Americans doing Business in China – Part 1/16

February 21, 2012

Before I started putting this series of posts together, I read an ABC News piece by Bill Weir on “A Trip to the iFactory: ‘Nightline’ Gets an Unprecedented Glimpse Inside Apple’s Chinese Core” — (Note: clever play on words.)

Weir’s piece is a long one but there are some telling points I’m going to share before I launch into a series of guest posts from an American that did business in China successfully for a number of years. Each one of these guest posts stands alone but provides a glimpse into another person’s experience doing business in China.

However, in 2010, Apple was crucified in the Western media due to a number of suicide at Foxconn, which is the Taiwan owned company that assembles/manufactures about 90 percent of Apple’s products. If you were not aware of it before, many Taiwanese do business in China and Foxconn is an example.

In his piece, Weir said, “They (the suicides) went up during a three-month span in the spring of 2010, when nine Foxconn workers jumped to their deaths. A total of 18 Foxconn employees took their own lives, or tried to, in recent years and given the company’s massive size, it is a suicide rate well below China’s national average. But when people started jumping in a cluster, Woo tells me that Tim Cook rallied a team of psychiatric experts for advice. They suggested nets, on the chance it might save impulsive jumpers.

“But Foxconn wasn’t Apple’s only problem. The company says they stopped a supplier named Wintek from using a toxic chemical to clean iPhone screens after 137 workers were injured…

“Apple says they have been ordering audits of its suppliers since 2006, and since 2007 have been publishing the sometimes disturbing results…

“It is a Monday after a Chinese holiday, and since many overworked migrants will just stay home, the people who lined up before dawn know that the chances of getting an assembly line job are better than average. And in a country of 1.3 billion, where jobs are scarce, getting there first matters; especially for their families back in the village, where most of their paycheck will end up…

“Starting salary is around $285 a month or $1.78 an hour. And even with the maximum 80 hours of overtime a month, the Chinese government considers them too poor to withdraw any payroll taxes…

“We mostly found people who face their days through soul-crushing boredom and deep fatigue. Some complained of being overworked, others complained of being under worked and almost all said they were underpaid…

“We do have labor unions at Foxconn … but it’s not a freely elected labor union yet. I expect to see that in the next year or two, they will become more like a collective bargaining union, and they will be freely elected. In fact, I see that some legislations in more progressive provinces (of China) would require labor unions to be sitting on the board of companies…”

The exclusive full report from ABC’s “Nightline” will air Tuesday, February 21 at 11:35 p.m. US ET/PT. This link to Hulu is where much of the full episodes of “Nightline” are posted for online streaming the day after the original broadcast.

Continued February 22, 2012 in Americans doing Business in China – Part 2 (a guest post)

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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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6 Comments | America, business, capitalism, China, economy, expatriates, expatriots | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The “Mandate of Heaven’s” Gobal Revelation – Part 2/2

May 15, 2011

Global history shows that not all previous civilizations collapsed at the same time.

After the Western Roman Empire (500 AD) and the Han Dynasty (219 AD) were gone, the Byzantine Empire thrived in the Middle East for almost a thousand years (500 – 1453 AD), while the Tang Dynasty survived until 906 AD and the Yuan Dynasty (the Mongols) to 1368 AD to be replaced by the Ming then Qing Dynasties.

The British Empire survived until 1947 then vanished as an empire as the United States became a global super power after World War II.

However, many people are not aware of The Mandate of Heaven’s cycle, which leads to behavior that repeats the same mistakes that caused the fall of other civilizations.

American style democracy, capitalism, socialism, jet planes, the combustion engine, telephones, electricity, the Internet, and the iPad are not going to save civilization, as we know it today.

The reason for this is that human nature is what causes the downfall of civilizations.

History shows that during the good times at the height of a civilization such as Rome or the Han Dynasty, most people take the quality of life for granted as if it will never end.  Once that happens, the end begins.


The Mandate of Heaven explained on a global scale by Warren Edward Pollock

In the video, Warren Pollack explains how the Communist Party returned China to stability after chaos and anarchy swept China after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. If the Party continues to maintain domestic stability and keep people working, China may survive as the civilization it is becoming for a few centuries before the next collapse.

Since Mao died in 1976, the internal goal of the People’s Republic of China has been domestic stability. With domestic stability, we see China returning to that period in the dynastic cycle where harmony and prosperity rules leading to a period of stability.

To understand what happened in China, I suggest reading The Roots of Madness.

Edward Pollock says, “If China stood as the world’s top country, it would not act like the United States, which has been irresponsible, lazy and greedy and engaged in robbery and cheating. They (US)  have brought economic recession to the whole world.”

If we look to the dynastic cycle as a guide, it would seem that the United States has entered the cycle’s stage of decay moving toward a collapse.

However, with the weapons of mass destruction that America has in its arsenal (more than any other nation even the USSR), could the US, like a drowning man, pull the rest of global civilization down with it?

Return to The Mandate of Heaven’s Global Revelation – 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.

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