China’s Tiger Farms: Part 2/2

May 21, 2013

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.

Return to China’s Tiger Farms: Part 1

_______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

About iLook China

Leave a Comment » | business, capitalism, China, economy, environment, tourism | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Tiger Farms: Part 1/2

May 20, 2013

Steven McDonald reports from the Chinese North Korean border. Siberian tigers once roamed this area in the thousands, but as the forest disappeared so did they.

In 2007, it was estimated that 12 wild tigers remained in China’s northeast. This small gene pool has led to genetic deficiencies. The Associated Press reported the tiger could be extinct in a dozen years if left unprotected.

Individual tigers once roamed over a territory of 50 square kilometers or more, but today there isn’t much forest left to support even a few hundred in the wild.

Today, visiting the Siberian tiger park 37 km north of the city of Harbin is recommended unless you are squeamish since live animals are fed to the tigers.

Big Cat News reports that the tiger park sits on almost 400 acres of land and is one of the largest tiger refuges in the world.

A group of Chinese scientists is attempting to save the Siberian tiger and captive breeding has been successful.

The Harbin Tiger Park has more than four hundred. A sister park has about three hundred. In all of China, there are about 2,000 in captivity.

With such a small population, a DNA database is used to avoid losing genetic diversity. Tigers discovered to have flaws are not allowed to mate.


Feeding Time

However, the park has a shortage of money. China’s government provides some funding, but the park relies mostly on tourism and ticket sales. It costs more than four million dollars annually to feed the 700 tigers in the two parks.

Continued on May 21, 2013 in China’s Tiger Farms: Part 2

_______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

About iLook China

Leave a Comment » | business, China, economy, environment, tourism | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Exporting Romance

April 22, 2013

When I first read Tom Carter’s guest post about Harlequin Romance Invades China, my first thought was China is doomed.

First, American fast food arrived and now China is having a weight problem leading to poor health and the explosion of China’s Fat Camps.

Then there is America’s car culture, which is catching on fast in a country that doesn’t have the strict environmental pollution laws that have existed in the US for decades, and most of urban China is choked with smog.

Now, I learn that romance American style has arrived in China as another blow to China’s ability to survive as a civilization. Weren’t the 19th century Opium Wars bad enough?

Eating fast food that destroys health, smoking cigarettes, reading Harlequin Romances and driving carbon-spewing cars cannot be a good thing.

Is this how “democracy” is going to make life better for the Chinese?

Since Harlequin romance novels flew into China on collagen-filled lips, attitudes toward love has changed.

“According to Enjoy Reading Era, a Beijing-based cultural company specializing in publishing romantic novels, 1,500 love stories by writers in the mainland were published last year, an all-time high. The same company exported 50 romance novels to Hong Kong and Taiwan, while it only imported three novels from Taiwan.” Source: Show China.org

Reading romance novels may explain the increase in the divorce rate in China and the high divorce rate in the US. After all, how can any real man compare to the ink and paper men on the pages of a Harlequin romance novel?

However, I may be wrong about what the West has exported to China. Thanks to romance novels, China may no longer need the one-child policy since all those wheezing, unhealthy fat people driving cars instead of riding bicycles or walking will be reading trashy romance novels instead of making love.

This may end China’s population challenges.

In fact, GM and Ford are making huge profits in China as is McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut and Starbucks. Even Hooters is in China along with Wal-Mart.

Think of the profits these American corporations are earning to help make the rich richer.

_______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

About iLook China

Leave a Comment » | American culture, business, capitalism, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese men, Chinese women | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The cultural side of piracy in China

April 2, 2013

The more I learn about China, the more I realize that most of what happens in China has everything to do with cultural differences and little to do with the Communist Party.

In 2008, Lisa Wang wrote a post for China Law and Practice.com of Searching for Liability: Online Copyright Infringement in China.

Lisa Wang said, “The digital copying of music, images, and video, and their distribution over the internet (in China) can provide hours of entertainment for the general public and multiple migraines for rights holders.”

Many in the West that read this may think infringement of copyright in China is done to make money by selling fake copies but—while somewhat true—that isn’t always the case.

The Economist of December 4 published a piece of how difficult it was to make a profit in the toughest recorded-music market in the world, which is China.

It seems that many Chinese will not pay to download music on the Internet.

Instead, people download music free from a number of sites where other Chinese have made the music available.

In the November 20 issue of The Economist, I discovered that despite government censorship, many in China are downloading pirated video online and watching the latest movie releases and television shows from America.

In fact, pirated television on-line is so widespread, Wentworth Miller, who is best-known for his role in the Fox television show Prison Break, was mobbed by his fans when he visited China.

However, Prison Break is not officially broadcast by Chinese television stations.

If censors block a foreign TV show or movie, the Chinese may often watch pirated DVDs or go on-line to watch pirated versions for free.

I know an American expatriate living in China that watches the latest American movies free a few days after they hit the theaters in America, and he watches on-line.

The Chinese have a reputation for being frugal and saving money and this may be another way to achieve that goal by cooperatively helping each other read books and watch movies for free.

After all, China is a collective culture.

Discover how Harlequin Romance Invaded China

_______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

About iLook China

Leave a Comment » | business, capitalism, Chinese Culture, cultural differences, economy | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

A “found” corruption

March 11, 2013

Have you ever heard of a “found” poem?

If not, this is what it means: “Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.” Source: Poets.org

Well, I found something about consumer related corruption, but it wasn’t linked to China. It took place in the United States, and I’m going to write a “found” post by piecing together a collage of corruption with one example from China compared to similar private sector corruption in the United States where greedy CEOs took short cuts to boost profits.

On “60 Minutes” Sunday night, March 10, 2013, I first heard about the NECC Drug Scandal: Fake names used to bypass regulations (the story first broke September 2012).  I then Googled “NECC Drug Scandal” and came up with 786,000 hits.

Then I Googled “Chinese drywall import scandal” (2001) and came up with more than 4.4 million hits.

Since the late 1990′s there has been a conservative political agenda in the United States to take away and/or limit Federal government regulatory and watchdog protection for consumers. One of those exemptions from FDA over-site led to the NECC Drug Scandal. That same conservative political agenda also led to the 2007-08 global financial crises.

Wiki reports that from the NECC scandal (started September 21, 2012 and still ongoing) there have been 48 deaths, 720 injuries and more than 400 lawsuits filed against NECC.

Let’s compare that to the potential for injury from the Chinese drywall scandal: “The Center for Disease Control, in collaboration with The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry released a guide indicating the residents of affected homes reported irritated and itchy eyes and skin, difficulty breathing, persistent cough, bloody noses, runny noses, recurrent headaches, sinus infection, and asthma attacks.”

Out of curiosity, I Googled, “the Ford Pinto Case (1972) where, due to a cover up at Ford, people died.”The cases involving the explosion of Ford Pintos due to a defective fuel system design led to the debate of many issues, most centering around the use by Ford of a cost-benefit analysis and the ethics surrounding its decision not to upgrade the fuel system based on this analysis.” My Google search came up with 719,000 hits. Twenty-seven deaths were attributed to Ford Pinto fires.

Does this “found” post on corruption and good-old-fashioned universal human greed reveal that a scandal in China will cause more of an uproar than a similar or worse scandal in the United States? If so, why?  After all, no one has died yet from that tainted drywall that was made in China and sold in the US.

If the fungus tainted drugs from NECC had been made in China and exported to the United States, how many Google hits do you think would result?

Discover High Speed Rail Tragedy in China Reveals Small Minds in West (39 people died and it was an accident not linked to corruption) and More on China’s July 2011 Rail Accident (Note: a Google search of this topic came up with 22.2 million hits)

_______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

About iLook China

3 Comments | America, American culture, business, capitalism, China, Chinese Culture, crime, cultural differences, economy, media, politics, United States | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The WHO’s War on Tobacco

January 29, 2013

Gillian Wong of the Associated Press wrote about a battle over tobacco heating up in China—pun intended. China also signed the global anti-tobacco treaty backed by the World Heath Organization (WHO) to cut tobacco use. In fact, WHO awarded China’s Health Minister Chen Zhu for his efforts to battle tobacco use.

However, in China, tobacco companies sponsor public schools.  Something similar happened in the US when Coke and Pepsi installed vending machines in the public schools where students could feed their sugar cravings and grow obese at the same time by drinking sodas.

In fact, at Nogales High School in La Puente, California where I taught for years, I was told one morning by the truck driver filling the vending machines in the halls that more than two-thousand cases of Coke were selling a week there.

I complained in writing, of course, but was told by a district administrator that the money made off all that teenage sugar consumption was more important (not in those exact words but that’s what he meant).

The school district made a nice profit from its share. Now, it seems selling sodas at school may be against the law.

Maybe the US was China’s role model, but the Chinese have gone one-step further by (according to Gillian Wong) taking elementary students on school sponsored tours of cigarette factories where the slogans say, “Talent stems from hard work, tobacco helps you become accomplished.”

Where’s Qin Shi Huangdi when China needs him most? After all, when the first emperor wanted to get something done, nothing stopped him. He unified China, finished building The Great Wall, mandated one written language and had the scholars who complained dig their own graves before setting them on fire and throwing dirt on the remains.

On the other hand, if China did nothing, the One-Child policy could be abolished to make up for deaths caused by tobacco use.

In fact, China should encourage smoking to reduce the population. Estimates say that one in three young men will die early from tobacco use. Within fifty years, China’s population problems would be solved while private companies make massive profits from smoke.

Did you know that the US State Department helped open China to US Tobacco products after the States in America took on the cigarette giants and beat them in courts hurting their profits? After all the smoke cleared in all those courts, big tobacco in the U.S. owed the states $206 billion, and those companies had to open new markets—China was the target.

______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

About iLook China

Leave a Comment » | America, business, capitalism, China, health care | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Evil Tobacco

January 28, 2013

Cigarettes are evil.  The person smoking the cigarette may not be evil but the pain and suffering that cigarettes cause is. I watched a father-in-law, a neighbor, an aunt and my father die from the ravages of tobacco.

The last few years of my father’s life, he wore a breathing mask attached to a tank of oxygen.  His freedom was limited to the fifty-foot hose connected to that tank.

Margie Mason of the Associated Press wrote about smoking and listed some frightening statistics.

  • Thirty percent of the world’s smokers are in China.
  • In the next 15 years, an estimated 2 million will die from it.
  • The largest tobacco grower in the world is in China.
  • Heart disease, linked to smoking, is already killing a million a year.
  • China has more cases of diabetes than any country.

Dr. Judith Mackay said, “You have to price them (cigarettes) out of the hands and pockets and the mouths of children.”

Hong Kong may be showing the rest of the mainland how to cut back on tobacco use by putting high taxes on cigarettes as we have done in America. The Chinese government may be watching and hoping that this cycle of doom can be slowed.

Learn more from Smoking Gun

______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

About iLook China

Leave a Comment » | business, capitalism, China, health care | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

A bit of advice on doing business in China

January 14, 2013

An expatriate living in China sent me a copy of The Australian’s Goodwill Offers a Rich Yield by Greg Rudd.  The commentary was published in that newspaper back in May 2009.

However, what Greg Rudd says is just as important today as it was then regardless of the few negative voices that left comments.

I find it interesting that the negative comments from such as “lao de lao ren” and “RN of Canberra” may be from ignorant individuals that do not realize that the US Founding Fathers despised “democracies” and built a “republic” where only white male property owners (excluding Jews) could vote—about 10% of the 3.9 million people counted in the first U.S. Census of 1790, and 90% were farmers.  That number included almost 700,000 slaves in the land of the free. That means about 320,000 may have been eligible to vote.

“RN of Canberra” even compared China to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, which isn’t even close. There is no comparison. Today’s China is a much safer place to live than Nazi Germany was and there are no signs that China plans to go out and wage war against the rest of the world or set up gas chambers and start killing people as the Nazis did.

Both “lao de lao ren” and “RN of Canberra” express that China should become a democracy. Well, the CCP has about 80 million members and they do vote in addition to the 600 million rural Chinese that vote in elections for village political posts such as mayor. That’s more than 10% of the population.

In fact, the first time the US was officially called a democracy was by President Woodrow Wilson more than a century after the US was founded. Why, after the Civil War, veterans were known as the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR)—not the Grand Army of a Democracy.

Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both said democracy was no better than mob rule, which explains why the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College to select presidents and why George W Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore but became president anyway.

Greg Rudd offers some advice about China in his commentary.

He says, “My mother taught me when you walk into someone’s house you shouldn’t be rude. You may not like what you see sometimes, and advice and suggestions can be given in the right spirit and in the right atmosphere, but always remember it is not your house.

“When we are in China’s house we should show respect and when they are in our house they should show respect.”

Greg Rudd is managing director of GPR Asia, based in Beijing. GPR advises on investment and joint ventures.

GPR Asia works with Asian companies who wish to invest/joint venture/merge or acquire companies in Australia and/or with Australian companies that wish to invest/joint venture/ merge or acquire companies within the Asian region.

Discover more about Doing Business in China

______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

About iLook China

2 Comments | America, American culture, business, China, Chinese Culture, Communism, democracy, economy, expatriates, expatriots, history, politics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

A US President’s half brother and Disneyland in China

January 1, 2013

President Obama’s half brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, has lived in Shenzhen, China since 2002, and he is married to a Chinese woman. Ndesandjo speaks fluent Mandarin and practices Chinese calligraphy. In a TIME interview, he said, “I’ve experienced the warmth and the graciousness of the Chinese people.” Ndesandjo is overwhelmingly positive about his life in China.

Mark runs an Internet company called WorldNexus that advises Chinese corporations how best to reach international customers.He graduated from Brown University, studied physics at Stanford University, and received an MBA from Emory University.

In 2008, TIME magazine reported that a Shanghai Disneyland was approved in China, and according to a report by the Burbank, California based Themed Entertainment Association, “Chinese consumers have a lot of love for Disney. They’re more excited about Disneyland than the EXPO 2010 Shanghai China.”

The opening ceremony for the construction of Shanghai Disneyland was held on April 8, 2011 and the park is expected to open December 2015 on 963 acres in Pudong, Shanghai.  It will be about three times the size of the Hong Kong Disneyland Resort.

Hong Kong Disneyland opened in September 2005 and is located on reclaimed land in Penny’s Bay, Lantau Island and has hosted over 25 million guests.

To give you an idea how much Chinese love the American lifestyle, visit Zhang Yimou’s musical, the Impressions of Liu Sanjie. This musical with a cast of hundreds is staged on and alongside the Li River in Southeast China near Vietnam. The theater reminded me of similar theaters at American theme parks like Six Flags or Disneyland but the music was local and ethnic.

Discover Eating Turkey in China

______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

About iLook China

1 Comment | America, American culture, business, China, Chinese Culture, economy, environment, tourism, United States | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Rising Film Industry

November 27, 2012

“China is now the second-biggest box office territory for Hollywood films, eclipsing Japan,” says The Hollywood Reporter. Not only that, but Chinese production companies are releasing films for the home market.

In fact, a recent science fiction movie, Looper, became the first new Hollywood film to make more money in its opening weekend in China than in the US. Source: Guardian UK

It also appears that the Chinese government has done some forgiving. “Zhang Zhao fled China for the U.S. soon after the crushing of the 1989 student democracy movement. But Mr. Zhang returned to China in 1998, and now he’s the man with the money: As head of Enlight Pictures, a unit of Enlight Media and one of the new film companies aspiring to tell Chinese stories to a rapidly expanding domestic audience, he has plans for an initial slate of 40 movies, and no problem with financing.” Source: RealFilmCareer.com

A film produced by Huayi Brothers Media

Then there is Huayi Brothers Media, which the May issue of “The Hollywood Reporter” says raised 160 million in an IPO on the Zhenzhen stock exchange.  The Huayi brothers have already released over 50 films, most of them huge box office hits in China. Source: CNN: Is This China’s Harvey Weinstein?

“Five years ago,” Wang Zhongjun said, “we hoped (the Hollywood studios) could bring us support and investments. Now we’re helping them,” reports The Hollywood Reporter, which predicts box office gross in China could exceed 10 billion yuan by the end of 2010.

Discover Going to School with Dad on My Back

______________

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.

Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.

About iLook China

1 Comment | business, capitalism, China, Chinese arts and music, Chinese Culture, cultural differences, media | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

« Previous Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 573 other followers