A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China – a Guest Post by Lionel Carver
Even though jailhouse stories have become the stuff of cliché in Hollywood films, I figured somebody somewhere would want to know about my time in a Chinese prison.
Like many foreigners in China, I arrived in Shanghai in search of the “jade dream.”
Unfortunately, finding work that did NOT involve teaching English was not as easy as I had hoped.
I had met many people in Shanghai – locals and foreigners – with startup businesses, and so I, too, thought it would be great to jump on board a venture to capitalize on China’s growing economy.
The first company I signed up with, a small real estate startup, seemed like a good opportunity because Chinese real estate prices were soaring.
The cost of illegal immigration in the United States.
Unfortunately, they never actually paid me a steady wage. They also led me on with false promises of the coveted “Z” Work Visa. These two withholdings were a double-edged sword because it prevented me from earning enough money to renew my visa let alone stay in or get out of the country.
Eventually my 3-month tourist visa expired. I thought I would be okay as long as I laid low—but I was wrong. There are eyes everywhere in China, especially on foreigners.
It was in Huaqiaozhen, a suburb of Shanghai, that everything began to unravel. I had just signed a lease for a cheap, shared apartment, but, strangely, the landlord never came to collect the rent or sign the contract.
One Saturday morning I awoke to a knock at my door. I answered, thinking it would be the landlord, only to come face to face with a PSB (Public Security Bureau) officer checking identifications for registration.
Luckily, he didn’t speak English, so I phoned up a trusted friend to tell the officer I would register the next morning. I spent the rest of the day packing my stuff and moving out.
I fled to Baoshan district in northern Shanghai, and with the last of my savings acquired a cheap apartment, where I lived quite frugally (no TV, internet, bed, etc).
I washed my clothes by hand and used a single naked light bulb for illumination. Anyone who thought that westerners in China have it made should have seen me sleeping on the bare floor.
Inevitably, the police once again came knocking at my door to do the registration thing. This time I didn’t answer, but, as I learned later, one of the officers waiting outside spotted me hiding on my balcony.
They tried both the landlord and real estate agent to contact me, and I replied with a text message that I had lost my passport at a friend’s party.
This bought me some extra time.
A western acquaintance I met in Shanghai advised me to get another foreigner to stay in my apartment and flash their passport when the police came calling again. I asked if he would be willing, but he was smart enough to avoid his own advice.
How the United States and Canada treated Chinese Immigrants
When the cops showed up again, I was in the shower and didn’t hear them at my door. I prepared to go to Krispy Kreme, my daily indulgence (I’m not the fittest foreigner in China), which also allowed me to use their free wifi, another penny saver I learned from being broke abroad (a donut is cheaper than the internet).
When I exited my apartment building, I noticed two fellows wearing police uniforms.
I thought I could evade them if they didn’t speak English, but that strategy failed when they began chatting with me in my own mother tongue.
“Let’s go for ride,” the officer said, with what I interpreted as an ominous smile.
“Um, to where?” I asked.
“Police station, of course.”
I swallowed and thought up the first excuse I could. “My passport is still at my friend’s house, so I can’t register yet.”
“That’s okay, you still come.”
A half hour later, I’m sitting in an interrogation room of the local PSB office with an English-speaking immigration officer telling me I am “illegal”, because it’s against Chinese law to not carry your passport at all times.
On top of that, according to their computer, my visa had expired.
It took most of the day to get all the paperwork done—the Chinese are not known for their expediency.
Since I didn’t have money to pay the exorbitant “fine”, I agreed to eight days in detention.
When I signed that fateful agreement, I also checked a box so that the American embassy would be notified and so they could begin processing my new passport—even though it was never really lost.
Off I went in a white Santana police car to begin my eight days of incarceration.
After being processed at the detention center, I was corralled into a cell with five bunk beds.
Violence Inside American Prisons
There was a TV set above the door, a small radio, and a closed circuit camera that watched everything, which were the only things modern about the cell.
A Chinese squat-style toilet offering no privacy sat in one corner along with a sink. Inmates are given a package of recycled paper to use as toilet paper, which is not very comfy on the rear.
Opposite the toilet are shelves where inmates put their washbasins, which also house our eating bowl, spoon, toothbrush and toothpaste, a bar of bath soap, laundry soap, and a hand towel.
Each inmate is issued a button-down t-shirt with the Chinese name of the jail written on the back, along with a pair of black-gym shorts with white stripes on the sides. Shoes are placed on a shelf outside the cell and inmates are given rubber sandals to wear in the cell.
I also received a laundered pillowcase and a bed sheet. The beds are cushioned and have bamboo-reed mats on top.
The inmates were all Chinese, and I was the only foreigner there. I noticed that most of the prisoners had tattoos or horrible scars from their lives outside jail. Some looked like beggars and others like gang members. The most any of them could say in English was “Hello.” Better a Hello, I thought, than the “Your sh*it on my d*ck or blood on my knife” greeting I would have received in an American prison.
Apparently, however, homosexual encounters do happen in a Chinese prison.
One night I crawled up into my top bunk preparing for bed. I tried to fall asleep but the other inmates were still shuffling around and talking; one young man lit up a rolled piece of newspaper and began smoking it in lieu of actual tobacco.
Eventually everyone turned in for the night in spite of the fact that the lights stay on all night—I have learned that the Chinese can sleep through anything.
I thought I was the only person still awake when I heard one guy whispering to another.
Five minutes later, my metal-frame bunk bed began rocking back and forth. At first, I thought my bunkmate below was just getting up to take a leak, but the rocking never stopped.
Moaning and slapping noises ensued.
Rape in American Prisons
Daring to peek over the edge of my bunk, I saw one guy atop another. When the top man had finished, he slid off and another inmate came over and climbed on top of the same bottom man.
I didn’t know if I was witnessing a rape or of this threesome was consensual, and I was glad I wasn’t going to be in Chinese prison much longer to find out.
Overall, life in a Chinese prison is very boring. We never left our cells, and going outside was not allowed.
There are no sports.
We did exercise but to a short training video on the cell’s TV where we start off marching, swing our arms around, then touch our toes, and then perform jumping jacks.
There was no library, so books were very hard to come by; I was lucky to find an English book, one of those woman’s romance novels with a longhaired beefcake on the cover, which isn’t the kind of reading you want in a men’s prison.
During the first three days in jail, all inmates are required to skip naptime after lunch.
This may not seem like much of a punishment until you realize that every day starts at 6 am and ends after 9 pm. Most of the time, I felt exhausted, not from any physical exertion but from extreme boredom.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s chain gangs, tent prison and no television for prisoners
In prison, sleeping or dreaming is an inmate’s only salvation, and I dreamed about many things that week
For example, I dreamed about a cute Chinese girl I’d once met in Nanjing. I even began having delusional fantasies that I was in the video game Final Fantasy having sword fights.
Each day begins with an officer on the intercom yelling something in Chinese (I’m guessing it means, “Get up!”).
The first thing we did was make our beds. Inmates need to fold their bed sheet every day, like in a military boot camp, and it must be folded correctly. The supervisor comes in each morning after roll call to inspect the rooms.
Then somebody empties the trash by throwing it through the bars of the door. Two inmates out in the halls do the task of collecting garbage. In fact, those same two guys did all the tasks for the jailhouse (garbage, deliver food, water, etc), which is kind of gross when you think about it.
Next, came the hot water (in a giant metal barrel with a tap). Soon after that, the helpers bring the breakfast cart.
U.S. Unemployment, poverty and then atrocities in the prison systems
Prison meals always consisted of rice and vegetable soup with the exception of breakfast, which was some kind of orange-colored root. No meat! But since I was a foreign guest, I was allowed to also request a Chinese steamed bun.
Although the food was tolerable, it produced torrents of gas. Imagine being trapped in a cell with ten Chinese men ripping farts all day. That is the true definition of torture.
During roll call, inmates are required to line up their stools in the hall and sit on them in orderly fashion. When your number is called, you stand and then sit back down.
One day, an inmate argued with a guard, and I have no idea what it was about.
However, the next day during roll call, the officer called that prisoner’s number, made him stand up, then sit down, then up again, and did this repeatedly for some time.
After roll call, we either had morning exercise or just stared into space. This time in the morning was also used by the warden to question new inmates about their cases.
The Truth behind Deaths in U.S. Immigration Jails and Prisons
Lunch arrives noon and sometimes we were escorted out into a big sitting room to eat while listening to jazz music or watching a movie.
Once, they put on a pirated DVD of “Apocalypto” just for me, but I was subsequently charged 5 RMB for that viewing pleasure.
After dinner is bath time and those that want to clean their clothes washed and hung their stuff to dry on their bunks.
The rest of the night was spent watching Chinese television or socializing until bedtime.
Air conditioning did not exist.
Instead, there were two ceiling fans, and during the day if it was too hot and stuffy, the two helpers brought giant blocks of ice, which we put in wash basins in the middle of the room to help cool the air.
On the 7th day of my incarceration, an assistant from the American consulate appeared with a translator. I signed some papers and he provided me with two English-language magazines to pass the remainder of my time.
He explained that after I was released, I was to hurry to the consulate before 5 pm to acquire my new passport and then get on a flight home that same night, because I was being deported.
The next morning came, and the police said they would take me to my apartment to pack my belongings.
Caution, do not overstay your Visa in the United States.
I wished the police had not been with me so I could have called some people I’d met in Shanghai and explain my situation.
Since I didn’t want to go home for fear of unemployment—and mom’s wrath, I wanted to negotiate with the consulate to go to Japan or Korea or somewhere, anywhere, in Asia instead of back to America.
As a child, I had fought and beat cancer (I’m in my early twenties now), which is why I decided to see the world instead of spend the rest of my precious life delivering Dominos or standing at a Wal-Mart register.
My mom had been so proud of me for venturing off to China to find my fortune in spite of my physical limitations, but I had failed to find steady employment abroad and had gotten myself arrested and deported instead.
God bless moms!
The consulate informed me that, while I was locked up, my mother had sent money to Western Union to cover the costs of my flight ticket home.
But when we went to pick up the money, the police wanted some for a “fine” and to pay for my exit visa.
The U.S. consular assistant explained to my police escort that the money was only for my trip home, because I had spent eight days in jail in lieu of a fine, and I was not legally required to pay.
Jobless in America unless you have the right skills.
It must have been a ploy by the escorting officers to earn a little on the side. Nice Try!
I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the immigration office at Pudong Airport waiting for my exit visa to be processed.
The upside to my deportation was that the immigration official informed me that because of my good attitude, he would allow me to come back to China whenever I wanted instead of blacklisting me for five years as was the usual policy.
After acquiring my exit visa, I was booked on a flight. I had no idea where I was going to land in the United States, but the ticket cost 13,800 RMB (USD $2,160!!!), which seemed outrageously expensive.
I suspect the police and immigration officers had worked out a way to get extra money for themselves. The two police officers escorted me to the gate to make sure I actually left China.
As I type this true to life story, I’m back in my room at grandma’s house in Middle America. I still haven’t found a job. When I touched down in the U.S., I felt as if I were walking on the ashes of a once-great country that had been nuked by economic collapse.
The jobs are few and far between and the wages even lower than when I had left for China.
Even if I found work, I don’t believe I could handle an office job, because I don’t feel comfortable being caged in a cubicle, which, when you think about it is like a cage surrounding the mind and isn’t much different from the Chinese jail cell where I spent eight days.
______________
Note from Blog host: The China Daily reported on another American leaving China for similar reasons that caused Lionel Carver to be sent home. However, Kevin (from California) didn’t spend any time in jail.
In fact, the China Daily reported, “An young American man who had run out of money in Wuhan, Hubei province, got a free air ticket to Beijing as well as a moon cake from the airport police on Sept 11, one day before the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival.”
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If I was referred to as the brainwashed Yank, not correct. No I haven’t been to China but I do have the freedom to express my opinion.
Jo Ann, how can you say you aren’t a Yank. Your IP address says you live in Muscatine, Iowa. Unless you are the citizen of another country living in Iowa.
Or, are you claiming you are not a “brainwashed” Yank? By the way, how can a brainwashed person know that they are not brainwashed?
I disagree—almost all Yanks are brainwashed to one degree or another due to the constant media bombardment from every possible direction. Just because there is freedom of the press/media in this country doesn’t mean the media is honest and accurate in what they report. In fact, there is no place in the Constitution and Bill of Rights that says the free press has to always be honest and accurate or even fair.
And yes, you do have “some” freedom to express yourself but it is not an absolute freedom. For example, Yanks are not free to express themselves in the private sector workplace (can even get fired from a job for doing so if it is considered unacceptable by the boss) and there are legal limitations on some topics people cannot express publicly. That doesn’t mean they won’t do it, but it does mean if the state or federal government wants to prosecute, they can because there is a law on the books that says so (for certain illegal topics/subjects).
Oh, and there is no total freedom of expression in the schools either.
Another example are Blogs such as this one where people that leave comments only have the freedom of expressing a personal opinion if the Blog’s host allows those individuals to do so. In fact, I’ve had a few comments that I left on other Blogs removed and I didn’t even use profanity or unacceptable language. All I did was express my opinion with no intent to insult the hosts of those Blogs. However, I did express an opinion those people did not support so they censored me be exercising their right to delete the comments I wrote and we were all Yanks. That doesn’t happened often but it has happened.
For example, when I left a comment on a Tea Party member’s Blog, she deleted my comment because I referred to that group as Tea Party People.
Most Yanks are not aware of the fact that the 1st amendment protections of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition only protects American citizens from persecution by the government, which means if I had an opinion that the President, a Congressional representative or Senator did not like, I could not be arrested or fined for expressing it in public such as on this Blog.
The First Amendment does not say that I, for example, cannot delete another person’s opinion from one of my Blogs. In addition, just became someone has an opinion, that doesn’t mean they are right, and this statement includes everyone—even me, which is why I often make such an effort to quote other (reputable) sources that may support whatever opinions I write on my Blogs. An opinion without reputable sources/facts is usually worthless.
“TROLL ALERT”
Two comments came in from the same IP address but each one had a different anonymous name for the person sending it. One was from Dave and the other one from Lee. Both were comments for “My Experience as an Inmate in a Chinese Jail (Viewed as Single Page)”, and have been moved to the post as a comment where all Internet Troll comments end up on this site.
If you are curious to read what Dave and Lee had to say and discover what country the comment came from, you may click this link: http://ilookchina.net/2010/01/28/studying-troy-parfitt-using-his-own-words-and-the-opinion-of-others/comment-page-1/#comment-15319
No jobs in America my ass…my brother just moved there in July with no job. He now has a visa and a well paid job…stop moaning and get out of ‘middle america’ and youll be fine…
After you said, “No jobs in America my ass”, I thought I’d check to see how many Anal (anal means ass) jobs there were in the United States. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
)
Gawker.com claims “The Most Anal CEO Ever was Steve Jobs (may he rest in Apple Heaven).
http://gawker.com/5854161/the-most-anal-ceo-ever
Then I found these jobs that requires Anal probes for Caribbean Airline jobs at http://propagandapress.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/anal-probe-required-for-caribbean-airline-jobs/
And last but not least, this one about “I think my job might be the worst “Anal Gland Expresser” at http://open.salon.com/blog/mannk/2008/12/10/i_think_my_job_might_be_the_worst_anal_gland_expresser
In fact, when I typed “Anal jobs in the Unitd States” into Google, there were 96.5 million results in 0.20 seconds. At the top of the list was the “HPV and Anal Cancer Foundation” at http://www.analcancerfoundation.org/about-us/jobs/
So you are right, there are a lot of “Anal” jobs in the U.S. All one has to do is look.
Seems as though you wasted a lot of time there, Lloyd…
Not a total waste of time. In America, a teacher feels they succeeded if one kid out of thirty responds by actually doing the work and learning and I’d say my success rate was more than one per class but it wasn’t easy—maybe 3 to 5% of the students I taught actually did the work and paid attention and learned—the average failing rate in my classes was 30 to 50%, and I was always being called into the office by a VP or the principal and told that I had to get that failure rate down—that I was failing too many students and hurting their self-esteem. You see, in America the prevailing philosophy with the average parent is that the child must be happy all the time and feel super good about themselves believing they will become whatever they dream of when they grow up.
In fact, I had “ONE” mother that was concerned about her daughter’s very low reading skills and I told her what she had to do at home, and she did it. That student gained five years in reading literacy skills in one school year. Sad to say, out of about 6,000 students taught, that was the only mother that asked for help and actually followed my advice.
However, every year, I had parents that pulled their kids out of my classroom because they were so concerned about their child’s happiness and self esteem and earning a FAILING grade for doing nothing in the class was unacceptable. IT wasn’t unacceptable to those parents that their kids wasn’t reading or doing the work assigned. It was unacceptable for him or her to earn a FAILING grade and it was considered my fault and not the kid that said he or she was bored and refused to do homework, read or study.
There were other parents of lousy students that asked for help but they never followed my advice and those students never improved.
Most of the successful students were usually Asian-Americans or came from a strict home and they arrived in my classroom with the study skills and discipline that was needed. In one case, I had a student that was home taught until high school by very strict fundamentalist Christian parents. He wanted to be around kids his own age. He was lonely but his parents had instilled in him the discipline to pay attention, be polite and study. He also arrived in my classroom reading above grade level because his parents taught him at home.
In addition, when I taught Journalism and was the advisor the high school newspaper, more than 90% of my students were Asian-Americans and they worked hard to produce a quality newspaper that ended up winning regional, national and international recognition.
If it weren’t for immigrants and the first generation of immigrant parents coming to the US, America would be in really bad shape. It is the immigrants that are keeping this country running. Even the Latinos that come across our Southern Border take the jobs most Americans refuse to do and yet those same Americans treat immigrants as if they are second class citizens and to be looked down on.
In addition, I know a person that is responsible for hiring scientists for one of our government’s most important high-tech labs (it’ actually a small, remote city in the desert located in America’s southwest) and he says 90% of the scientists they hire are all immigrants and if it weren’t for immigrants willing to work hard and learn, America would be lost—totally lost. The US was in trouble back in the 1980s when President Reagan had to change the immigration laws by allowing foreigners with highly educated skills America needs to be fast tracked into the US as citizens. Even after World War II, the US did this with Nazi scientists from Germany. Many of these scientists war considered war criminals because of some of the things they did for Hitler’s Nazi Germany but they were forgiven their crimes and allowed to become US citizens so they could work for the US in its weapons and space program.
Therefore, during the thirty years I was a classroom teacher, my goal was to teach to the few that were there to learn and control the others so they would not ruin it for the few and I succeeded at that but it was not easy because the average American student is extremely difficult to control since those kids feel that are entitled to have fun every day and never be bored and the teacher is there to entertain them and not make them work to learn.
If you want to learn more about the truth of American education and America’s average child and parent, I write another Blog called Crazy Normal, a classroom expose over at http://crazynormaltheclassroomexpose.com/
And it isn’t as if Americans don’t know the truth. Studies have revealed what is going on in America’s schools but America’s leaders and most parents ignore these facts and continue to blame teachers and raise their children to be entitled, spoiled brats that will probably grow up to be fat, ignorant and reading way below grade level.
The average American reads at or below 5th grade level. Sixty percent of high school graduates in America that go on to college cannot do college work and half of all college students eventually drop out mostly due to that. Many colleges offer several levels of what we call “Bone Head English” (slang) for those students that have to catch up and those classes do not count toward college graduation.
Because of all these challenges in America’s public schools, the turn-over-rate for teachers is 50% in the first three to five years and those that leave never return. To survive, teachers must accept the reailty and be very stubborn. It is very difficult to keep teachers that started out motivated to help kids learn but quickly discover that most kids do not want to learn and struggle daily fighting the teacher while American politicans and the so-called free media almost always blames the teachers for all of this. It’s never the parent or the student’s fault. Never!
Actually, the success rate with students isn’t that much different in China. There are about 150 million students in primary school in China but by high school, more than 90% have dropped out or did not pass the exams to get into senior high school and then about 10 million (give or take a million or two) end up being accepted into colleges. The big difference is that in China students advance through merit but in the US merit is not considered as important as boosting self-esteem, which in my opinion, will give China the advantage in time.
When I say merit, in China at the end of each school year, students have to take entrance examinations to be admitted into the next grade. If students fail to pass the test, they may take the test again. Ultimately the students who are unable to pass the test are left unable to finish their education. But in the US, students reach high school that are still reading at second grade level and they are not sent home but kept in the school with the blame going to the schools and teachers–not the student or parents when in reality the reason the child does not improve is because of the lack of support at home.
In fact, in 2006, only 9.5 million Chinese of the 150 million that started school applied to take the Gaokao, National Higher Education Entrance Examination.
However, in the United States, it is mandatory that students must stay in school no matter what. Annual exams are used to measure student growth and instead of blaming or punishing students that do not learn, teachers and the public schools are blamed for the students that are not at or above grade level and/or showing improvement to catch up. The students and parents are not blamed and have no responsibility to prove themselves so many students do not study and hate to read. Many also hate being forced to stay in school until age 16 when they may apply to be allowed to drop out of school. Even then, due to that dropout rate, the schools are blamed again for not keeping those students. At parent-teacher conferences, I heard many parents tell their children that if the class was boring, they did not have to do the work or listen to the teacher, and often those same parents would blame the teacher for the child’s FAILING grades even when the parents did nothing at home to make sure the child reads books, studies for tests or does homework. Instead, these same parents are the ones that allow their children to spend that 10 hours a day watching TV, playing video games, social networking on sites such as Facebook, etc. This defines the average American parent or about 40% of them.
These types of students exist in China too but China does not waste its time on them or blame the teachers for the child’s behavior and/or the lack of proper parenting. This is why, in the long run, I believe, China will prosper while the US declines.
As for wasting time, no. In America because of this handicap, teachers often work 60 to 100 hour weeks and spend a lot of time outside of class calling parents almost begging for them to help. It’s getting worse too. Many schools are forcing teachers to call the parents of all the students that do not work and this is taking so much time after school, that I know of one teachere that had to hire a retired teacher and pay her $25 an hour to correct papers because he did not have time due to those phone calls. This teacher told me it is depressing to make all of those phone calls every night and still see little or no change in those children and then get blamed for it.
I admire this person wanting to see the world but I am an American and I believe in this country more than a country that doesn’t allow too many freedoms.
Which freedoms are you talking about? Please be specific.
I take it you have never been to China. Although the Chinese people outside of the 80 million voting members of the Chinese Communist Party and the 70 million members of China’s Communist Youth League do not take part in national politics and vote, the Chinese people today have more individual freedoms and a higher quality of life than at any time in China’s history.
In addition, democracy is practiced at the rural, village level where elections are held to decide who will lead each village. About 600,000,000 Chinese votes in these very democratic rural village elections and non Party members may run for election against Party members and win to hold office at that level. Nonmembers are then eligible to apply for membership in the CCP.
In addition, freedom of religion does exist. However, freedom of religion is restricted (as it is in other countries such as Singapore and Saudi Arabia–in fact, 57% of the world’s population lives with high or very high government restrictions on religion including India) but in China that restriction is limited to Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism and these religions are not allowed to be part of the political process. There are also active Jewish synagogues in several of China’s cities.
How many religions are needed to worship the true one God? Did you know that in the US, there are several thousand different religions and globally more than 30,000? Yet, God said in the Old Testament that there is only one chosen religion that he is God of. No one else will gain his favor when the time comes.
Picking a religion is like playing God’s Lottery.
Another interesting fact to know—since 1949, China is responsible for 90% of all global poverty reduction while in the US people living in poverty has increased. In 1949, the average lifespan in China was 35 years of age. Today, the average lifespan has more than doubled to about 75 years of age. In 1949, about 85% of the people lived in severe poverty. That number is about 13% today while more than 16% of Americans live in poverty.
I would like to hear your views on China and how you are only allowed so many of a certain child and what happens to the “unwanted” children.
Jo Ann, I wrote about China’s one-child policy back in 2010 in five posts (two in March and three in November of that year, and each one covered a different aspects of the policy. India has a similar program but we don’t hear much about it. In fact, it is estimated that due to overpopulation in India, an average of 6,000 children die of starvation daily (and even more suffer from malnutrition), which may be one of the reasons both China and India have programs that are attempting to control population growth.
“The national focus on sterilization seems (in India) to have created an “all or nothing” mentality among Indians towards birth control especially since the awareness of other, temporary methods of contraception for much of the 20th century was minute. A 1993 study, India’s National Family Health Survey, revealed that of all contraceptive use at the time, 67% was by female sterilization (compared to 9% male sterilization).[5] The prominence of female sterilization indicates another flaw in the India population control strategies. By targeting women instead of men, the government inadvertently opts for the more hazardous means of birth control. The surgical procedure is more difficult and the rate of failure is high, not to mention the danger to the patient, which sometimes means death.” Source: http://www.colby.edu/personal/t/thtieten/Famplan.htm
China has the world’s largest population at 1.3 billion (10% of the land is arable, which means it is capable of growing food—much of China is mountains and desert), India is second with about 1.2 billion people and the US is in third place with a bit more than 300 million.
China has the smallest amount of arable land to grow food on, while India and the US both have the ability to grow food on about half of their land (except India is a much smaller country compared to the US and China, which are about the same size in land).
You can find all five of the posts on China’s one child policy in one post through the following link:
http://ilookchina.net/2011/10/03/the-controversy-complexity-and-reality-behind-chinas-one-child-policy/
Dont even entertain this woman. Shes just another brainwashed Yank that has never been to China and thinks she is qualified to comment…who gives a shit about people like this and their opinions…let her think that America is the best…itll keep here over there and away from us…
This is no surprise since most Americans know little to nothing about their own country let alone the rest of the world.
When I was teaching, many of the students I taught came into my class believing that Los Angeles was a country until I told them the facts, which they quickly forgot.
The reason most children forget what teachers teach them is because of the average American lifestyle.
In the US, most many Americans are addicted to sugar and hate drinking water so they drink sodas such as Pepsi and Coca Cola. Research shows us that sugar messes with short-term memory so what we should remember, we forget on a daily basis. The average American actually consumes more sugar each year than what they weigh in pounds.
In fact, 3 out of 4 Americans are fat and more than one third of those citizens are obese. In addition, the average American child spends about 10 hours a day watching TV, playing video games or spending time on Facebook or texting. They do not read books, do homework or study and why should they. If they don’t learn what the teacher teaches in school, it isn’t their fault. In America, everything is the teacher’s fault and the American media and so called free press makes sure that no one forgets this.
I disagree about The US having a lack of jobs. Get on the internet and you can make a startup business for FREE. Yeah, it sounds like a bad advert, but it’s true. I started my business while in China, with no experiece in online marketing. The money’s there, you just have to want it bad enough.
True!
I know people that are doing exactly what you say. However, millions of people are not taking advantage of these opportunites. It seems some would rather be broke and starve or become homeless than work at any job.
I wrote about this topic on one of my other Blogs in “America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States” at
http://crazynormaltheclassroomexpose.com/2011/11/17/americas-lost-work-ethic-and-the-future-fate-of-the-united-states-part-15-3/
Work @ home onlines? Excuse grammar touch screens are not my specialty. I’m currently researching opp. I have little knowledge of web design but crowdsourcing is an option for 1 with little skill.
Crowdsourcing?