Tourists may buy live animals for the tigers to kill and eat. Chickens are the best price.
Allowing the tourists to buy live food for the tigers has to do with money – but money is not the key factor.
In artificial breeding, the park feeds the tigers a fixed diet using artificial or processed food. This diet might eventually lead to malnutrition. The most important thing for the tourists is that they are helping feed the cats.
Feeding the tigers live animals is also part of a long-term project with a goal of releasing tigers back into the wild.
There is another park near Changbai Mountain that has about fifteen specially selected tigers.
These tigers still live behind a fence. However sending tigers to the Changbai Mountains allows them to be more experienced with the natural environment.
The Hunchun Nature Reserve was established in 2001 for the protection of wild Siberian tigers and leopards.
Before releasing the tigers into the wild, the big cats must be given the appropriate wild-habitat training. The first step is for the tiger to adapt to the climate changes of the four seasons. Next, the tigers’ hunting ability must be improved.
Since the Changbai Mountains share a border with North Korea, the big cats are allowed to travel between countries. In the past, the border was divided by iron and wire mesh fences, which blocked the tigers. Now the fence is gone.
It is believed that with wild training over time and with the efforts of several generations of scientists, the tigers will finally return to nature.
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 love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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It is ironic that in the 1940s we were fighting with the Chinese against the Japanese. Then in 1950, China and the US fought against each other in North Korea and Chinese advisers were sent to assist North Vietnam to fight the US in the 1960s.
Then Nixon arrives in China in the 1970s and we were friends again.
In February 2010, I had an instant message chat with Ian Carter, an Australian expatriate living in Southeast China, and learned that during World War II in 1944 an American B-24 Liberator bomber vanished without a trace in Southeast China.
Fifty-two years later in 1996, farmers discovered the bomber’s wreckage and the remains of the ten-man crew on Mao’er Shan (Little Cat Mountain), Southern China’s highest peak. The name of the B-24 bomber was Tough Titi.
These Americans are considered heroes (click on this link for more about this story) to the Chinese, and the remains of the crew were returned to the United States for burial.
There’s a memorial stone near the crash site and Chinese tourists pay honor to these Americans by leaving flowers and other gifts.
To honor these heroes further, the Chinese recovered some of the bomber’s parts and used them as a centerpiece for a museum in Xing’an, about four hours from the crash site.
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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In March 2012, I attended a lecture by Adam Johnson, the author of “The Orphan Master’s Son“. Johnson gave us a glimpse into the mysterious Hermit Kingdom of North Korea. Although many call North Korea’s government a dictatorship, it appears to be more of a monarchy since the leadership has passed from father to son twice.
“No one has written a literary novel in 60 years… No one has read a book that’s not propaganda for 60 years,” Johnson said of North Korea.
Johnson spent six years reading everything he could find on North Korea. In addition, he interviewed a number of people that once lived there or had visited. He also watched every YouTube video on North Korea he could find. Then he traveled there as sort of a tourist in 2007. It wasn’t easy gaining permission.
While in North Korea, Johnson saw a country that was hungry for food, power and money. The trucks and cars he saw on the roads were coming out of the same factories that were manufacturing the same models in the 1950s with no changes. In addition, appliances manufactured in North Korea were the same models that were made six decades ago. North Korea is a country trapped in a time warp.
In an interview with Sheila Himmel of the Stanford Magazine, Johnson said there was daily loudspeaker propaganda. “If you’re caught tampering with your loudspeaker (everyone has one in their home and workplace), that’s something that could send you to a prison mine.”
Himmel wrote, “Johnson knew he had to visit North Korea to put flesh on the bones of his research. After being turned down twice for a visa as a visiting scholar, Johnson met a Korean War orphan whose NGO planted apple orchards in North Korea. As the orchardist’s assistant, he got a tourist visa.
“I would walk the streets and people would not even look up at me. They were Afraid to,” Johnson said.
Johnson stayed in the Yanggak Island hotel, staffed by Chinese, “So we didn’t even get to meet a North Korean citizen at breakfast,” Johnson said.
More than an hour with Adam Johnson – Live from the library.
The hotel was located on an island and was only open two weeks a year for the Airirang festival celebrating the birth of Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founding autocrat (emperor/king as far as I’m concerned). Even then, only two floors were occupied out of forty-nine and the only lights that were on were on those two floors. The other 47 floors were dark and abandoned.
While Johnson was in North Korea, he was told that the DPRK was the most democratic nation in the world. “They’d say to Johnson, ‘How many people turned out to your last election?’ About 60 percent. ‘We’re 100 percent. We’re more democratic!’ ”
However, being a democratic country, which North Korea isn’t (it’s also not a republic), may not be all that desirable. After all, America’s Founding Fathers created a republic in the United States, because they hated democracy believing it morphed into mob rule and eventually a dictatorship, and George Washington, in his farewell letter to the people as he left the presidency, warned Americans against multiple political parties competing with each other because that led to divisiveness and rancor.
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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Recently an e-mail arrived from a friend, and she provided a link to a CNBC.com piece about India testing an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of more than 3,100 miles. The test was successful. This long range missile is capable of reaching deep into China and Europe.
My friend wrote, “This doesn’t thrill me. I think the international community should come down just as hard on India as on North Korea.” She was right, and the Hindustan Times reported, “North Korea violated international law by missile launch.”
So, why is North Korea’s failed missile launch different than India’s?
Nowhere in the CNBC piece was India criticized as North Korea was for its failed test of a long range ballistic missile.
This 10 minute video may “BLOW” your mind—pun intended!
Instead, CNBC reported, “India lost a brief Himalayan border war with its larger neighbor, China, in 1962 and has ever since strived to improve its defenses. In recent years the government has fretted over China’s enhanced military presence near the border.”
In addition, Srikanth Kondapalli, professor in Chinese studies at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University told Reuters, “India can now deter China, it can impose maximum possible punishment if China crosses the red line.”
It is obvious to me that there is a double standard in the world.
There is the Democracy Club and countries that feed the world’s democracies with oil and then there is everyone else. India is a member of the democracy club and seldom if ever is criticized in the Western media even though the maternal mortality rate is 46.07 deaths per 1,000 live births (ranked #1 globally), life expectancy is 67 years at birth, 43.5% of the children at age five are underweight (the highest in the world), about 5 million children die (50 million each decade) from malnutrition and starvation annually, the literacy rate is 61% of the population, and 25% (more than 300 million people) live below the poverty line. Source: The CIA Factbook
Comparing India’s democracy to a non-democracy, such as China, reveals the double standard I’m talking about.
Before 1949, life in China was equal to or worse than India is today (life expectancy was 35 and 87% of the people lived in severe poverty). However, according to the CIA Factbook, today, the most recently reported maternal mortality rate was 15.62 deaths for each 1,000 live births ( a third of India’s and ranked #111 globally), life expectancy was almost 75 years of age, and literacy was more than 92% while the population living below the poverty line was 13.4% (about half of India).
6,000 children starve to death in India EVERY DAY
Then there is the fact that India’s middle class is about 5% of the population (61 million), while it is estimated that China’s middle class is now more than 230 million people or 37% of the total urban population. With all of these facts for a comparison, there is no doubt that the quality of life in China’s authoritarian republic is far better than life is in India’s democracy where people are “free” to starve and be illiterate.
Moreover, nowhere in that CNBC piece does it mention that India also fought border wars with Pakistan and Nepal—India fought with Pakistan in 1947, 1965 and came close to war in 1990 all over disputed Kashmir.
In fact, soon after the conflict with China, India had a clash with Nepal over a paltry 75 square km in Kalapani. Indian forces occupied the area in 1962, and the dispute with Nepal intensified in 1997.
Nowhere in the CNBC piece does it mention that India has 90 nuclear weapons while China has about 240.
Is India really serious about punishing China for future alleged violations of a disputed border?
In addition, the American/Western media crucifies North Korea for having 10 nuclear warhead compared to America’s 8,500 and Russia’s 11,000. Source: Huffington Post
Now, don’t get me wrong, North Korea’s government has earned its infamy, and I’ll spend more time with what that means in Part 2. Oh, lest I forget, North Korea has tested two nuclear bombs—one in 2006 and one in 2009. How many nuclear bombs has America tested? Watch the first video to discover that answer.
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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I subscribe to Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College. While finishing my morning exercise routine on the stationary bike, I read an essay written by Sung-Yoon Lee of Keeping the Peace: American in Korea 1950 – 2010.
Professor Lee is an adjunct assistant professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and an associate in research at the Korea Institute at Harvard University.
He writes of the pressure North Korea has applied on the United States to sign a peace treaty that might require US troops to leave South Korea. Professor Lee feels this would be a mistake, and I agree.
He says, “It is important for Washington to hold quiet consultations with Beijing to prepare jointly for a unified Korea under Seoul’s direction, a new polity that will be free, peaceful, capitalist, pro-U.S. and pro-China.”
This is the first I’ve read anywhere in a Western media source (and Hillsdale College is decidedly conservative in its political stance, which I don’t always agree with) that it is possible a country could be both pro-U.S. and pro-China at the same time.
In fact, Hillsdale College is often anti-leftist (liberal) and anti-entitlement to the point that it has rejected accepting Federal aid even in the form of student scholarships since almost every entitlement dollar from the Federal government comes with strings.
By saying that a unified Korea under Seoul would be both pro-China and pro-U.S. admits China is not the evil dragon so many in the West believe.
When Mao ruled China, North Korea and Communist China seemed as if they were evil twins. However, today that is not true. In the 1980s, China emerged as a hybrid one-party republic with term limits and age limits so one man would never rule the Middle Kingdom again as Mao did for 26 years.
China became a hybrid capitalist-socialist economy while politically it was an authoritarian one party republic guided by the 1982 Constitution.
Prior to 1911, there was the imperial aristocracy, a “small” middle class (with an emphasis on small) and a huge peasant class living in severe poverty with hard labor and short life spans.
Today, China’s middle class has reached about 300 million and almost 500 million are connected to the Internet, and China’s attempt at censorship does not totally control the flow of global information to those that want it who then share what was learned through Chinese Blogs and e-mails with friends, fans and family.
North Korea is frozen in time, but South Korea and China have evolved and adapted to the global economy. It would be in China’s interest to see North Korea merge with South Korea and become a capitalist nation open to the world for trade.
In fact, China does more trade with South Korea than the North, which by all accounts is a burden since China often feeds many of North Korea’s citizens to avoid famine sending food grown in China that should have gone to Chinese consumers.
If Korea is unified under Seoul’s leadership, the threat of war in Korea will evaporate.
However, under Pyongyang’s leadership. Korea becomes a larger threat to both China and the US and more difficult to contain.
The US must maintain a military pretense in South Korea and I’m sure China agrees even if it never says so publicly since a war between Pyongyang and Seoul would not be in China’s interest economically.
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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