Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – Part 2/4

June 25, 2011

In this post, we will visit the recovery of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina.

In March 2009, Planetizen reported that Citizen Recovery Efforts Hit Government Barriers in New Orleans.  It was a traumatic story about two New York architects wanting to do something to help the recovery that ran into a wall of dysfunctional government.

Roberta Brandes Gratz wrote, “When architects Anne Van Ingen and Wes Haynes set out to aid the New Orleans recovery effort by restoring a home in the Ninth Ward for low income buyers, they thought their work would be welcomed. But bureaucratic interference and misguided policies have turned a good deed into a nightmare.”


China earthquake response, faster than US Katrina response

On August 29, 2010, the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, News Ahead.com reported, “President Barak Obama acknowledged that recovery has been slow. He vowed to see that turf wars and red tape didn’t hamper recovery, and the 5th anniversary of the storm offers a measuring stick.

“New Orleans appears to be returning to its old self, but throughout the region, boarded-up houses, overgrown vacant lots, homelessness and a lack of essential infrastructure tell a story of continuing impediments to recovery.”

This link to the Documenting Disaster timeline provides a glimpse of the pace of reconstruction and challenges that New Orleans has faced since the hurricane hit New Orleans on August 25, 2005.

There is a “+” or “-” bar on the left of the screen that allows you to move the timeline from when the hurricane hit to when the only movie theater reopened in Chalmette on July 29, 2010.

Then on March 30, 2011, The Northerner, The Independent Student Newspaper of Northern Kentucky University (NKU) published a piece by Jill Liebisch about Kelsey Robinson and Stephanie Mathena and how they assembled a group of eight NKU students to travel to New Orleans to film a documentary and aid in various rebuilding efforts.

Their conclusion, “There is still a lot of work to do in New Orleans.”

Continued on June 26, 2011 in Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – Part 3 or return to 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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – Part 1/4

June 24, 2011

Man has little power to stop the damage and loss of property and life caused by the power of blizzards, earthquakes, floods, forest fires, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions such as the famous one from Mount St. Helens in 1980 that blew down or scorched 230 square miles of forest or the dangers of Mount Rainier, which could kill thousands and cause billions in damage in less than an hour if it erupted as it has many times in the past.

However, governments from countries such as the US and China, the two largest economies on the planet, do have an ability to recover faster from the damage caused by one of these devastating blows from nature than many countries do.

On March 11, 2011, much of the world witnessed the horrible tragedy in Japan as an undersea earthquake caused the Tsunami that hit Japan resulting in much death and destruction.

Then in May 2011, Americans witnessed on the news or experienced how powerful nature is as more than a thousand tornadoes roared through the Midwest flattening American towns and cities while causing much destruction and more loss of life.

In this series, I will write about the recovery efforts in Sichuan, China, where a devastating 8.0 earthquake struck in May 2008 and about the thousands that lost their lives while millions were made homeless. I will compare China’s recovery to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, which hit the US Gulf Coast in August 2005, and Haiti’s recovery from its devastating January 2010 earthquake that killed about 300,000.

In fact, I spent hours hunting for the information I was interested in, which was a comparison of the recovery efforts from the 2005 Hurricane Katrina and the Sichuan earthquake of 2008.

What I learned may surprise some people that pay too much attention to Western Media sources such as FOX, CNN or The New York Times. Sometimes what we don’t learn is more revealing than what is reported.

Continued on June 25, 2011 in  Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – Part 2

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Capturing a Vanishing China

June 23, 2011

I feel compelled to write about a one-star review that appeared recently of Tom Carter’s China: Portrait of a People.

In fact, as I write this post, Carter’s book has had 100 reviews. Eighty-eight earned five stars and eleven four-star reviews. There is only one one-star review.

My wife is Chinese and was born in Shanghai (discover the modern city) during Mao’s Great Leap Forward then was sent to a labor camp as a teen during The Cultural Revolution. When she first saw the photos in Tom Carter’s book, she said he is the first and only photojournalist to capture the heart and soul of China.

What she was talking about was the rural Chinese who have always been the invisible heart and soul of China. If it weren’t for those same rural Chinese, Mao and the Communist Party would have never won China’s Civil War.

What follows is the rambling, rant of a one star review written by someone calling him or herself Xuemin Lin.

Lin says, “Ignorance of all American who think that these photos show the reality China, you don’t know the truth. Tom Carter pictures can only show that poor farmers and rural areas. He ignoring the majority of China’s middle class and developed districts in urban life intentionally. We have a modern apartment and a beautiful new car and stylish clothes. Why Tom Carter just want to show the barefeet farmers and the minorities? His pictures make you believe we Chinese all are swarthy skin and the tooth is not good and make our homes in the mountains area. China’s economy has grown rapidly. The United States owes a debt to total billions of dollars to China. China will soon become a superpower in the world! Han people will lead Asia and then the world. So, do not believe that this book is shows the real China! Tom Carter in a planned way only want to show you the poor! I upload his video got from the Youku website so yourself can see his photos is not the good. Do not by this book I suggest!”

Lin claims that the majority of Chinese belong to the emerging middle class. Lin is wrong. China has a few decades to go until more than a billion people join the modern middle class lifestyle.

Even China’s leaders have admitted that China is not as developed as America or Europe and that China will never rival American super power status. The best China may attain is a regional military super power and a global economic super power.

To understand what I mean, you may want to read Amy Chua’s Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance–and Why They Fall.

It is a fact that China is modernizing at a pace never before seen in history and more than three hundred million Chinese now live in urban cities similar to Shanghai and Beijing and belongs to China’s middle class. However, that leaves about 1.2 billion people that have not yet joined that middle class and 800 million of those people still live as Carter shows us in his photos.

If China accomplishes its goal to modernize most of China and lift the majority of Chinese into the middle class, the world that Tom Carter captured with his photos will vanish. Our only reminder of that China will be his book.

What Lin’s one-star review really reveals is a shame among some Chinese that should not exist. China should be proud of its rural peasants because they have always been the backbone of China and those people deserve their moment in the sun or between the covers of China: Portrait of a People

When I visit China, I want to escape America for a few weeks but realize that I cannot escape the Golden Arches of McDonalds, or Starbucks, Pizza Hut and KFC, which is the worst thing China could adopt from America.  In addition, China has also inherited the obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer that come with this fast food, middle class, and motorcar culture invented in the West.


Some of America’s history captured in photos and song.

In addition, I’ve complained that China has no artist comparable to America’s Charles Russell or Bev Doolittle — great artists that captured the heart and soul of the America that existed before Europe and the industrial revolution arrived to fill the air with poison.

However, Tom Carter’s photos capture some of that world in China that will soon be lost. After China has paved over its past, without Tom Carter’s photos we would never know what that world was like.

Therefore, I ask the Xuemin Lins of China, “What is it you have against Tom Carter capturing what is fast disappearing as China becomes another middle class, smog choked clone of Los Angeles, London, Paris and New York?”

I prefer the China where people are practicing Tai Chi in the early morning fog.

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

7 Comments | America, American culture, capitalism, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese middle class, cultural differences, expatriates | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The “BRICS” Emerging Powers Summit

June 22, 2011

On April 14, 2011, Chinese President Hu Jintao and leaders from Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa (countries now known as the BRICS) met on the far southern Chinese island-province of Hainan Island.

The most telling result of the summit was the decision to refuse mutual payments in US dollars. This means that the BRICS countries will give credits to one another in their national currencies and the development banks of these countries have signed an agreement about a further gradual withdrawal from loans in American dollars.

The move opened lines of credit in these countries national currencies in order to dilute their overreliance on the U.S. dollar as the BRICS seeks more independence from American political influence.

In addition, China and India agreed to reestablish defense ties and initiate closer border cooperation. China also agreed to deepen its “strategic partnership” with Russia. The biggest gains to come out of this summit may be the BRIC access to Africa due to its newest member, South Africa.

The BRICS nations now accounts for over 40% of the world’s population, but only 18% of its GDP in 2010 and the IMF says the BRIC nations will account for 21.6% of the world’s GDP by 2015, while the International Business Times reports that these nations are expected to represent 47% of the world’s GDP by 2030.


Aljazeera English says, “While many developed nations are struggling with the aftermath of the global recession, the economies led by the leaders of the BRICS nations are still booming.”

Another way to look at this is to compare the BRICS with the GDPs and labor force of the European Union and the United States.

We often hear that the United States has the largest GDP in the world, which was $14.72 trillion in 2010 with a labor force of 154.9 million as estimated by the CIA World Factbook.

The CIA World Factbook listed the European Union (probably due to the Euro) as the world’s largest economy at $14.89 trillion with a workforce of 225.2 million (2009 est.).

When we combine the GDPs and the labor force of the BRICS nations, we see a combined GDP of $21.079 trillion and a labor force of almost 1.5 billion people.  If the BRICS developed a standard currency as the European Union has done that would create the largest economy on the planet with largest work force.

The BRICS is also calling for a greater say on the UN Security Council, which only China and Russia have a permanent seat on now.

Goldman Sachs investment banker Jim O’Neill to highlight Brazil, China, Russia and India’s similarities in terms of their potential for development and growth, created the term BRIC. South Africa was not a member at the time.

To discover more about the BRIC/S see Move Over America, the BRIC is Coming, The Growing BRICs, Brazil’s Growth Depends on China and China Reaching out to South Africa

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Closed Minds and Culturally Blind Missionary Zeal

June 21, 2011

Recently, my wife bought me a copy of Henry Kissinger On China. She said if you read anyone that is not Chinese writing about China, Henry Kissinger is the only Westerner to trust.  The reason, she explained, was that the leaders of China trust and respect few in the West.

However, Kissinger is the exception, and from what I’ve discovered since 1999, I don’t blame most Chinese or China’s leaders.

I haven’t read that far into the book but Kissinger’s Preface has a revealing quote in it.

Kissinger said, “American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world. China’s exceptionalism is cultural. China does not proselytize; it does not claim that its contemporary institutions are relevant outside China.”

What Kissinger didn’t say, which I may discover later as I read further into the book, is that America is spreading more than its spiritual, ethical, and moral values but is also importing its middle class unsustainable, consumer, debt-ridden, fast food, disease ridden lifestyle, which is more popular outside America than US cultural values.

The Economist for May 21, 2011 reviewed Kissinger’s book and said, “The Western politician who understands China best tries to explain it–but doesn’t quite succeed.”

In fact, it isn’t easy to overcome the Western prejudices that refuse to accept that people from other cultures are different from America and the West, which may be one reason why The Economist is so cynical and critical of almost everything they write about that does not fit their British cultural bias.

Another example is when a friend and expatriate living in China sent me a link to a Site called The Middle Kingdom Life written by a person that lived and taught at universities in China for seven years then left feeling bitter and disappointed, because China didn’t measure up to what he felt it should be, which is a reaction that has a lot to do with that American obligation to spread its values to every part of the world (even when other countries and cultures are not interested in those American and/or Western values).

Then another Blog I follow (but hold little respect for) sent me a notice that someone had left a similar comment.

That other Blog is called Understanding China, One Blog at a Time (should be “One Post” at a Time).

One Blog at a Time doesn’t understand China or the Chinese and is another emotional, biased rant criticizing China for not being a mirror image of American culture and does not take into account that China is a different culture with a different history and is still a developing third-world country with a large segment of its population that, until a few years ago (as early at the 1980s), lived as people had for centuries with a medieval lifestyle—meaning no electricity, no running water, no schools, no toilets, no sewers, or paved roads, etc.

It seems that little has changed from the 19th century when Robert Hart was the same as Kissinger is today to the Chinese except that today China stands on its own feet and is powerful enough militarily not to be bullied to cave in to Western demands to change the Chinese culture due to that American (and Western) obligation to spread its values to every part of the world, which may explain why we are fighting Islamic fundamentalists that wants to destroy Western Civilization.

That same Western missionary zeal (from Europe) that drives America today destroyed the Aztecs and Incas, enslaved tens of millions of Africans, colonized North America leading to the American Indian Wars of the 19th century, started two Opium Wars in China, killed a quarter of a million in the Philippines, meddled with Japan’s culture leading to World War II in the Pacific and China where The Rape of Nanking  took place, invaded Vietnam where millions died, fought the Korean Conflict, and imported American values with nation building by invading Iraq and Afghanistan.

What’s next?

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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