Hung Huang, one of China’s four Opras, and the CEO of China Interactive Media Group, the host of TV talk show Crossing Over and one of the top-five most popular Bloggers in China wrote a post for the New York Times Economix Blog about why the Chinese save so much.
She thinks the Chinese save out of fear.
I don’t agree, because China is not unique when it comes to Asians saving money. Galbi Think.org says, “Savings rates for East Asian economies averaged about 35% of GDP.
For a comparison, the long term saving rate in the US is less than 7%.
Another study reported by All Business.com says, “The fact that the saving rate of rural households (in China) is considerably higher than that of urban households—even though their income levels are so much lower—is surprising.”
Not so surprising. I married into a Chinese family and I’ve come to believe the Chinese can out frugal anyone. The less earned, the more the Chinese save. All it takes is saying no to buying frivolous junk and eating out when the money isn’t there.
In fact, I found the comments to Huang’s post to be more convincing.
Melvin Chin says, “Asians, including Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, are predominantly brought up with the concepts of frugality and saving from very young. … Saving teaches them to be proud of what is accumulated, enjoy the fruits of abundance, and cherish the habit as a virtue.”
B. Ray says, “The strong family connection is the reason for Chinese to save. It is the same in Taiwan. Almost every elder person I know saves for their descendents.”
Fei says, “Simply look at the generations of Chinese who live in North American, you’ll find out that the majority of them still maintain a lifelong enthusiasm of saving … because saving is a habit that’s deeply rooted in the Chinese culture.”
If all Asian cultures are so good at saving money and are all collective cultures, what does that say about the West and North America’s individualistic cultures?
_______________
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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An expatriate living in China sent me a copy of The Australian’sGoodwill 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.
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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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.
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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I’m always looking for information about China, and I learned something new from The Economist’s May 6, 2010 issue. Click the link to read the entire piece or read this summary. I bought the magazine.
China has two classes—rural and urban. The urban people have prospered for the last thirty years as China built a middle class. Most rural Chinese have not been able to benefit from the booming economy and are getting restless.
Rural land outside China’s cities usually belongs to collectives. When Mao won China, the Communists divided the land among villages—not individuals. Individuals do not hold title to farmland and cannot sell land that no one owns.
China saw what was happening in India when farmers sold their plots to developers. Rural people in India flocked to the cities and built sprawling slums. To avoid that, the Chinese government created a system to keep rural people on their farms. Another motivation was fear of another famine like the one that struck China from 1959 to 1961 killing millions from starvation. If farmers left the fields for a better lifestyle in cities, that nightmare might return.
An experiment was tried in rural areas outside Chongqing to see if the land can be divided among individuals while increasing food production. Since the government still hasn’t figured out how to make the transition smoothly, don’t expect rural land reforms to happen quickly.
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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“Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook said in his interview with NBC that companies like Apple chose to produce their products in places like China, not because of the lower costs associated with it, but because the manufacturing skills required just aren’t present in the U.S. anymore.
“He added that the consumer electronics world has never really had a big production presence in the U.S. As a result, it’s really more about starting production in the U.S. than bringing it back.”
Reading that AP piece reminded me of an in-service I attended in the early 1990s when I was still teaching. We were told that America’s children, supported by their parents, were not interested in the sort of education that would have led to the type of jobs Tim Cook is talking about.
For one example, we were told about a GM bumper factory that once employed 500 workers but now employed two who maintained the computers and robots that were still making bumpers in that same factory. Those 498 jobs were lost to robots—not to China.
When one of the two workers was getting ready to retire, GM, by law, had to advertise and spend time attempting to find an American worker skilled enough to replace the one who was leaving. After several months and thousands of dollars spent to advertise the position, none of the applicants had the necessary job entry skills. Only then was GM free to look outside the US and hired a recent high school graduate in Germany to take the job that came with a $90,000 annual salary in addition to the benefits of health care and a retirement plan.
Today, many of America’s high school graduates are too busy chasing frivolous dreams of fame and wealth while standing in line to audition for programs such as American Idol or the X-Factor where sixty thousand from each show are rejected annually before the final ten or twelve are chosen to compete on live TV. In fact, Hollywood still attracts thousands of starry eyed teens each year. That is a 99.98% failure rate but that hasn’t stopped many American children from chasing dreams and being encouraged by parents.
I remember one student of mine that dreamed of becoming a super model and possibly working for Victoria’s Secret. Her mother was even paying for private modeling lessons, and the student was only fourteen and no way did this girl look like the super models that Victoria’s Secret hires. To achieve that would have required serious weight loss and some plastic surgery.
Then there were the kids that never did the class work or homework because they were going to earn millions in baseball, basketball, football or golf, so why read? After all, it was no fun to read.
Next there were the parents obsessed with the child’s self esteem and always feel good attitude. Heaven forbid that a parent should say no to his or her child or sit down and tell the child the reality of dreaming to become a super star in sports or entertainment or become the next Steve Jobs.
In fact, “The perception among some Americans is that immigrant labor and off shoring of jobs are the major causes of unemployment. Indeed, American corporations choose to utilize migrant labor and off shoring to India and China in order to pay out lower wages. Yet, studies have estimated that off shoring accounts for 10 percent of unemployment and would only affect two percent of employed Americans.” Source: Smirking Chimp.com
Does that mean that 90% of jobs lost in America were to robots and computers?
However, no matter the facts, if someone is out of work, it is easier to blame it on China or Japan or India or South Korea, or Bangladesh, for example, than on some machine probably made in America by another machine that caused the loss of 99.6% of the high paying jobs with benefits in that GM bumper factory back in the 20th century.
And if it comes to education, then the public (mostly parents that refuse to take the blame for how they raised their children) will need another scapegoat and turn, once again, on the US public education system, its teachers and teacher unions.
What were American companies supposed to do, go out of business because the children didn’t want to learn the skills necessary to work in those industries?
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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Gillian Wong of the Associated Press reported on a lone, rural Chinese farmer that had resisted selling his house to the local government so a new road could be completed. The photo shows a house sitting in the middle of an almost finished road with pavement surrounding it.
If that had been in the US, the house would have been gone long before the road was build—something Wong fails to mention is that this sort of thing happens in the US all the time and it started during the decades that the roads and highways spread across the US like a spider web.
In fact, local US governments do not need to wait for the owner of a house to agree to sell. It can force the owner to sell and then use the police/marshals to move him or her out using force if necessary.
I still remember reading about one incident in The Los Angeles Times that happened in Southern California during the craze to build freeways there.
The home owner was a combat veteran from World War II, Korea or Vietnam (I do not remember which war). This vet refused to move out of his house even after the local government forced him to sell it. He claimed he wasn’t being paid what he had invested in the house in improvements.
This American vet filled sandbags and stacked them against the walls of his house; he stocked up on canned foods, bullets, rifles and a gas mask along with a bullet-proof vest. No one was going to take his house away from him.
A swat team had to be called in, tear gas was used and the swat team broke into his house and swarmed him before he could shoot anyone. Then off to jail and court he went to be judged by a jury of his peers. I never did find out what the outcome of that trial was.
In the US, as states, cities and towns expand and improve roadways, sewer and power lines, communications and other system, local governments often secure or acquire access to private land. Without the government’s power to do so, the size and capability or public infrastructure would become inadequate to serve the needs of society (the people) and often in the US the estimated value of a property does not match, because the government uses a different method to determine value not based on what the owner spent on the property but based on the value of other properties in the same community based on an average. To the government, the value of the property is an estimated value. To the owner, it may be every penny he or she invested in the property. Source: Find Law.com
In the US, this has been called legalized theft and it has been debated for decades. The following source is one example of that debate: Fee.org
The law is called Eminent Domain and it gives a government the power to buy private property for public use, usually with compensation to the owner.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia says: “Government power to take private property for public use without the owner’s consent. Constitutional provisions in most countries, including the U.S. (in the 5th Amendment to the Constitution), require the payment of just compensation to the owner. As a power peculiar to sovereign authority and coupled with a duty to pay compensation, the concept was developed by such 17th-century natural-law jurists as Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf.”
Therefore, why is this incident in China worthy of media attention in the US, and I wonder if China’s media ever reported on similar incidents in America?
After all, they happen all the time and are often ignored by the American media because they are so common. If you doubt what I say, watch the three-part PBS program embedded in this post.
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 conclusion, how many ignorant adult voters are there in America that a presidential candidate can fool to gain votes? I think the answer may be found from the number of adult Americans that do not read books and watch too much reality TV.
1. One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
2. Forty-Two percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
3. Eighty percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
4. Seventy percent of U.S., adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
5. Children who watch four or more hours of TV per day spend less time on school work, have poorer reading skills, play less with friends, and have fewer hobbies than children who watch less TV. Source for #5: Reading.org
However, according to A. C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day, and the number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes. Source: csun.edu
No matter what we hear from an American politician running for election, the Bureau of Labor Statistics proves that education/literacy pays, because the unemployment rate for adult Americans with less than a high school diploma is 14.1% (medium weekly earnings in 2011 was $451) while unemployment for workers with a college BA degree is 4.9% (medium weekly earnings in 2011 was $1,053).
In fact, about 39% of voters ages 18 and older that do not have a high school degree vote, while 77% of college graduates vote. In addition, you may suspect that low-income voters would vote Democratic, but the top sixteen states with very high or high level of persons living below poverty (43% of adults with low literacy skills live in poverty), twelve of these states vote solidly Republican. Source: Election 2012 Factors: Poverty Level Households by State
Answer this question: If you cannot read or understand what you read, where do you get information to help decide how to vote or what to think about China?
A. talk radio (dominated by conservative talk shows such as Rush Limbaugh)
B. television
C. reading informative Blogs such as this one
D. reading newspaper, books, and magazines to become better informed
E. other sources – for example, the barber shop or a bar
I think that Abraham Lincoln should have also said, “It is easier to fool someone that is uneducated and does not read than someone that is educated and reads.”
Note: If you want to learn about the impact of watching too much TV, I suggest you read TV Turns Kids Into Zombies, Retards Development, and eventually, these children grow up to be adults that vote.
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 Part 2, we discovered that China’s unemployment rate among rural Chinese working in manufacturing reached 16.4% in early 2009 (while unemployment in the United States was only 9.3%), and from Forbes on October 18, 2012 we learn: “Manufacturing jobs stand poised for a rebound as jobs get reshored from China — creating 2.5 million to 5 million U.S. jobs in manufacturing and support jobs. Worries about a severe job skills gap are largely misreported according to results from a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) analysis – part of the firm’s ongoing series entitledMade in America, Again.”
In comparison, unemployment in the United States stands at 7.8% today. In another comparison, during 2007 – 2009 while China lost 23 million manufacturing jobs, the United States lost only 2 million in that job sector. Source: bls.gov
With numbers like these, would someone explain how China is stealing manufacturing jobs from the US?
In addition, the average credit card debt per household in the US (I’m not talking about the Federal national debt) is about $16,000 while total U.S. Consumer debt was $2.43 trillion as of May 2011.
The History of Economic Booms and Busts
US Mortgage Debt is more than $14 trillion and 40% of Americans have no retirement savings while 25% have no personal savings. In fact, 38% of American adults have no emergency funds to fall back on.
However, in China the average household saves almost 30% of its annual income. The average business saves about 45% of net profits and the government has a surplus savings rate of more than 50% of tax revenues instead of the US that has a national debt more than 100% of GDP–more than $16 trillion. The US has been spending more than a trillion dollars a year that it doesn’t have while China saves half of its tax revenues and invests in infrastructure and in other countries such as the US. Source: VoxEU.org
Does that sound as if China is a threat to the US and is stealing manufacturing jobs from America? Many in the US are self centered and do not consider that China trades with the world–not just America. In 2011, China exported about $1.6 trillion in goods to other countries while importing about $1.4 trillion. At the same time, China bought about $104 billion in goods from the US. Source: US-China.org
In addition, outside the US, the world sees China differently. The Pew Global Attitudes Project surveys thousands of people in 59 countries. For 2012 China had a 94% favorable rating while the United States had 40%.
The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
Back to Abraham Lincoln, who said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
We will discover what that means today in the last post in this series.
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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
