The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 2/5

January 1, 2012

It is a fact that China has done more to reduce severe poverty than any nation on the earth and 90% of global poverty reduction starting in the 1980s took place in China. In addition, the Chinese Communist Party, starting in 1949, was the first government in China’s long history to have an organized plan to reduce poverty in that country.

Even during Mao’s era, there were annual improvements in the economy, health, life span, mortality rates and lifestyles in spite of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

To create an in-depth profile of China, I’ve written more than a thousand posts and a half million words. To talk about the reason India’s economy will not surpass China for a long time led to this post.

Then, Manjeet Pavarti, an Indian citizen, challenged my opinions on this subject. It is obvious that Pavarti must be a nationalist who loves his country—an admirable trait except when a patriot is misguided and possibly misinformed and/or uninformed.

In Pavarti’s last comment of October 16, 2010 at 01:33, he challenged my sources—a photojournalist (Tom Carter) with extensive experience traveling in China and India, and my use of evidence from The Economist.

To correct the shortcomings of the first post on this topic, I talked to Gurnam S. Brard, the author of East of Indus, My Memoires of Old Punjab. He agreed with my opinion and said there are many in India like Pavarti that refuse to see the problems that hold India back from achieving its potential.

I also talked to Alon Shalev, author of The Accidental Activist. Shalev told me of his extensive trip through India with his wife and his impressions were the same as Tom Carter and Gurnam Brard.

Next, is Foreign Policy magazine’s Prime Numbers, Mega Cities, where there are no opinions—just facts. I’m going to cover “three” that are roadblocks to India future economic growth.

Continued on January 2, 2012 in The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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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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Note: This revised and edited post first appeared on October 22, 2010 as India Falling Short

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The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 1/5

December 31, 2011

This post was originally a result of a comment on the China Law Blog, which chastised me because, “He wanted me to provide a super-quick summary of The Economist cover story comparing India with China, but it (I) did not,” which was correct then.

Returning to this subject is because of my twelve-part debate with Troy Parfitt. Mr. Parfitt claimed, “Corruption in India isn’t germane to the debate.” In fact, most if not all of the facts and comparisons used during the debate were not relevant according to Mr. Parfitt unless those facts supported his opinions of China.

At one point, Mr. Parfitt mentioned reviews of his book in Publisher’s Weekly in defense of his book not being racisit. He claimed the South China Morning Post didn’t say that. Neither did Publishers Weekly, the Korean Herald, The Vancouver Sun… and none of the Amazon reviewers [that may change].

However, Publisher’s Weekly [PW] did say this of his book, “The result is mostly travelogue told from an outsider’s perspective, contextualized with overviews of major events in Chinese history. Parfitt argues that China will not rule the world, because as a nation it is more interested in the appearance of success than actual substance. He suggests that culturally, China has little to offer…” In addition, PW says, “his book lacks the precise facts and figures that he decries in other books promoting Chinese dominance.”

Basically, this is what the China Law Blog complained of in my post, Comparing India and China’s Economic Engines.

The facts and figures missing from Mr. Parfitt’s “Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas” are important as the China Law Blog says. To judge one country without comparing its government, economy and culture to other countries offers no balance for readers to make informed decisions.

Continued on January 1, 2012 in he China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – 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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Note: This revised and edited post first appeared on October 22, 2010 as India Falling Short

28 Comments | China, Communism, democracy, economy, food, health care, history, India, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Sending a Message the Wrong Way

November 20, 2010

Yasheng Huang at Foreign Policy magazine says in an opinion piece — identified as an “argument” — that the US should bypass China’s government and “somehow” directly reach the Chinese people with the message that the US knows what’s best for China.

Considering China’s history with the West starting with the first Opium War and the West’s support of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan and Islamic Separatists, outspoken Chinese democracy activists and religious cults such as the Falun Gong, I’m sure that would be well received — not.

Wanting to know more about Yasheng Huang, I discovered that he has a long title and is a professor of political economy and international management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also holds a special-term professorship at Fudan University with an honorary professorship at Hunan University.

Impressive resume. You may want to check it out. Just click on his name above. I’m sure the good professor wears his many titles well.

Professor Yasheng Huang may be right when he says, “To be sure, the vast majority of serious economists are absolutely right that in the long run, a currency revaluation is in the interest of the Chinese. But this is politics, where the issue is not about the technocratic intricacies of who is right and who is wrong.”

However, the professor is wrong to suggest that Washington D.C. find a way to communicate more effectively with the Chinese people by bypassing China’s government.

Consider how Americans would take to China’s Communist Party bypassing Washington and going directly to the entire US population with a huge media campaign to win them over.

The US already tried that in the Middle East and that hasn’t worked well. Islamic Fundamentalists have done a much better job winning Muslims over to their cause than the US has.

In fact, a report by Professor Frank Griffel at YaleGlobal Online makes a good case for why Professor Yasheng Huang’s suggestion won’t work in China.

Griffel writes, “Muslim fundamentalist movements encourage the use of the internet among their followers, for instance, not in order to sell something by e-mail order, but rather to promote the creation of a network of like-minded people who share a common understanding of what ‘Islam’ means and what it advocates.”

The same is true of the Chinese, who use the Internet differently than people in the West and are promoting a network of like-minded people who share a common understanding of what being “Chinese” means.

Most Chinese are not interested in being told how to think or what to do by anyone outside China.

I suggest that the good professor stick to economics and let the politicians do their job even if they don’t always get it right. Doesn’t he understand that it is impossible to even get a majority of Americans to listen and agree on one concept?

Learn about the Power of the Peasant

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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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American Grasshoppers and Chinese Ants

May 26, 2010

In The Ant and the Grasshopper, as retold from Aesop’s fable and illustrated by Amy Lowry Poole, the grasshopper plays, while the ants work and save diligently gathering grain for winter. The ants urge the grasshopper to prepare for hard times, but the grasshopper will not be bothered.

After all, under Confucianism, absolute obedience to authority, a strict family structure and hard work have been valued for more than two millennia so the ants keep working while grasshoppers play.

In Time to Defriend China, Elizabeth Economy (Is that really Liz’s last name—Economy?) and Adam Segal say we should stop negotiating with China. This post at the “Foreign Policy” Blog, like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, is self-centered and out of touch.

Liz and Adam say China isn’t cooperating globally as if China has an obligation. They say, “The sticking points in U.S.-China relations are mirrored in China’s relations with much of the rest world. The European Union and Japan, for example, find it no easier to negotiate with China on issues such as trade, climate change, cyber conflict and the Dalai Lama.”

Really— climate change and cyber conflict? Didn’t China recently announce they were going to cut carbon emissions by 40% or more in the next few years while President Obama thought the US might reach 17%? As for cyber conflict, that’s a two-way street, and the Dalai Lama’s claims are a mix of big lies and small truth.

Meanwhile, China has its hands full with a greater challenge—the 1.2 billion Chinese outside the Communist Party who expect a better life.

In 1950, China was generating 0.005 kilowatts of electricity and much of the country was without.  Under Mao, there was the tragedy of The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution costing tens of millions of lives. It wasn’t until Mao was gone that China started modernizing and improving the lifestyles of hundreds of millions of people.

Today, China is breaking records building modern cities and growing the second largest economy in the world and with a savings account. However, China still has 750 million people without proper medical care, electricity or modern connivances. In addition, they have problems with Tibet and with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province, who want to break free with support from Hollywood and maybe the CIA.

Then there is the Taiwan issue. If the US had not interfered in 1949, that issue would not exist. Taiwan would be part of China today and America would have a larger Chinese population.  Don’t forget that the Kuomintang until the 1980s, was a dictatorship that America supported and the Taiwanese were burdened with martial law for more than thirty years.

When China meets its goals at home, then “maybe,” China will be willing to help the West.

Hu Jintao and Obama shaking hands

Instead of walking away from negotiations as Liz and Adam suggest, the US and the rest of the developed world should find ways to offer a win-win situation that helps China meet its internal goals. How will China do that if they allow the global exchange rate for their currency to fluctuate putting millions of Chinese out of work? If America wants to grow jobs, the US must find ways to do so without hurting the Chinese worker any more than these people have already been hurt. Since the 2008 global economic crises caused by American greed, more than 20 million Chinese workers lost their jobs and 70,000 factories went out of business.

Like those ants in the fable, don’t expect the Chinese to come running to rescue nations that squandered their future while China is still building one. A better opinion on this topic might be this one from Martin Wolf in the Financial Times.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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