Japan: does democracy work in Asia? Part 1 of 6

January 19, 2016

The partnership between capitalism and alleged multi-party democracies in Asia is an ironic joy to behold.

After spending hours researching Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, India and Taiwan, I understand why the West and America, in particular, keeps pressuring mainland China to allow democracy to flourish.

The best way to discover what happens to China if it were to become a multi-party democracy is to look at the Asian democracies surrounding it.

Let’s start with Japan.

In 2009, the Guardian said of Japan, “After more than 50 years of almost uninterrupted power, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been buried in a general election. Once before, in 1993, change came when a coalition of opposition parties briefly took power, but the LDP still held on to a majority in the Diet’s powerful lower house. This time … the center-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took more than 300 of 480 seats in the lower house.”

Then in the 2012 election, the LDP took back the majority of seats Japan’s National Diet. The National Diet is Japan’s bicameral legislature. It is composed of a lower house called the House of Representatives, and an upper house, called the House of Councillors.

After the 2012 election, the LDP held 294 seats in the 480 seat House of Representatives and in 2013 took 115 of the 242 seats in the House of Councillors.

The Guardian reported that the DPJ, which ended the five-decade rule of the LDP from 2009 – 2012, was “funded to some degree by the U.S., (and) was put in place to marginalize all left-wing opposition. This involved some strong-arm tactics, especially against the unions …”

Japan has a long trail of corruption.

Werner Pacha’s study of Corruption in Japan from an Economist’s Perspective says, “Corruption can quite simply be understood as the use of public office for private gains.”

Then Pacha reveals a series of scandals starting with the 1954 Shipbuilding Scandal, which contributed to the collapse of the Yoshida cabinet sending one person to prison of the 71 arrested.

Next was the Lockheed Scandal of 1976, resulting in the arrest of Prime Minister Tanaka for having received payments from Lockheed (an American defense contractor) of about 500 million Yen.

In 1988-89, there was the Recruit Scandal, which concluded with the resignation of Prime Minister Takeshita on April 1989.

In 1991, the Kyôwa Affair, another scandal, included former Prime Minister Suzuki and Kyôwa, a steel-girder construction firm.

Briefly, there followed the Sagawa Kyûbin Scandal of 1991-1993, the Tax Evasion Scandal of 1993,  the Genecon Corruption Scandal of 1993, the Sôkaiya Scandals of 1997, and the 1996 – 1998 Scandals within the Elite Bureaucracy.

The CIA (in 2007) reported that 15.7 percent of the people in Japan lived below the poverty line. In comparison, according to the CIA, only 2.8 percent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) live below the poverty line.

Continued with South Korea on January 20, 2016 in Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

#1 - Joanna Daneman review posted June 19 2014

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The Rape of Nanking – Part 2/2

January 22, 2013

One of the greatest atrocities in history was the rape of Nanking. Most humans are capable of great evil and this is one horrific example. Several hundred thousand were raped, 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.

Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking was published November 1997 and became a bestseller while Japan tried to discredit the book. Iris Chang committed suicide on November 10, 2004. She was 36 and left behind a husband and two-year-old child.

Then in 2011, The Flowers of War was released, a movie that focuses on the rape of Nanking, starring Christian Bale.

Roger Ebert wrote in his movie review, “The Rape of Nanking (1937-38), one of the most horrifying atrocities in history, during which the Imperial Japanese Army invaded the Chinese capital city and slaughtered an estimated 300,000 civilians, usually raping the women first. It is one thing for civilians to die in the course of a war, and another for them to be hunted down and wiped out on a personal basis for the crime of their race. … “The Flowers of War” is in many ways a good film, as we expect from Zhang Yimou (a Chinese director who has won more than 58 international awards that included two at the Cannes Film Festival and one at the Sundance Film Festival.)”

What bothered me about Ebert’s review is the ignorance of his conclusion.

Ebert wrote, “Now let me ask you: Can you think of any reason the character John Miller is needed to tell his story? Was any consideration given to the possibility of a Chinese priest? Would that be asking for too much?”

Yes, it would be asking too much because if the priest had been Chinese, he would have been shot down the moment the Japanese troops came into the church and the young girls would have been raped and murdered followed by the rape and murder of the prostitutes once they were discovered. Then the church probably would have been destroyed. Without an American as the Christian priest, there would have been no story to tell.

My wife and I enjoyed this movie, felt it was well done and highly recommend it.

Is there a reason why the Western media continues to avoid and even ignore what happened in Nanking while continuing to remind the world of the so-called massacre of a few hundred students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 that did not happen? The protests in Tiananmen Square did take place but there is no evidence of students being killed, as the Western media continues to remind us.

Return to The Rape of Nanking – Part 1 and/or discover more about The Tiananmen Square Hoax

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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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The Rape of Nanking – Part 1/2

January 21, 2013

Although China has suffered from internal war and strife, the Han Chinese have seldom invaded another nation outside of what we know as China today in its four-thousand year history. In addition, until the 1980s, China was almost always self-sufficient. After the first emperor unified China, to wage war on neighboring countries to conquer and rule over them was not part of the Chinese character.

Nanking was the capital of China from the third to the 6th century. In the 14th century, the first Ming Emperor made Nanking the capital again. To protect the capital, the largest city wall in the world was built. It was fifty-feet high, forty-feet wide and more than twenty-five miles long.


Part 2 of this video continues the Rape of Nanking and it is so shocking and disturbing, you must go to YouTube and sign in showing that you are at least 18. If you do not wish to watch Part 2, the next post will continue to report about the Rape of Nanking, and it will not be as disturbing.
Part 2, The Rape of Nanking

On July 1937, Japan attacked China, and Chiang Kai-shek was the commander of China’s army and navy.  The battle for Shanghai came first. Tens of thousands of innocent Chinese were killed while 300 thousand Chinese troops died. After losing Shanghai, the Chinese army retreated to Nanking.

The Japanese soldiers were ordered to burn all, steal all, and kill all as they advanced through the countryside toward Nanking. It is estimated that 300 thousand innocent Chinese were murdered in that military campaign.

For over one-hundred days, Japanese bombers bombed Nanking, while Chinese troops fought fiercely defending the city. Eventually, Chang Kai-shek fled with most of his generals and government officials, but ordered one general to stay behind with the army and fight.

After Nanking fell to the Japanese, several hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered, and during World War II between 3 million to more than 10 million civilians, mostly Chinese, were killed by the Japanese occupation forces.

Continued on January 22, 2013, in The Rape of Nanking – Part 2, and/or discover The Roots of Madness

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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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Scapegoating China and Manipulating the Opinions of Americans – Part 2/4

November 6, 2012

Once we discover how many times the United States has had one financial disaster after another, we start to understand why China must be used as a scapegoat to distract many Americans and give them a victim to blame for lost jobs and low pay.

In another example, Business Pundit.com mentions the 10 Most Bizarre Economic Bubbles in History.  One example was US Dot-com Bubble that burst on March 10, 2000 resulting in a mild but long-felt recession, and the stock market crash of 2000-2002 caused the loss of $5 trillion in the market value of US companies from March 2000 to October 2002.

I’ve left out many other global financial disasters such as those taking place in Israel (1983), Sweden (1990s), Japan (1990), Mexico (1994), Russia (1998), Turkey (2001), Argentina (2001), Iceland (2008), etc.

Then there is the global financial disaster of 2007 – 2008. Total losses are estimated in trillions of U.S. dollars globally. Between January and October of 2008, owners of stocks in U.S. corporations suffered about $8 trillion in losses while losses in other countries averaged about 40%.


Financial Crisis History Lesson – Part 2

Global Issues.org says, “While the Western mainstream media has often hyped up a threat posed by a growing China, the World Bank’s chief economist, (Lin Yifu, a well respected Chinese academic) notes ‘Relatively speaking, China is a country with scarce capital funds and it is hardly the time for us to export these funds and pour them into a country profuse with capital like the U.S.'”

I think what Lin Yifu is talking about is not the US National Federal Debt but the fact that US corporate profits just hit an all-time high … Source: Business Insider.com

During the second 2012 Presidential Debate, Romney mentioned China seven times. He blamed China’s currency manipulation for the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US, and promised to “crack down on China when they cheat.” Source: The New Republic.com

However, what Mitt Romney did not say is the number of jobs lost in China due to the 2007 US financial crisis that swept the globe. “After August 2008, the number of orders filled by many export oriented enterprises dropped precipitously, and thousands of factories in the coastal region, especially in the Pearl River Delta, were closed. The impact was most serious on the rural migrant labor force. … In absolute terms, it corresponds to a loss of 23 million jobs. Rural migrant labor dropped from 140 million to 117 million with an unemployment rate of 16.4% in early 2009.” Source: The Global Economic Crisis and Unemployment in China

Continued on October 31, 2012 in Scapegoating China … 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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Is China a Republic? – Part 2/4

January 23, 2012

It appears that democracies come in several types. According to Democracy Building.info, there are three basic types of democracy—the Direct Democracy [ex. Switzerland], the Presidential Democracy [ex. USA, France] and the Parliamentary Democracy [ex. UK, Germany, Spain, Italy].

As for checks and balances, the parliamentary system offers few effective checks and balances [remember that China doesn’t offer checks and balances either].

In the UK, the Prime Minister, as head of state, is not elected. He or she is the leader of the majority party and may stay in power as long as his or her party is the majority. One of the main criticisms of many parliamentary systems is that the head of government is in almost all cases not directly elected by the people.

There are two types of parliamentary systems.  One is the unicameral system, which means it only has one single house or parliament. Forty-four countries fit this description. Examples are Denmark, Finland, Greece, Israel, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Sweden and Turkey.

Then there is the bicameral system [thirty-three countries] of a parliamentary government, which has two houses, an upper and a lower chamber. Examples of this form of democracy are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the European Union, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Spain, Thailand and the United Kingdom.

Let’s see how China’s type of government compares and decide if it is a democracy, republic or a dictatorship.


Democracy From the Bottom Up (The Carter Center)

The Carter Center says, “More than 600,000 villages across China are participating in a national movement toward meaningful democracy—democracy from the bottom up—in a communist nation of 1.3 billion people. For more than a decade, at the invitation of the Chinese government, The Carter Center has aided this effort by helping to standardize election practices among villages and by promoting good governance and citizen participation.”

According to Rural Life in China at Facts and Details.com, “the 2010 census [reported that], 51.3 percent of China’s population lives in rural areas. This is down from 63.9 percent in the 2000 census, which used a different counting system, and over 95 percent in the 1920s. There are around 800 million rural peasants and migrant workers—roughly, 500 million farmers and 300 million to 400 million excess unskilled rural laborers… There are around 1 million villages in China, about one third of the world’s total.  Each village has an average of 916 people.”

That means about 549.6 million rural Chinese vote in democratic village elections every three years.

By contrast, in the 2010 US national election 37.8% (90.6 million) of the voting-age population turned out, and in 2008 only 56.8% (132.6 million) did.  In 2008, the voting age population was 231.2 million and in 2010, it was almost 236 million.  If the majority of people do not vote in an election, does that mean the democracy is broken?

I recommend reading Rural Life in China at Facts and Details.com.  It is well balanced and points out the way it was and the way it is.  Although I did not read every word, I didn’t see any China bashing going on. It was not an indictment of China. However, I am sure a critic [read that enemy] of China could easily cherry pick this article and select a few pull quotes to support more misleading mudslinging at the CCP while ignoring what life was like in rural China before 1949.

Continued on January 24, 2012 in Is China a Republic – 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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