fate regarding China has not been decided.
Face is a puerile concept, a license to behave however one pleases.
Guanxi is important in all societies. It only seems more prevalent in China because people discuss it.
Confucianism, Legalism, and Taoism are enlightened philosophies to those who’ve never read them. The essence of Confucianism is obedience. Legalism is Machiavellian. “A weak people means a strong state…” says The Book of Lord Shang. The Tao Te Ching urges rulers to eradicate knowledge and desire. The strains of despotism in these native ideologies speak to communism’s appeal.
Nowhere in Jonathan Spence’s Mao does it say Mao’s Cultural Revolution had to do with waging war on Confucianism. Spence notes Mao “never wrote a single comprehensive analysis of what he intended to achieve by the Cultural Revolution, or… how he expected it to proceed.”
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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Note from Blog’s host: In this discussion, Parfitt has agreed to ask me five questions and I will ask him five. After each answer, a response and then a final word will be allowed. Since each question, answer, response and final word may run 600 to a thousand words, this discussion of China and its culture will be a twelve-part series.
At times during this debate, the reader may sense that ‘Responses’ and ‘Final Words’ are clipped and often incomplete. That may be due to the fact that Parfitt and Lofthouse agreed to limit the number of words for each answer to 350 and 150 words for each ‘response’ in addition to another 150 for the ‘final word’.
In that case, readers may weigh in with comments that may request either Parfitt and/or Lofthouse to respond further. However, comments that insult and are deemed vulgar will not appear and will be “censored“.
Post 12 concludes this discussion with two 500 word ‘Closing Statements’. Each author selected the embedded videos that support his position/opinions.
Part 1 introduces the two authors showing the different paths each took to gain an understanding and education of China’s history, people and culture.
Troy lived and taught ESL in Seoul, South Korea for nearly two years and in Taipei, Taiwan for more than ten. It was in Taipei where Troy became interested in Sinology. He currently resides in Canada and is a writing consultant at a Canadian university.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of The Concubine Saga — In early 1999, he was introduced to China’s history and culture through the woman he would marry a few months later. That education has continued for more than a decade.
His wife was born in Shanghai and grew up during Mao’s Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution where she spent three years in a labor camp along with tens of millions of mainland Chinese youth to be educated in Mao’s attempt to erase the old culture and make China stronger to recover and survive the Western invasion of Asia. One of Mao’s first moves was to liberate women and elevate them to be equal to men when he famously announced that women held up half of the sky.
Since 1999, Lloyd has traveled extensively in mainland China with his wife as his tutor. In fact, he and his wife have a flat in one of the suburbs of Shanghai. He also spent about a decade learning about China through Robert Hart’s journals and letters (1835- 1911).
Hart is known as the godfather of China’s modernization. The Concubine Sage is the fictional story of Robert Hart’s early years in China and of his real-life love story with a Chinese woman, his concubine Ayaou. Lloyd’s reference library of China fills several shelves in his home office and he has written more than a half-million words about China for this Blog.
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.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
In addition, at Answers Yahoo.com, Genxi asked, “Why do Americans lack filial piety? At the international level, filial piety is very common… After all, parents definitely would care and protect their children unquestionably—ideal condition—, but why can’t adult Americans have filial piety toward their ageing parents in exchange?” (the few responses to this question are interesting)
However, anyone that believes Confucianism may define China might be surprised to discover that Legalism, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Christianity, etc have also influenced the foundation and moral structure of China’s culture. While China has always had a diversity of religious beliefs, filial piety has been common to almost all of them and it worked.
The result, for more than two-thousand years, China was the wealthiest and most powerful, technologically advanced nation on the planet until the 19th century.
As for the United States, back in January 2010, I read a post at Parent Base.com that said any damn fool can be a parent, and although I agree, I thought North America is not a comfortable place to be if you become a geezer.
Our daughter called me a geezer once, which means a man who is (usually) old and/or eccentric, when she was joking around during her early high school years. She was not raised to be a narcissistic self-esteem child but knowing many American children that were raised to have high self-esteem did rub off resulting in that rude comment.
Today, she attends Stanford and the degree of respect she demonstrates for older family members is reassuring. I hope the self-esteem residue wore off.
When I was a child, youngsters were to be seen and not heard, which means we treated our elders with respect, and surprise of surprises, I was born in America and I am a Caucasian of British/Irish ancestry. I’m not Asian or Chinese so I suspect piety was once widespread in American/Western culture but during the 20th century suffered a steep decline.
One exception would be the Amish community in the United States. The Amish are a stark contrast to the American concept of individualism—not only do the Amish encourage reciprocal family assistance but the entire Amish community is responsible for helping each other, including the elderly. According to Reuters, the US Amish population grew 86% to 231,000 in 2008 from 125,000 in 1992 and is set to double by 2026.
However, the Amish are not the norm. After the spread of television, the birth of Disneyland, fast food, MTV, the Internet and the iPod generation, a cancer called self-esteem spread through much of American culture. That self-esteem youth worshiping virus killed off much of the ‘respect’ for one’s elders among many of America’s youth.
In China, what America seems to have lost survives and is the norm. In addition, in Asian countries such as the Philippians, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, etc., piety is still strong and is learned in the family—not from a pulpit.
Collins English Dictionary (Harper Collins Publishing) says piety is a devotion and obedience to parents and superiors and says it (piety) is “now rare” (in the West).
In fact, a comment left by an “Aussie in China” on another post verifies that piety is still taught in most Chinese families since piety plays a significant role in the morality of China.
Aussie in China said, “from my experience here, I would argue strongly that there is a commendable level of morality among many of the young Chinese. The issues of morality are well drummed into them at school and at home.”
The decline of the “first of all virtues” in the West first appeared during the 1960s with the spread of the self-esteem movement among American parents. The history of this movement goes back to the late 19th century and by the 1960s, it permeated American culture in addition to many of its private and public schools.
The America of today is not the America prior to World War II, and the United States owes its greatness to that previous generation, which was not raised to have high self-esteem and spurn piety and family values.
One example of this moral decline in the US happened to me one night during the summer of 2008 when a pack of young boys taunted me as they raced in and out of our steep driveway on bicycles.
“Hey, old man,” one boy shouted, “you can’t stop us.”
I called the police and filed a report, and the next day walked the neighborhood door to door seeking support to stop the harassment that had gone on for two years—mostly during the summers when school was out and these children had nothing better to do but run wild without proper parental/adult supervision.
These boys wanted to race their bikes down our steep driveway for a cheap thrill, and I dared to tell them not to do it so they defied me as often as possible.
The reason why I didn’t want them playing in our driveway is because the United States has become a litigation nation and if one of those boys hurt himself on our property, the parents might take us to court and possibly destroy us financially—even take our home from us.
When I talked to the mother of one of these boys, she asked, “What was your reason for not letting them play on your driveway?”
Did I need a reason?
Since the episode with that gang of boys (I’m sure they all had a high sense of self-esteem), that mother who thought I needed a reason to keep them off our driveway, doesn’t talk to me or acknowledge that I am alive if we pass each other on the street.
After all, I ratted out her precious, perfect, wild child and called the police on his pack of young friends. In addition, one of the other boys argued with me the first time I politely asked them to go elsewhere for their thrills.
Of course, as a teacher for thirty years, I’ve heard American parents say, “kids will be kids” to explain this sort of behavior.
However, I do not accept that excuse for defiance, lack of respect, rudeness and unruly behavior. In fact, the way children act is often linked to how parents raise them and children raised by self-esteem obsessed parents are often the worst ones, while children raised to value piety, which means respect and obedience to parents and superiors/adults, are often the best.
In reading a post at Always on the Verge, I discovered a misguided individual that inadvertently advocates a world overrun by noisy children that do what they want whenever they want wherever they want.
The author of the post says, “I have always had issues with this saying (children should be seen and not heard). However, that Blogger called “Webbhouston” does not consider that being quiet around adults is also a sign of respect for those older people that go to work daily to feed the family and pay for a roof over their heads to avoid becoming homeless and hungry.
That, by itself, should be enough for children to learn to keep quiet around adults. Children are not an alien species. They are humans, but when they are born, they are wild animals that parents and adults, such as teachers, tame and train to fit into society.
A cartoon (used for educational purposes only) that dramatically illustrates the decline of piety and family values in America.
I searched for a Blog that talks about teachers being abused by students and found thousands that did nothing but bash teachers. Then I found Who’s to Blame … (a dim light in the wilderness of blame the teacher).
It seems that only a few people in the West care what happens to teachers (Finland may be the only country in the West where teachers are given the respect they deserve and Finland’s education system is one of the best in the world. In Fact, the World’s Happiness Index from Forbes.com places Finland second of 155 countries as the happiest place to live).
Then months after I first wrote this post, which appeared January 2010 as a nine part series, I launched Crazy Normal – the Classroom Expose, another Blog to help fill that lack of support for teachers in the US.
Then there was a second incident I experienced that further demonstrates the loss of piety and family values in American culture.
During the summer of 2007, we had just pulled into a motel parking lot in Southern California after driving several hundred miles. A teen with his girlfriend wanted to rent a room for an hour at the same motel. As we waited to check in, we heard the motel manager say, “No way!”
The boy turned to me, and asked, “Hey, old man, can you give us a ride to the next motel? They will not rent us a room here.”
I’m sure this adolescent was out for quick sex. He probably didn’t even know the girl’s name or care. Nevertheless, the lack of respect was obvious.
Today, it is as if adults are expected to be invisible and silent while youngsters get whatever they want such as a TV, Internet connection and video games in the child’s bedroom.
In most of North America, we have spawned more than one generation of narcissists with no respect for piety or understanding of what family values means and many are now giving birth to the next generation.
More than twenty-four hundred years ago, Confucius dedicated his life to the moral training of his culture. He lived during the Warring States period before China was unified. Living with all of that violence and death, he dreamed of a land where people could live happily and harmoniously together.
To learn more about Confucius and piety, check out this site at the Journal for International Relations. I’m not saying what Confucius taught was perfect but it has served China well for thousands of years and still plays a vital role in that complex culture.
Confucius said, “The reason why the gentleman teaches filial piety is not because it is to be seen in the home and everyday life. He teaches filial piety in order that man may respect all those who are fathers in the world.
“He teaches brotherliness in the younger brother, in order that man may respect all those who are elder brothers in the world. He teaches the duty of the subject, in order that man may respect all who are rulers.
“Those who love their parents dare not show hatred to others.” Confucius taught. “Those who respect their parents dare not show rudeness to others…”
While visiting China, I have never heard, “Hey, old man.”
However, there are always exceptions when it comes to piety. Even in China, there will be the occasional rude individual. The thing is, I haven’t seen or heard one yet, and I have visited China many times since 1999.
I did have a disrespectful, American born Asian student (once) during the thirty years I was a teacher.
I also had a small number of hard-working, respectful students from all ethnic groups—even those that were American born, but those types seem to be a dying breed.
My best students were usually immigrants that came to the United States after living in their birth country for several years where the word “self-esteem” was never heard and parents taught the value of piety instead.
In addition, I had one American born student enter high school as a freshman after being home taught by his Caucasian, conservative Christian parents. He was a great person—polite and he worked hard to further his education.
It was obvious that piety and/or family values had been instilled in this one individual by his parents, a daunting task in a country obsessed with stuffing a high sense of self-esteem in its youth.
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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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Before 1949, Chinese culture was heavily influenced by Confucian thought and poetry, and the arts were extremely popular for their aesthetic and moral importance.
The goal of Confucianism was to create gentlemen that carried themselves with grace, spoke correctly and demonstrated integrity in all things.
Confucius believed that the most important lessons for obtaining a moral education were to be found in the Book of Songs, because many of its poems were both beautiful and good.
In fact, to Confucius, the role of poetry and art played an important role in the moral education of a gentleman as well as that of society in general.
For this reason, before 1949, the cultivation of poetry and the arts was considered more important than that of science or business.
Prior to 1949, to have a son majoring in the arts was a source of pride for most Chinese parents.
However, today, if a parent says his or her son is majoring in the arts (such as poetry, literature, or painting) at this or that university, (shocked) silence is the usual response and many Chinese parents would not want a daughter to marry such a man since this career choice may often lead to a dismal future.
A better choice today might be to see one’s daughter marry a banker or an I.T. major working for Alibaba, China’s e-Bay, or Baidu, China’s Google.
This cultural shift may best be seen by popular majors in China’s modern universities.
According to a recent survey conducted by Beijing University, the 10 most popular college majors in China recently were I.T. (information technology, which refers to anything related to computing technology, such as networking, hardware, software, and the Internet), electronics, languages (study of foreign languages such as English), law, mechanics, architecture, accounting and finance, journalism, medicine, environment and business management.
In comparison, according to College Stats.org , the most popular college majors in the United States are biology, business, communications (journalism), computer science, criminal justice (law), elementary education, marketing, nursing, psychology, and political science and/or sociology.
If we compare popular college majors in China to those in the United States, which country appears to be on the right track?
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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