Filed under: China, Chinese Culture, economy | Tags: 2008 Beijing Olympics, Badaling, China, Chinese Culture, chinese history, Great Wall, Lloyd Lofthouse, Mutianyu, toboggan
China has become a tourist attraction. Everywhere you go, there is something new to see and do. I learned recently that Disneyland is going to build a theme park near Shanghai.
We have visited the Great Wall several times over the years. The areas of the Great Wall that we have been to are an hour or so out of Beijing. The most popular site is at Badaling. The second choice, Mutianyu, is more dramatic. Since we have visited the Badaling section before, we decided to see Mutianyu in September 2008. It was worth it. This portion of the Great Wall runs along the ridge of a mountain range. Badaling, meanwhile, is in a mountain pass and there is a steep climb on the wall to reach the higher altitudes.
The best way to reach these sections of the Great Wall is by taxi or bus. After you get there, you will discover the usual tourist shops before you reach the wall. Since I enjoy looking for the rare find and love to haggle, I always spend time checking out this area.
At Badaling, there were real camels and horses you could pay a fee to sit on while having your picture taken.
Once you reach Mutianyu, you have a choice to make—take a few hours to climb the mountain or ride a ski lift to the Great Wall in fifteen minutes. Getting back down is easy. Take the toboggan seen during the 2008 Beijing Olympics on network TV.
I’m sure that during Mao’s time as the leader of China, most Chinese would have never imagined what was about to happen. China is changing fast. Every year, we return and discover new things.
On our way back, we stopped at a factory where we learned about the manufacturing techniques for brass vases decorated with a colorful porcelain coating and hand painted figures. I bought a set of three small vases. They are yellow with a blue trim. One has a blue dragon on it, the second a phoenix beside a chariot, and the third has running horses. Since they are sitting on a bookshelf behind me, I’ve been spinning around to make sure I described them right. Each one is about the size of my hand.
Filed under: China, Chinese Culture, economy, minorities | Tags: China, dragon's back, ethnic people, Lloyd Lofthouse, Longi Rice Terraces, Nixon, southeast china, tourists, vietnam, Yao, Yuan Dynasty, Zhuan
China has turned into a tourist destination—for the Chinese.
Before President Nixon visited China, the country was surrounded by an invisible bamboo curtain. It’s citizens were not allowed to travel far and had to ask permission when they did. Even in 1999, the first time I visited China, Western tourists were more noticeable than Chinese tourists.
In September and October 2008, there were so many Chinese tourists everywhere we went, that we were the minority. The loudest evidence that China is changing is the number of people toting cameras and traveling across China to visit history or nature. And China has both in abundance.
The Dragon’s Back is one example. The construction of the Longi Rice Terraces started during the Yuan Dynasty (1271 – 1368). Even today, many Zhuan and Yao ethnic people live a simple life that honors the laws of nature. China’s central government encourages them to live that way.
The Dragon’s Back is in Southeast China near Vietnam. Only a few villages are open for tourists. After our bus climbed a narrow, winding mountain road, we reached a parking lot that reminded me of lots in the United States that served national parks.
For a few yuan, we gained entry. Inside, past the ticket booths, were men willing to carry us to the top in sedan chairs. Considering how steep the climb was, the two men that it took to carry each chair must have had legs of iron.
A hundred feet further, vendor’s stalls lined both sides of the road. It was China’s market economy in action reminding me of Disneyland and the shops there that sold trinkets no one needs.
We walked halfway to the top before reaching a village built on stilts clinging to the mountain. The steep slopes around the village were heavily terraced to grow rice. Since it was mid afternoon, we stopped to eat. We enjoyed local rice cooked in sections of bamboo on a hot bed of coals.
That night in our hotel, we were kept awake by an overactive air conditioner turning the room into a freezer and the loud voices of someone singing in a nearby karaoke bar. Morning, by contrast, was quiet. There was a river flowing through the center of the city, and I watched from our hotel room as men on bamboo rafts fished with small throw nets.
Climbing the Dragon’s Back was a rewarding experience. One that would be impossible to duplicate in the United States. During America’s expansion west in the 19th century, the native populations were decimated by European diseases, defeated in battles they did not want to fight and driven from the land they had lived on for ten thousand years.
Yet, we saw a place where life hasn’t changed much except for the tourists. Mao is gone. The Cultural Revolution ended decades in the past, and China is moving on while time seems to stand still on the Dragon’s Back.
Filed under: China, Chinese Culture | Tags: ancient caital, before Christ, China, first emperor, Lloyd Lofthouse, medieval wall.ming dynasty, qin shi huangdo, terra cotta warriors, Xian
China is changing rapidly and every time I go, I discover evidence showing how fast. On the trip to Xian, we traveled eight hundred miles from Shanghai to Beijing by rail in a modern, sleeper car. We spent three days in Beijing before boarding a flight to Xian. This would be my third visit to the ancient, former capital of China. My first was in 1999.
Two hundred years before Christ, Xian was the capital for the first emperor of China. The city would remain a capital for most of the next eighteen-hundred years before the Ming Dynasty moved to Beijing.
After landing in Xian, we walked outside the new airport and saw a line of bright, tiny taxis. There was one black taxi that looked like a limo. “We’re taking that one,” I said. I’m six-foot-four, and I was tired of being cramped.
We stayed with the same driver for three days. Sun Long’s first words were, “If you have heard about Xian’s bad reputation cheating tourists, it is my goal to change that.”
Sun had served in the Chinese military for more than ten years as an embassy and consulate driver in a dozen countries in Europe and Africa. He didn’t speak English, but I understand he speaks other languages since he has many German tourists book him in advance.
If you are not part of a tour group, you will want to hire Sun. If needed, trust him to find an interpreter to show you around. Our first night, he managed to get us great seats for a reasonable price next to the stage for a Tung Dynasty musical in a theater that looked like it had been airlifted from Las Vegas. The food was great.
The next day, Sun drove us the hour to the Terra-Cotta Army and the tomb of the first emperor, Qin-Shi Huangdi. Last time we visited Xian, we went on a two-lane road. This time, it was a freeway. Sun drove past the off ramp to the Terra Cotta Warriors. “I know a better way. This road has bumper to bumper cars, and it will take two hours to reach the tomb.”
The other way was a road with no traffic. We arrived in fifteen minutes from a different direction.
A new airport, the freeway, a city that has doubled its population since 1999, and a subway system under construction are a few of the things that have changed. We also saw McDonalds, KFC, and Starbucks. American food has arrived.
Sun said that the underground subway system was taking longer than expected since they kept running into the tombs of ancient emperors and had to go around. In today’s China, it is against the law to disturb an archeological site like an emperor’s tomb.
Our last day, we walked on Xian’s seventeen-mile medieval wall.
Sun even knows where you can buy a hamburger made from Mongolian, grass fed, organic beef. Here’s his cell-phone number: 136-0916-251
Filed under: China, Chinese Culture, economy | Tags: China, chinese middle class, cultural revolution, deng xiaoping, economly, great leap foward, Lloyd Lofthouse, mao zedong, the world's factory floor
This Blog was originally posted on Open Salon.com (October 22, 2009), and was moved to “Learning China” (WordPress), October 25, 2009
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Economy
Under Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976), China suffered for twenty-seven years. During Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, thirty-seven million died—many from starvation. Mao’s form of communist socialism did not work.
On June 30, 1984, Deng Xiaoping said, “Given that China is still backward, what road can we take to develop the productive forces and raise the people’s standard of living? … Capitalism can only enrich less than 10 per cent of the Chinese population; it can never enrich the remaining more than 90 per cent. But if we adhere to socialism and apply the principle of distribution to each according to his work, there will not be excessive disparities in wealth. Consequently, no polarization will occur as our productive forces become developed over the next 20 to 30 years.”
Deng Xiaoping may have been right. Bruce Einhom writing for Business Week, Countries with the Biggest Gaps Between Rich and Poor, October 16, 2009, listed the top countries with the biggest gaps. America was number three on the list. China wasn’t on the list—yet.
What does this mean for America? (CBS/AP) The Census Bureau reports that 12.5 percent of Americans, or 37.3 million people, were living in poverty in 2007, up from 36.5 million in 2006.
After 2000, the situation in America deteriorated quickly (with President George W. Bush in the White House)—all of the gains in middle-class economic security since WWII were erased within a few years.
PBS reported in “Middle Class Squeeze” (December 13, 2002), the shape of income distribution in America is changing and many are finding it increasingly difficult to afford housing while keeping up with necessities such as food, clothing, transportation, and health care.”
What does capitalism, Chinese style, look like? Under Deng Xiaoping’s economic policies, China became the world’s factory floor.
Prior to 1979, the year China opened its economy to world trade, it was rare to find anything made in China. Since then, exports from China have increased 10,000%, and this year China’s economy become the second largest in the world as Japan slipped to third place.
In the last decade, something happened in China that Mao thought he had destroyed. China grew a middle class with between one-hundred to one hundred-fifty-million people.
A middle-class family in China usually owns an apartment, a car, eats out and takes vacations. National Geographic in the May 2008 magazine, said, “they owe their well-being to the government’s (Deng Xiaoping’s) economic policies…”
Current estimates show China’s growth will continue and grow between five and eight percent a year. China’s real GDP growth accelerated on a year-over year basis by a full percentage point, rising from 7.9% in the second quarter to 8.9% in the third quarter (reported Oct. 22, 2009)
Filed under: China, Chinese Culture | Tags: Lloyd Lofthouse, China, mao, america, deng xiaoping, communist party, the beijing spring, the changing face of china, john gittings, electoral college
This Blog was originally posted on Open Salon.com (October 15, 2009), and was moved to “Learning China” (WordPress), October 25, 2009
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In 2012, the new rulers of China will “all” have been educated in the West. After Mao died and the gang of four, responsible for the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, went to prison, Deng Xiaoping and his supporters “rebuilt” the government. The party instituted term limits, two five-year terms for any political position and an age limit of sixty-seven, something we don’t have in the United States.
These changes were implemented to avoid having another modern emperor like Mao. Those who spoke out against Mao usually were killed, went to prison or fell out of favor. Deng Xiaoping was one of those people. When his son was dropped from the top of a high rise and was paralyzed for life, the message to Deng was to “shut up or else”.
A high-ranking, retired Communist that fought with Mao during World War II and the revolution told me that the seventy million party members (like America’s Democrats and Republicans) do not always agree on issues. The difference is that the world hears little of what goes on behind the scenes in China. Doing business that way has little to do with the party. That type of behavior is classically Chinese—not to talk about the elephant in the room or to hang out your dirty laundry for everyone to see as the West does.
In addition, in America, the outcome for a Presidential Election is decided by the Electoral College, card-carrying members from the two major political parties. The popular vote does not elect the American president. The Communist Party acts similar to America’s Electoral College without the hypocrisy of a popular vote. Critics argue the American Electoral College is inherently undemocratic.
Unlike Mao’s time, today’s Chinese leaders must answer to the seventy-million party members that are scattered throughout China. These people listen to the 1.3 billion Chinese that do not belong to the party. The result: if an elected official is not doing his or her job, that person usually isn’t reelected.
Other changes took place after Mao. Under Deng Xiaoping, the People’s Republic announced a policy of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” John Gittings in The Changing Face of China quoted Deng Xiaoping as saying, “Planning and market forces are not the essential difference between socialism and capitalism. A planned economy is not the definition of socialism, because there is planning under capitalism; the market economy happens under socialism, too. Planning and market forces are both ways of controlling economic activity.”
Soon after Mao died in 1976, The Beijing Spring was introduced. This was a brief period lasting from 1977 into 1978. During that time, the public was allowed greater freedom to criticize the government, which wasn’t allowed under Mao.
There was also a new Beijing Spring between 1997 to November 1998 where the Chinese government relaxed some control over political expression and organization. It was during this time that China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Filed under: China, Chinese Culture | Tags: capitalists, China, communists part, cultural revolution, Lloyd Lofthouse, united states, western media
This Blog was originally posted on Open Salon.com (October 6, 2009), and was moved to “Learning China” (WordPress), October 25, 2009
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My wife landed in Seattle in 1984. She was born in China during the Cultural Revolution and was twenty-seven when she arrived in America. She came prepared for the worst with a suitcase full of toilet paper. The state controlled media in China fed the people twenty-seven years of propaganda saying the working class in America was treated like slaves by rich capitalists and were starving. When my wife saw overfed, brightly dressed Americans everywhere she went, she learned the truth.
Fast forward to 1999, my first trip to China. I expected to meet dour people dressed in dull, olive-green uniforms marching in lines like ants. To my surprise, I found the Chinese people as different as my wife found the Americans when she arrived in the United States fifteen years earlier.
Over time, I realized that the mass media in the West, including America, was not reporting an accurate picture of China. That’s still true today. Westerners have been and still are being spoon-fed propaganda from a biased Western perspective.
Since 1999, I’ve traveled to China often. When in China, I don’t hear much about the government there. Many Chinese don’t watch government TV either. There are choices now. The Chinese people are connecting to the Worldwide Web and will soon outnumber the population of North America on the Internet if it hasn’t already happened.
There are a few points to think about before you believe what you read or hear from our media.
1. America is considered the only super power on the earth today.
2. China was a super power for more than two thousand years. During the Han Dynasty, China was more powerful and technologically advanced than the Roman Empire at its strongest. It was the West and Japan that knocked China off its throne starting with the Opium Wars during the 19th century and ending with World War II.
3. This year, China moved past Japan to become the second biggest economy on earth.
4. China moved seven places this year to rank as the 92nd most developed country in the world due to improvements in education as well as income levels and life expectancy. This ranking comes from the UN Development Programme (UNDP) index that ranks 182 countries.
5. The United States dropped one rank to the 13th spot.
6. China has several hundred nuclear weapons and the largest army on earth close in size to that of the United States. They are modernizing their navy and air force and America is selling them advanced technology to do it.
7. China owns more than one trillion in U.S. debt, and is investing several hundred billion dollars in US companies annually.
8. China is considered the “factory floor of the world”.
9. The Chinese tend to work harder, longer hours for less and save more than people from other countries do.
What is your image of China?
Filed under: China, Chinese Culture, minorities | Tags: Lloyd Lofthouse, China, education, minority treatment, tibet, fifty-six minorites, financial support
This Blog was originally posted on Open Salon.com (October 2, 2009), and was moved to “Learning China” (WordPress), October 25, 2009
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Many similarities exist between the way the emperors of old treated minorities inside China and the way the Communist government treats minorities today.
The law now applies to all fifty-six minorities in two areas. The first law is that an elementary education is mandatory for all children. There are no exceptions, and children under sixteen are not allowed to work.
The Tibetan minority has problems with this. Many of the old leaders in exile don’t want mandatory education for Tibetan children, because it goes against the way the Buddhist Lamas ruled a feudal Tibet prior to 1951. The National Geographic Magazine for October 1912 does an excellent job showing life in Tibet was before Mao’s reoccupation.
The second law is that all civil law must be obeyed. For example, you cannot destroy the forest or sell your children, which was once part of Chinese culture under the emperors.
China’s government provides financial support to minorities under certain circumstances. Money goes toward developing the tourist potential in the minority areas and some minority people are paid a stipend to continue living in their traditional lifestyle as long as it does not violate Chinese civil laws. Tibet gets the biggest slice of this financial pie.
If a minority person decides to leave an autonomous region, he receives monthly food coupons to help maintain a decent lifestyle. If a minority person wants to attend college, she is allowed entry over better-qualified Han Chinese students and receives financial support to succeed.
The mainstream western media seldom reports these facts about China. We mostly hear bad news and accusations without much evidence to support the claims. A recent series of pieces in American magazines reveals the real China.
I suggest you read the May/June 2008 issue of Good magazine; the May/June 2008 issue of Poets and Writers Magazine’s “Beijing Book Report”, and the May 2008 issue of National Geographic Magazine.
A recent book by American photojournalist Tom Carter, China: Portrait of a People, captures the heart and soul China. He spent two years walking thousands of miles through much of China to discover the real China—not what most in the West have heard.
It is always good to have the facts before jumping to conclusions.
Filed under: China, Chinese Culture, minorities | Tags: Lloyd Lofthouse, China, li river, mao, minority treatment, tibet, han, dragon's back, dream of red mansions
This Blog was originally posted on Open Salon.com (September 24, 2009), and was moved to “Learning China” (WordPress), October 25, 2009
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China has a one-child policy due to a population of 1.3 billion people. What isn’t well known is that the one child policy applies only to the Han majority. That policy does not apply to the hundred million people that belong to the fifty-six minority groups in China. That means Tibetans may not be able to worship and maintain the feudal, nomadic lifestyle like they had before Mao’s brutal reoccupation of Tibet in 1951, but they can have as many children as they want without a penalty.
When emperors ruled China, the emperor wanted others to see him as a benevolent ruler embracing every kind of beauty under heaven. To do this, the emperor encouraged minorities to stay where they had always lived. No one forced them off their land with false promises. In China, if a minority king proposed a marriage alliance with the Emperor, the Emperor adopted a Chinese beauty as his daughter and sent her to the king of the minority. This is portrayed in the Dream of Red Mansions, a Chinese novel written in the 1800s.
If the minority king became powerful and caused unrest, the emperor proposed that this king marry the emperor’s real daughter, as if to say, “You will be a member of my family so stop what you are doing. Since we are soon to be related through marriage, there is no need to fight.” This happened more than a thousand years ago with Tibet when the Emperor of the Tang Dynasty married his real daughter to the king of Tibet so the warlike Tibetans would stop raiding into China.
Under the rule of the emperor, minorities were not forced to pay taxes like the Han Chinese. It was believed that minorities were less fortunate and did not have the same advantages.
Filed under: China, Chinese Culture, minorities, tibet | Tags: america, China, lofthouse, native minorities, politics, tibet, treatment
This Blog was originally posted on Open Salon.com (September 18, 2009), and was moved to “Learning China” (WordPress), October 25, 2009
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Most of us have heard about Tibet and the demands by Tibetans in exile that Tibet be free from China to rule itself. We hear claims of recent brutal human rights violations taking place without much evidence to support the claims.
Meanwhile, in the United States, news recently revealed that tens of thousands of illegal aliens (some seeking political asylum) locked up in detention centers are not getting proper medical care and are dying because of it.
How does Communist China treat its minorities compared to the way minorities have been treated in the Americas? Yes, human rights violations did take place in Tibet and there is evidence to support such claims.
However, during Mao’s twenty-seven years as the modern emperor of China, almost everyone in China suffered. Most who lived in China during the Cultural Revolution, including my wife, suffered.
Thirty-seven million died including people in Tibet. Since Mao considered Tibet to be part of China (and recorded, nonbiased evidence from primary sources prior to the rise of Communism supports that claim), those who suffered in Tibet were treated the same as the rest of China, horribly.
Monasteries in Tibet were destroyed. Buddhist Monks were killed, but the same was going on everywhere in China. Soon after Mao died, many of the larger Buddhist Monasteries in Tibet were rebuilt and Buddhist monks wearing saffron colored robes once again inhabit their rooms.
Most know that China’s Communist government is capable of reacting harshly when there is criticism of their management of China, but China does not have a Bill of Rights as America does. Chinese law does not permit criticism of the government. We may not like it, but China is not Europe or America. Of course, American and European democracies can say, “Look at how we treat people in our countries as an example of how to treat your people.”
If this tactic were used, it would be wise not to mention how American natives, minorities and illegal aliens have been and are being treated in America.
What is that saying? Don’t do as I do, but do as I say. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Filed under: China, Chinese Culture, minorities | Tags: Lloyd Lofthouse, China, america, minority treatment, sir robert hart
This Blog was originally posted on Open Salon.com (September 14, 2009), and was moved to “Learning China” (WordPress), October 25, 2009
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China vs. America
Compare and Contrast Native Minority Treatment
Part One
(a four part series) This post will focus on the United States with some historical background.
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Atrocities abound in the history books concerning treatment of Native American Indians during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The Spanish destroyed the Aztec and Inca civilizations with disease and warfare. The Catholic mission system in California enslaved American Indians. After the Civil War, the United States military was sent west and drove North American Indians from the land they had lived on for thousands of years and slaughtered men, women and children—millions died.
The American government went on to grab Hawaii from the native Hawaiian people against their will. (There’s a native Hawaiian nonviolent separatist movement asking for freedom from America.)
There’s also a chapter in the history of the Philippines. After the Spanish American War, America took possession of the Philippine islands and waged war against the native people killing more than two hundred thousand people. This went on until World War II.
In fact, the treatment of American Indians hasn’t changed much. The United States government might not wage brutal war against Native American Indians today as they did in the past, but in recent times billions of dollars slated to support Native American Indian tribes on reservations went missing, and no one seems to know where all that money went or care, except the Indians. It would appear that the era of lies and broken treaties has not ended.
If you want to learn more about American Indians, I suggest you read what the New York Times said about the work written by Vine Deloria Jr., and check out Native American Literature worth reading. It’s best to stay away from Hollywood if you want to get closer to the truth.
