From a discussion at theJames Randi Educational Foundation, we learn there isn’t much of a difference between cherry picking and confirmation bias. In fact, cherry picking, is also known as suppressing evidence and the fallacy of incomplete evidence.
Professor deLaplante says, “Confirmation bias is a tendency we have to filter and interpret evidence in ways that reinforce our beliefs and expectations. To deal with this bias we must force ourselves to seek out and weigh even the evidence that might count against our beliefs and expectations.”
Cognitive bias research conducted over the past forty years on this topic revealed that confirmation bias leads to making bad decisions. Confirmation biases lead us to proportionately accept arguments that support our beliefs and reject arguments that challenge our beliefs and this leads to errors in judgment.
An example of cherry picking and/or confirmation bias appears in Part 3 of our debate when Sid said, “Locating a valid academic source concluding Mao’s reign was more beneficial than not is impossible.”
I replied,”Proving China prospered [on average] under Mao at the same time that Chinese people suffered due to Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaigns was easy. Professor Stephen Thomas [University of Colorado at Denver] wrote for the World Bank’s Forum on Public Policy, ‘In 1949, the newly established People’s Republic of China designed and carried out economic development policies that led to an annual average economic growth rate of about 4 percent from 1953 to 1978, among the highest in the developing world…‘”
Another example may be found in Part 4 of our debate where Sid says, “China’s achievements have occurred despite Confucian values. Overwhelmingly, Confucianism works only to stifle creativity, stymie critical thinking, and nullify questioning. It is a form of authoritarianism, tyranny of the mind and soul… I don’t deny China’s scientific achievements… Chinese innovations should not be disregarded. However, it must be asked why so few have appeared in modern history.”
Sid’s flawed logic follows the pattern Professor deLaplante revealed in Part 2 of this series of posts.
1. Confucianism is a form of authoritarianism, a tyranny of the mind and soul that stifles creativity and stymies critical thinking, which nullifies questioning.
2. The Chinese are influenced by Confucianism
Therefore, all [1.3 billion] Chinese are incapable of being creative, thinking critically, etc.
If Sid had not been cherry picking or fallen victim to his own confirmation bias to prove his theory that Confucian values stifle creativity, he would have realized that this theory is not realistic. In fact, he dismissed China’s innovations over the centuries by claiming they happened in spite of Confucianism inferring that those innovations were accidents.
However, the facts say otherwise.
Over more than a thousand years, mostly during the Han (206 BC – 219 AD), T’ang (618 – 906 AD) and Sung (960 – 1276 AD) Dynasties, in spite of being ruled by authoritarian governments with an emperor that was considered a god, the Chinese, probably because of the Confucian emphasis on education, developed paper, the printing press, the compass, a method to measure earthquakes, multi-stage rockets, holistic/herbal medicine, a cure for scurvy centuries before the West, the stirrup, the crossbow, gunpowder, the cannon, the Pound Lock used on the Grand Canal and much more—all during extended periods of stability and prosperity.
In fact, forms of authoritarianism do not stifle innovation. If this were so, Hitler’s Nazi Germany would not have developed the solid fuel rocket, the first freeway system [the autobahn], jet engines and stealth technology. Instead, the evidence says that most innovation takes place in times of economic stability and prosperity regardless of the type of government, political or cultural philosophy.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Even after 1949 with the founding of the People’s Republic of China, science fiction literature continued to flourish. During this period, the genre adopted a popular science approach and directed the majority of its stories towards younger readers.
However, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), science fiction stagnated and then revived after March 1978 when the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council convened a national scientific congress in Beijing, proclaiming to China, “Science’s spring has come.”
Scientific enthusiasm and popular science followed, greatly promoting the development of science fiction in China.
From China.org we learn, “The monthly circulation of Science Fiction World, one of China’s most popular magazines, has exceeded 500,000, dwarfing all international counterparts. Yang Xiao, head of the magazine’s editorial board, said 70 percent of its readers were students who shared single copies of the journal between dozens of friends because they could not afford their own. Millions of Chinese young people were affected by science fiction, said Yang, who hailed the rise of the modernist genre among the people who would decide the nation’s future.”
Another sign of the progress of science fiction literature in China first took place August 25, 2007 at the Chengdu International SF/F Conference. Over two days, authors from America, Canada, Britain, Russia, Japan, and China, and over twenty-thousand science fiction fans arrived in Chengdu for the event, which in turn increased the influence of SF in China due to media coverage.
Then from Chinese Science Fiction.org, we discover the second Chengdu Science Fiction and Fantasy conference was held November 12, 2011 in Chengdu.
Meanwhile, China continues with plans to build a space station, and then a productive mining colony of rare-earth minerals on the moon with a future exploration of Mars on the books, while the United States space program languishes.
The cause of this development is due to the US national debt and the costs of the war on Islamic terrorism, which may have been caused by what Henry Kissinger calls, “American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world” even if the world isn’t interested resulting in this resistance from the Middle East.
In addition, many young people in the United States with a high sense of self-esteem do not read books while watching too much TV has been scientifically linked to lack of a development in part of the brain where imagination blossoms.
Note: You may read more on this topic [written by British thriller writer O. C. Heaton] over at A Rush of Green.
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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.
The history of science fiction in China predates the CCP’s encouragement today, and that interest started in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — a cultural phenomenon that emerged from Western Europe’s Industrial Revolution. One site I visited while researching this topic even dated science fiction to ancient China.
In Sci-fi books? China’s got tons of those, Asia Obscura.com says, “When it comes to sci-fi movies, China’s really falling behind. One that really did impress me, though, was the very first to be produced in China: 1980′s gorgeous, fun, and campy ‘Death Ray on Coral Island’ (珊瑚岛上的死光).
“In ‘Death Ray,’ a good-hearted team of Chinese scientists, based in what appears to be San Francisco, finally succeed in completing their fabulous futuristic invention. That is, until the sinister back-stabbing Americans, played with Bond-villainous glee by Chinese actors in whiteface and prosthetic noses, decide to steal the invention for their evil plots…”, which reveals another perspective of the US.
Then Foreign Policy.com introduces us to The Prosperous Time: China 2013, written by 58-year-old Hong Kong novelist Chen Guanzhong, who has lived and worked in Beijing for much of his life.
“China 2013 presents an ambivalent vision of China’s near future: outwardly triumphant (a Chinese company has even bought out Starbucks), and yet tightly controlled”, which may be a prediction that China’s one party republic is here to stay.
Note: You may read more on this topic [written by British thriller writer O. C. Heaton] over at A Rush of Green.
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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.
The British Telegraph’s HG Wells on Google: which of his predictions came true? reminds us that H. G. Wells first mentioned genetic engineering in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), lasers in The War of the Worlds (1898), the first moon landing in The First Men in the Moon (1901), nuclear power and weapons in the World Set Free (1914), and the Second World War in The Shape of Things to Come (1933).
Blog Tutor says, “At the time of their writing, these science fiction ideas often seemed impossible to fantastic to ever come true—and yet today’s technology seems to keep pace with the dreams of writers past.
“Although Cyberspace hasn’t quite reached the level of technology William Gibson predicted in 1986’s Burning Chrome, no one can deny that the Internet’s alternative worlds … are working towards the virtual…”
With that introduction, it may not come as a surprise that science fiction fits with China’s goals to catch up with and possibly surpass the West and reclaim its heritage and history of being the most powerful and technological advanced country and culture on the planet as it was for more than two thousand years before the 19th century and the Opium Wars.
In fact, we learn from The Race is On that “China’s Government actively encourages its citizens to read Science Fiction… Mark Charan Newton calls this the “Cult of Science Fiction – that is, the faith in dreaming up Big Ideas… So perhaps the Chinese are onto something with their focus on science fiction: a genre that weds the scientific to the artistic.”
Note: You may read more on this topic [written by British thriller writer O. C. Heaton] over at A Rush of Green.
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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.
This Blog explored (with Tom Carter’s guest post) how Harlequin Romance Invaded China without mentioning that romance literature in China has a history reaching back before the Dream of the Red Chamber (1715-1763), which has a tragic Romeo and Juliet love story between its covers.
As a child, I read many historical texts on Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, the Napoleonic Wars, the British Empire, and historical fiction on similar subjects.
Then as an adolescent in middle and then high school I devoured science fiction and fantasy novels often one or two a day.
Today, I mostly read mysteries and literature but find my science fiction fantasy fix from film productions such as The Lord of the Rings, TV’s Stargate and Star Trek franchises in addition to George Lucas‘s Star Wars Saga.
Recently, I’ve been watching the complete series of Earth 2 while reading mysteries and thrillers.
In fact, the future we live with today was predicted in the early pages of Western science-fiction literature and China has noticed that science fiction literature often predicts and precedes scientific innovations such as laptop computers, the Internet, the Amazon Kindle and even doors that open automatically.
Note: You may read more on this topic [written by British thriller writer O. C. Heaton] over at A Rush of Green.
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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.
My wife and daughter returned from China last summer with a crate of Chinese movies on DVDs—there wasn’t one American movie in the mix and many do not have English subtitles.
Therefore, it is strange that the one Chinese film that impressed me the most (so far) was one I discovered at a local Half Priced Books. The movie was Life Show (2002) adapted from a book by Chinese author Chi Li.
Since the late 1980s, Chi Li has been considered a pioneer of “new realism” and her work depicts ordinary life in China so critics have identified her work with the Western school of “existentialism”.
In fact, it was the “ordinary element” of her work that I saw in the film which captured my curiosity to learn more. Since I’ve traveled to China several times since 1999 and not with tour groups, I’ve visited streets similar to the ones that appear in the film. I’m sure most foreign visitors to China that visit on packaged tours do not see the ordinary side of China as I have.
My wife says Chi Li is one of her favorite Chinese authors. The first time I was introduced to Chi Li’s work was through Life Show, which tells the story of Lai Shuangyang, a restaurant owner played by Tao Hong. Shuangyang’s life is busy dealing with family and business but she is lonely until one of her long-time customers, played by Tao Zeru, shows a romantic interest in her.
Zeru plays a middle-aged businessman, and Shuangyang takes a risk and the two strike up a romance that ends when she discovers he is the developer behind the modernization of the area where she has her restaurant. He offers to take care of her but it is obvious that Shuangyang values her personal freedom and independence and in a fiery scene, she breaks up with him.
Lai Shuangyang’s life is filled with complications. Her younger brother Jiuju is a drug addict in jail/rehab. The woman that loves Jiuju is Mei, who works for Shuangyang in her restaurant. Mei attempts suicide because Jiuju is not interested in her, and then Shuangyang arranged a marriage for Mei to another man, who is mentally ill.
Her sister in law, Xiaojin, is trying to regain the Lai family’s home, which was given to a neighbor during the Cultural Revolution. In addition, Shuangyang is at risk of losing her restaurant due to a redevelopment project in Wuhan.
Chi Li, the author of Life Show, is one of China’s best-known writers and several of her novels have been translated into French by publisher Actes Sud.
Chi Li was born 1957 in Wuhan, Hubei province, graduated from the Chinese Language Department of Wuhan University and then worked as an editor of a literary magazine called Fang Cao (Fragrant Grass).
Chi Li rarely travels and avoids “literary circles”. “If my unsociability is thought to be a flaw, I admit I’m a person with a flaw,” Chi has said.
Chi Li, Chinese author of "Life Show"
During the Cultural Revolution, like millions of other young Chinese, she was sent to the countryside to become an “educated youth”. Later she studied medicine and practiced for five years before becoming a teacher.
Today, she is a member of the National People’s Congress (NPC), which provides an opportunity to discuss politics with other representative of the NPC providing an understanding/education of China’s policies and political atmosphere.
Chi Li’s work relates to love, marriage, divorce and extramarital affairs of contemporary Chinese life, while her characters are imbued with common human traits such as ambition, deceit, jealousy, and sexual desire. Her work, Comes and Goes, was a story of extramarital affairs occurring in Wuhan and became a TV series of same name.
The city of Wuhan comes alive in her work—enough to be considered a character. Although many of her novels have been translated into French, there are no English translations yet, which is a shame.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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In August 2010, I ran a twelve part series on Sun Tzu’sThe Art of War starting with Part 1. In this post, I’ve brought together the series in one post and added more content.
The reason for revisiting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has to do with a recent study by The Pew Research Center, which says, one in three Iraq and Afghanistan veterans of the post-9/11 military see these wars as a waste.
Then NPR’s Jackie Northam reported as the wars drag on, interest among Americans has dropped from 90 percent supporting the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan before the war started to 25 percent today.
Northam quotes Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. “The public soured on the decision to go to war in Iraq by 2004, when not only were there no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) found, but all of a sudden, the cost of that war began to increase, [and] casualties began to be rather substantial.”
In addition, Fair Game (2010), a movie of CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband, who wrote a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece on the topic of WMD in Iraq, alleged that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq—an accusation of fraud in the White House.
According to the wisdom of Sun Tzu, these three points are enough to indicate a “high” possibility of defeat for the United States.
So, who better to turn to than Sun Tzu to see if the goals of these wars are possible to achieve.
It is time to reexamine the master that West Point cadets study. Sun Tzu dates to China’s Warring States Period (476 – 221 BC). Traditional accounts place him in the Spring and Autumn Period of China as a military general serving under King Helu of Wu (544-496 BC).
You have to be good to still be taken seriously about 2500 years after your death.
There are three key principals to The Art of War.
1. Know your enemy and know yourself — understanding your opponent is crucial to victory.
2. Sun Tzu prizes the general who can outwit instead of outfight his opponent — to subdue the enemy without fighting is the height of skill.
3. Avoid what is strong. Attack what is weak.
In the case of President George W. Bush, when he went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is now clear that he did not know his enemy (or much at all about the culture and politics of the Middle East and of Islam).
Bush also resorted to subduing his enemy with force instead of outwitting him—as if President Bush was capable of outwitting Al-Qaeda, since finding the weakness of an organization that is like smoke would be a challenge to any president.
As for Sun Tzu, around 500 BC, the King of Wu summons him, one of the greatest military minds in history, to save his kingdom from a more powerful enemy.
Sun Tzu was a warrior and a philosopher. He was important because he had a cohesive, holistic philosophy on strategy.
Sun Tzu tells the King of Wu he can defeat the enemy with a smaller army. Doubting him, the king challenges Sun Tzu to turn the palace concubines into a fighting force and Sun Tzu accepts.
Sun Tzu shows the concubines what to do, selects the best two students and puts them in charge of the others. When Sun Tzu orders the exercise to begin, the woman laugh.
He tries again but the concubines laugh again.
Sun Tzu says, “If instructions are not clear and commands not explicit, it is the fault of the general. But if the orders are clear, and my orders are clear, it is the fault of the subordinate officers.”
Without warning, Sun Tzu beheads the two concubines he had selected to lead the others. To Sun Tzu, war is a matter of life and death. This is the key principal of his teachings. Once understood, everyone from the general to the solider will be motivated to win.
However, in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States fought wars with rules that hamper victory and ignore the fact that war is a matter of life and death.
Instead, politics and public opinion decide the rules of the battle field.
While the bodies of the first two concubines are still warm, Sun Tzu appoints two new concubines to lead the others. This time the concubines follow his orders without hesitation. The king of Wu is convinced and appoints Sun Tzu commander of the Wu army.
Sun Tzu now must train an army of 30 thousand troops to fight a force ten times larger.
The state of Wu has only 33,000 troops while Chu can field a force of 300 thousand.
Outnumbered ten to one, Sun Tzu could build his defenses and wait for the attack. However, he does the unexpected. He invades Chu.
He doesn’t attack Chu’s main army. Instead, he attacks outposts and weaker targets. When Chu sends an army to fight, Sun Tzu slips away emphasizing maneuver, surprise and deception.
After every battle, Sun Tzu learns more about his enemy.
During another war more than two thousand years later, Sun Tzu’s ultimate secret becomes more evident. In the mid 1960s, the world’s largest super power is fighting in Vietnam—a country smaller than the state of Montana.
The American general sees the battlefield like a chessboard where armies stand and fight. However, Vietnam has no clear objectives to attack and destroy.
The Communist general understands Sun Tzu and uses the Viet Cong in hit and run attacks against fixed US positions.
Sun Tzu said, “It is more important to outthink your enemy than outfight him. In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military power.”
The US commander breaks these rules.
Sun Tzu liked the enemy to maneuver and respond to his moves. This way he was in charge of the battlefield.
A US report after the Vietnam War revealed that 80% of the time, it was the North Vietnamese and Vietcong who decided where and when to fight.
Sun Tzu said, “Once you know the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, you can avoid the strengths and attack the weaknesses.” At the beginning of the war, almost 80% of Americans supported it.
As the Vietnam War continued with mounting US causalities, that support at home shifted against the war, which achieved another of Sun Tzu’s rules, “The skillful leader subdues enemy’s troops without any fighting. One does not win wars by winning battles.”
Although the North Vietnamese and Vietcong did not win battles, they won the war by turning the American people against it. To achieve this goal, the North Vietnamese commander was willing to lose ten men for every American killed.
In the end, the US lost 53 thousand troops and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong more than a million with several million more noncombatants killed as collateral damage to the American bombing.
Sun Tzu felt spies were important, and he devoted one chapter to spies. He said, “Use your spies for every kind of business,” and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong followed that advice.
Sun Tzu said, “An accurate knowledge of the enemy is worth ten divisions.”
He also said, “Let your plans be as dark as night – then strike like a thunderbolt.” The Tet Offensive in January of 1968 was that thunderbolt.
Sun Tzu said, “Keep plans as dark as night.”
The NVA (North Vietnamese Army) and Vietcong did this by moving supplies and troops through miles of tunnels built in the 1950 and 60s.
Deception was also one of Sun Tzu’s rules.
To achieve deception, the NVA and Vietcong announced they would honor a cease-fire on January 31, 1968, the Tet New-Year Holiday.
Sun Tzu said, “In battle use a direct attack to engage and an indirect attack to win,” meaning to deceive your enemy so you can win your real objective.
To achieve this goal, the NVA launched a surprise attack on Khe Sanh, a remote US base, one week before the Tet Offensive.
The South Vietnamese and American military are surprised when the NVA launches the Tet Offensive. At first, it looks like the Vietcong will win, but the NVA ignored one of Sun Tzu’s rules—moral influence.
Moral influence means a leader must have the people behind him to win.
During the early days of the Tet, the Vietcong rounded up and brutally assassinated several-thousand South Vietnamese government workers and killed many Catholic nuns losing the support of the people.
However, in America, watching the violence of the Tet Offensive on TV turned more Americans against the war.
Eight years later, in 1975, Saigon falls to the NVA and America loses the war even though the US had military superiority.
It is about 500 BC in China and Sun Tzu’s hit-and-run campaign against the state of Chu is working. The Chu prime minister is starting to lose support and the moral of his troops is dropping.
Throughout the countryside of Chu, there is fear of where Sun Tzu will strike next. When the larger Chu army threatens one of Sun Tzu’s allies, Sun Tzu uses another rule of war, “To move your enemy, entice him with something he is certain to take.”
Then, when his own forces are surrounded, Sun Tzu says, “Put the army in the face of death where there is no escape and they will not flee or be afraid – there is nothing they cannot achieve.” See The Long March
What happened to Sun Tzu in China when his small army was surrounded also happened on June 6, 1944 when allied troops in World War II invaded Europe during D-day.
Sun Tzu says, “All warfare is deception. If you can deceive your enemy before battle, you are more likely to win.”
That’s what General Eisenhower did before the invasion of Normandy. To succeed, the allies used deception to convince the Germans the attack would not take place in Normandy.
Sun Tzu says, “It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to spy against you and bribe them to serve you.” In The Art of War, double agents are the most important spies.
That is what the Allies did in World War II before the Normandy Invasion of France. No one used double agents better than the British did.
Britain turned almost every spy Germany sent during the war. These double agents made the Germans believed the invasion would take place at Pas de Calais and not Normandy.
Sun Tzu says, “The way a wise general can achieve greatness beyond ordinary men is through foreknowledge.” The allies had foreknowledge because they broke the German code and knew what the Germans were thinking and planning.
Sun Tzu would have praised the allied preparation for the invasion and the use of deception but he would have condemned the actual assault.
Sun Tzu says, “When a falcon’s strike breaks the body of its prey, it is because of timing. When torrential water tosses boulders, it is because of momentum.”
Sun Tzu believes that the best attack can be ruined if momentum is lost, and he would have predicted the cost of lives during the Normandy invasion more than two-thousand years before it took place.
During the invasion of Normandy, the allies survived on death ground exactly as Sun Tzu predicted by fighting together and never giving up.
Sun Tzu meant when you put troops in a combat position where they must fight or die, there is no choice but to fight.
Another reason the Allies succeeded during D-day was another of Sun Tzu’s rules of war. He said, “It is essential for victory that generals are unconstrained by their leaders.”
The allied command structure gives total authority to General Eisenhower as supreme commander.
However, Germany under Hitler did not have the same command structure.
Hitler had set up a confusing system of overlapping authority so no one had total control over the military leaving Hitler the only one who made final decisions.
Hitler’s command structure is a perfect example of what Sun Tzu says about “no interference from the leader”.
The allies in France are bogged down in difficult terrain. The combat losses are horrible and little progress is made.
The solution is found in Sun Tzu’s rules of war. “Make your enemy prepare on his left and he will be weak on his right.”
The allies will follow this rule.
Sun Tzu says you must behave like the snake. When your enemy attacks, you must be flexible.
Throughout the invasion of Normandy, France, Sun Tzu’s rules of war guide the Allies to victory. The Allies used deception, foreknowledge, and a superior command structure that motivated the army to fight as one.
Sun Tzu says, “The winning army realizes the conditions for victory first then fights. The losing army fights first then seeks victory.”
More than two thousand years before the Battle of Normandy, the battle between the kingdoms of Wu and Chu raged on.
Even with a smaller army, Sun Tzu is not worried. He has split his army. While the Chu army is surrounding his smaller force, the main part of his army is moving toward the unprotected Chu capital.
The Chu commander turns from the smaller Wu force under Sun Tzu’s command and rushes back to save the capital.
Sun Tzu says, “No nation has ever benefitted from prolonged war.” The American Civil War is Sun Tzu’s nightmare scenario. Possibly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the same since so many of Sun Tzu’s rules of war have been ignored.
Sun Tzu says, “Those skilled in war bring the enemy to the field of battle. They are not brought by him.” This will happen to General Robert E. Lee in 1863.
China’s Sun Tzu says if the orders are unclear, it is the fault of the commanding general.
General Lee told one of his generals to “Attack when you think it is practical.” That general decides it is not practical and does nothing.
At the Battle Gettysburg, Lee did not give clear orders.
Robert E. Lee made a tactical mistake when he did not follow Sun Tzu’s rule to “Move only when you see an advantage and there is something to gain. Only fight if a position is critical.”
Sun Tzu says, “When the enemy occupies high ground, do not confront him. If he attacks downhill, do not oppose him.” Robert E. Lee did not listen and decides to attack the Union positions on the high ground.
General Longstreet disagrees. He does not want to attack the high ground. Instead, he wants to go around the Union Army toward the North’s capital, Washington D.C.
Sun Tzu says, “There are some armies that should not be fought and some ground that should not be contested.”
After two days of horrible losses, Robert E. Lee orders what is left of his army to attack uphill a third time. General Longstreet urges Lee not to do this. Lee ignores him.
On the third day of Gettysburg during Picket’s charge up another hill, only 5,000 survived of 12,000 troops. Sun Tzu would have been horrified.
Sun Tzu says, “When troops flee, are insubordinate, collapse or are routed in battle, it is the fault of the general.”
Sun Tzu sees a commanding general as someone intelligent and cunning and never rash or arrogant, which is the opposite of the commander of the Chu army more than two thousand years ago.
Sun Tzu won the war against Chu, which had an army ten times larger than his. He did this through preparation, deception and indirect attacks.
After winning the war against Chu, Sun Tzu retires and writes The Art of War.
The first line of Sun Tzu’s rules of war says, “War is a matter of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, survival or ruin.
As I finished the series on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, I thought of President Lyndon Johnson who invaded Vietnam (1950 to 1975)—a war where a super power lost to a third-world country as Chu did to Wu about twenty-five hundred years ago.
Nations that fought with the United States lost more than 300 thousand troops with almost 1.5 million wounded. North Vietnam and the Communists lost almost 1.2 million troops and more than 4 million civilian dead. Source: Vietnam War – Wiki
President G. W. Bush rushed into a war in Iraq and Afghanistan on faulty evidence, which may have been based on lies. For these wars, the casualties and losses continue.
Several American presidents ignored Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Since World War II, America has spent more than 23 trillion dollars fighting wars and in defense. The U.S. won the Cold War against Soviet Russia without fighting.
Too bad the citizen of the US, Presidents Johnson and G. W. Bush did not learn from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
China’s Sun Tzu said, “Sometimes, the best way to win is not to fight.”
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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To understand another country’s history and culture, one should listen to the music, read that country’s novels and watch its films.
This summer, my wife and daughter returned from China with dozens of original Chinese films on DVD.
Then I saw Reflection of the Moon, (ISBN: 7-88054-168-3), which is about Ah Bing (1893 – 1950), a famous master of the Chinese Erhu, who overnight—in 1950 shortly before his death—became a national sensation as radios throughout China played his music.
Fortunate for me, Ah Bing’s story had English subtitles, which were not of the best quality and true to form for a Chinese movie filmed in 1979 (shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976), the plot was melodramatic with traces of propaganda that favored the Chinese Communists.
However, to be fair, in 1950, the Civil War was over and the Communists, with support from several hundred million peasants, had won.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution would not begin for years and for those that survived the purges in 1949 and 1950 (mostly abusive land owners and drug dealers accused of crimes by the people they may have abused and victimized), Mao fulfilled his promises of land reforms.
To understand the era of Ah Bing’s life, much of China (including Tibet) was still feudal in nature, and the upper classes often took advantage of the peasants and workers as if they were beasts of burden treated as slaves.
This is one of Ah Bing’s masterpieces for the Erhu—Moon Reflected in the Second Spring (二泉映月)
Ah Bing’s real name was Hua Yanjun. His knowledge of traditional Chinese music and his talent as a musician went mostly unnoticed until the last year of his life in 1950, shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
In 1950, two musicologists were sent to his hometown of Wuxi to record and preserve his music. At the time, he was ill and hadn’t performed for about two years. Six of his compositions were recorded that are considered masterpieces. It is said that he knew more than 700 pieces—and most were his compositions.
As “Reflection of the Moon” shows, the lyrics of some of his music criticized the KMT (Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government), and he was often punished for speaking out through his music. If you have read of The Long March, you know that the peasants did not trust the KMT, but they did trust the Communists and that trust was earned between 1926 and 1949—a period covering twenty-three years, and most rural Chinese of that era still think of Mao as China’s George Washington.
In fact, Ah Bing’s story and music is still so popular that the Performing Arts Company of China’s Air Force performed Er Quan Yin, an original Western-style Chinese opera, in 2010. Source: China Daily
To discover more of the time-period that Ah Bing lived, see The Roots of Madness.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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This film (based on a novel by Lisa See) is the story of four women and of the complexities of China — Lily and Snow Flower live in 19th century Southwest China, while Nina and Sophia live in 21st century Shanghai.
Even in the 19th century, Shanghai was a world apart from Southwest China and still is. It is safe to say that the day-to-day grind of life probably hasn’t changed much (except for foot binding and more freedom for women) in remote rural villages in Southwest China, which is off the beaten track of most foreign tourists that visit China on fast-paced packaged tours.
I read Lisa See’s novel soon after it came out and although I enjoyed the book and felt it was well written, I couldn’t understand why it stayed on the New York Times Bestseller Listas long as it did. And to be honest, I still don’t. However, if there was a formula to predict why a few books are wildly successful and many fail, no one has discovered it yet.
The original story Lisa See wrote shows a small part of China and in no way represents all of China and all things Chinese. That would be a challenge since China is a diverse land with many spoken languages and cultures and one written language and a very long history.
From what I recall, Snow Flower and Lili, the characters in 19th century China, live in Southwest China and belong to one of China’s fifty-six minorities, which have unique cultures apart from China’s Han majority, and as children these two girls are sworn to be loyal friends for life.
Considering what life was like in China for woman in the early 19th century, it is understandable why such a custom would have evolved. However, to be clear, I will remind the reader that women were mostly treated this way everywhere in the world at that time, and many still are outside the US, Europe and China. Sex slavery and abuse of women still exists in many countries such as Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
These reviews, written by Sino-blind Americans, demonstrate no clue that the real purpose of this movie may have been to highlight China’s past and present and not as another cloned US movie such as two I saw recently, which reflect what is mostly popular in America. Both of these American movies, Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon and Horrible Bosses, lacked depth without a soul, and I cannot recommend them to anyone. However, I must admit that I’m capable of enjoyed both depthless movies and films with depth such as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.
I’ve been to China many times and sat in movie theaters watching movies made in China for a Chinese audience and this movie, to me, is a Chinese film with Chinese actors and actresses set in China. After all, a Chinese film company was behind its production and the director is Chinese.
Most Chinese do not think like the average American that is often stuck on a linear path incapable of seeing the meaning between the lines. However, Chinese think metaphorically meaning if you want to understand and enjoy this film, look between the lines and learn from what is hidden in sight?
As we travel with the ancient (19th century) and modern (21st century) sworn sisters with scenes that shift from past to present, we discover that although there is more personal freedom in China today than there was almost two centuries ago, life still comes with no guarantees. The scenes in modern Shanghai show a city in transition with old being torn down being replaced by new as if China is emerging from a cocoon. I saw this transition as a metaphor. The scene where Nina is taking off her high heels and rubbing her feet compared to the ancient Lili (both played by the same actress) taking off her three-inch shoes and rubbing her bloodied, painful bound feet demonstrates how far China has evolved.
In fact, because this film is more Chinese than the novel written by American born and raised Lisa See, I feel it captured more of a sense of China than the novel did.
For those reasons, I cannot agree with most of the American media critics that trashed the film. Of course, to be fair, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan would be considered a failed and flawed film to most Western critics because it is a Chinese film adapted from a Western book.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is more than just a disjointed film jumping clumsily between centuries. This film represents China and the complexity of Chinese civilization and it demonstrates how much China has changed while so much that is often out of sight of most foreigners stays the same.
If you have the patience to suspend your Western values and expectations of what movies should offer and want to discover something new, I recommend seeing this film. But be warned, since this film is Chinese (in my opinion), it pushes the melodramatic envelope beyond what most Americans are comfortable with.
Shallow thinkers that flock to see movies such as Transformers 3, Horrible Bosses, The Zookeeper, and Cars 2, etc. may want to avoid Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. However, if you are an individual that enjoys learning and expanding your horizons, go — and take a box of tissues.
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.
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.
A friend reminded me of the Dragon Boat and Rice Cake Festivals that took place in China earlier this month.
These festivals came about because of the suicide of Ch’u Yuan (343 – 289 BC), an aristocrat of the Ch’u State. He is considered one of ancient China’s greatest and earliest recognized poets.
History/myth tells us that the festival celebrates and honors Ch’u Yuan, who drowned himself in the Mi Lo River as a protest against his government’s actions.
What we do know is that when he was banished from his home, he left in despair feeling his exile was unjust. As he traveled about, he wrote poetry, observed shamanistic folk rites, and learned of legends that influenced his work.
The Dragon Boat Festival, held on the fifth month of the Chinese lunar year, originates from the search for the poet’s body. A popular legend says villagers raced in their boats to the middle of the river and desperately tried to save him, but were unsuccessful. They threw the rice filled dumplings or rice cakes into the water as a food offering to distract the river’s god and the fish away from his body.
The Dragon Boat Festival is also celebrated in San Francisco (and many other cities around the world) and I learned that a Dragon Boat race takes place in San Francisco Bay. While Dragon Boat races are being held in China this month, San Francisco holds its races in September 17-18, 2011 from Treasure Island.
In Beijing, China, the Dragon Boat Festival, also known as Duanwu Festival, was celebrated early in June.
As for the rice cakes, I suggest watching the embedded YouTube video to see how they are made, which demonstrates a process similar to how my wife makes them.
However, besides the essential sticky rice, the other ingredients are optional. Sticky rice cakes may also have raisins and black beans added. For centuries, Silk Road caravans leaving China carried rice cakes as rations since they have a long shelf life.
When I checked a list of China’s Public Holidays, the only one listed for June was the Dragon Boat Festival. Then I read that “Zongzi”, traditional rice cakes wrapped in bamboo leaves, are eaten during the Dragon Boat Festival, which is a three-day holiday.
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.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
