Two Thousand Years Before Buddhism, Taoism, or Confucianism
“In the nineteenth century, due to the influence of Darwinian evolution, it was thought that modern religions actually evolved from animistic roots into polytheism and later into monotheism (that is, belief in countless spirits evolved into the belief in specific gods which in turn evolved into the belief in one supreme God). If this is true, primitive societies would have no concept of a Supreme Being (monotheism). However, not only is there no evidence that animism evolved into polytheism and later into monotheism, but there is tremendous evidence supporting just the opposite. It appears that monotheism de-evolved into polytheism. Today, anthropologists and ethnologists have proven that most primitive animistic religions have a latent monotheistic belief, even though they also believe in other spiritual forces. This is a common element in the oldest cultures on earth: the Australians, Polynesians, Zulus, bushmen, Congo tribes, and Mongolians. All of these cultures worship a primal Father. Belief in an all-powerful supreme Being also predates polytheism and pantheism in Eastern religions. For example, the earliest reference to religion in China refers to a Supreme God called “Shang Ti.” This belief goes back more than two thousand years before Buddhism, Taoism, or Confucianism arose in China. Similarly, an original concept of a supreme God is found in the early histories of Sumeria, Egypt, and other ancient civilizations.”
Story, D. (1997). Defending your faith (115–116). Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications.
10.22.10
China’s Gender Imbalance
The one child policy in China has had many bad repercussions. Here is a clipping from on article about the problem of gender imbalance in China. It is heart-breaking to read the stats and know this is taking place. Pray for these families and young women to be reached with the Gospel so their lives can be changed eternally!
The Problem of Gender Imbalance in China
…”In China, however, the proportion of males at birth is about 1.2/1. And it is even higher in the group of elder children (1-4 years old). Recent survey (2005) showed that in the group of Chinese under 20 years old there are 32 millions more males than females!
It’s not the secret that many Chinese feel very unhappy if their only child is a girl. Thus, the question is — what possibilities are available to parents who want to control the gender of their baby? The survey mentioned above names them:
- determining the gender of fetus during pregnancy and aborting in case it is female
- killing the newborn girls
- transferring baby girls for adoption
- giving half-hearted treatment for sick daughters in cases of illness
Due to availability of ultrasound, since the mid-1980s the main contributor to abnormal gender ratio became thesex-selective abortion (instead of post-birth neglect and abandonment of girls). And though the pre-birth sex determination has been outlawed in China, it is hard to explain the sex ratio distortion of such scale without assuming that “son-desperate” couples have access to illegal medical services.
Of course, majority of families never use any of the options mentioned above. But too often Chinese girls feel that their parents would be happier if they were boys. This cultural phenomenon is not restricted to mainland China. Let me quote one story about American Chinese from an interesting blog “At the back of the hill”:
Bright, vivacious, super intelligent. Her mom frequently verbally abused her in public, and the entire family got on her case for being admitted to Berkeley — stupid girl, so much money! So she never went. Did City College for three years, committed suicide in the fourth.
Her brother went to Stanford, and had his own apartment in Palo Alto. His education was funded entirely by his grandfather, because the boy would make the family proud.
Last I heard, they were very proud of him. He’s a PHD.
It is forbidden to ever mention that bad luck girl. Who?I guess that at this point you won’t be surprised to learn the fact that China is the ONLY country in the world where more women commit suicide than men. Actually, 56 percent of the world’s female suicides occur in China!”…
06.28.10
Autonomous Regions of the People’s Republic of China
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
An autonomous region (simplified Chinese: 自治区; traditional Chinese: 自治區; pinyin: zìzhìqù) is a first-level administrative subdivision of People’s Republic of China. Like Chinese provinces, an autonomous region has its own local government, but an autonomous region theoretically has more legislative rights. In practice, they only have the right to appoint the governor (from the local minority)[citation needed]. In all Chinese autonomous regions the Party Secretary, who is the real power base, is Han Chinese[1][original research?]. An Autonomous Region is a minority entity which has a higher population of a particular minority ethnic group. There are five autonomous regions in China: the Tibetan people in Tibet, the Zhuang in Guangxi, the Uyghur in Xinjiang, the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, and the Hui in Ningxia.
1) Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
2) Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region
3) Tibet Autonomous Region
4) Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region
5) Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region
Bold & Underline added by me.
China’s Death Rate Per Year!
China’s Death Rate Per Year: 9.13 million people (world rank: 1st) (2008 estimate)
Breakdown:
17.36 people per minute
1,042 people per hour
25,000 people per day
175,001 people per week
760,420 people per month
Comparison: Population of the State of Georgia = 9.829 million people (2009)
06.18.10
15 More Facts About China That Will Blow Your Mind
15 More Facts About China That Will Blow Your Mind
Thanks to the ridiculous rate of change being forced upon China, the nation is filled with excess and economic distortion.
First, in case you missed them, check out the first 15 mind-blowing China facts.
From a city building multiple Manhattans to a desert destroying them, here are the next 15:1) Chinese men outnumber women by 39 million — over ten times the population of Los Angeles, thanks to a distorted male vs. female birth ratio.
2)China has the world’s biggest mall… but it’s been 99% empty since 2005
3) Nearly 10,000 Chinese citizens each year are sucked into unsanctioned ‘black jails’.
4) If he spent his ENTIRE YEARLY INCOME on housing, the average Beijing resident could buy 10 square feet of residential property.
5) Home resales have increased 350% in the past three years.
6) China’s economy grew by 11.9% in the past year and its GDP chart ‘has gone vertical’:
7) China has more pigs than the next 43 pork producing countries combined
8.) Chinese consume 3 million cigarettes every minute
9) 80% of US toys are made in China
10) Shanghai built 1,500 miles of road in the past decade. That’s three Manhattan’s worth of streets
11) China is planning a train system that will link London to Beijing in two days, traveling 200mph.
12) China’s enormous Gobi Desert is the size of Peru and expanding 1,400 square miles per year due to water source depletion, over-foresting, and over-grazing. That’s 60 Manhattans every year.
13) Sizzling is an understatement for some Chinese property markets — home prices in Haikou have jumped 54% in the past year.
14) Beijing held the most expensive Olympics ever at a cost of $40 billion. This summer’s Shanghai Expo costs even more — $45 billion.
15) There are 292 individual languages still spoken in China. This is even more than the 175 languages spoken in the world’s melting pot, America.
Source: Business Insider (Click Here to read the full article/pictures.)
Also see the original: 15 Facts About China That Will Blow Your Mind
06.12.10
15 Facts About China That Will Blow Your Mind
15 Facts About China That Will Blow Your Mind
Despite all the wild stories you have already heard about China, expect the nation to keep blowing your mind.
That’s because not only is China enormous and highly diverse, but most importantly, it’s rapidly changing.
Thus China’s future already looks far different today than even five years ago. It’s surely not your father’s ‘Red China’, or even your older brother’s ‘Made in China’…
1) By 2025, China will build TEN New York-sized cities.
2) By 2030, China will add more new city-dwellers than the entire U.S. population.
3) China already consumes twice as much steel as the US, Europe and Japan combined.
4) If the Chinese, one day, use as much oil per person as Americans, then the world will need seven more Saudi Arabias to meet their demand.
5) There are already more Christians in China than Italy, and China is on track to become the largest center of Christianity in the world.
6) Chinese are far more likely to believe in evolution than Americans.
7) Chinese internet users are five times as likely to have blogs as Americans.
8.) China has 150% more soldiers than America does, plus a high tech ‘Kill Weapon’ the U.S. can’t deal with.
9) China still hasn’t rid itself of Europe’s medieval plague.
10) 40% of Chinese small businesses went bust or almost went bust during the world financial crisis.
11) China executes three times as many people as the rest of the world COMBINED… and uses mobile execution vans for efficiency.
12) China averages 274 protests PER DAY.
13) When you buy Chinese stocks, you are basically financing the Chinese government. Eight of Shanghai’s top ten stocks are state-controlled arms of the government.
14) 50% of counterfeit goods come from China.
15) The majority of Chinese drink polluted water.
Bonus: Chinese GDP could overtake the U.S. as soon as the early 2020s.
Source: Business Insider (Click Here to read the full article/pictures.)
Facts About Poverty in China
Here is an interesting article that explains poverty in China.
Facts About Poverty in China Challenge Conventional Wisdom
In its recent study of poverty in China (available in full here), the World Bank looks at some of the common perceptions of poverty in China to see how they match up with data studied by the bank.
The prevailing view of poverty in China, according to the World Bank, holds that it is exclusively a rural phenomenon, especially prevalent in western China, remote areas and minority regions; it is highly concentrated in clusters of poor villages; and it is more prevalent among girls, women and the elderly, mainly affecting people who are unable to work.
The report finds that, while there are elements of truth in some of these perceptions, poverty is far more differentiated in China. Among its findings:
• Conventional wisdom is right on one count, in that almost all of China’s poor live in or come from rural areas. Poverty is an almost exclusively rural phenomenon, with 99% of China’s poor hailing from rural China, though national statistics count migrant workers in cities among the rural, not urban poor. Even if migrant workers are excluded from the rural population, 90% of poverty is still rural. Even when applying a cost-of-living differential between urban and rural areas that is higher than the official standard, rural poverty would account for over 80% of overall poverty.
• Geography and ethnicity are relevant, but they’re not the sole determinants of poverty. Levels of poverty are higher and more severe in China’s western regions, but nearly half of the poor are in other parts of the country. People living in remote, mountainous areas are two to three times more likely to be poor than those who live in more central areas, and the incidence of poverty among ethnic minorities is two to three times higher than among the Han Chinese. Still, about half of the poor in China are neither living in remote areas nor members of an ethnic minority.
• The poor are dispersed throughout China’s villages, not concentrated in poor villages. As overall poverty declines in China, it tends to become more dispersed. This has important policy implications, since it makes it harder for the government to target whole areas for poverty reduction. Instead, new approaches that target poverty at the household-level will become more relevant.
• Most of China’s poor are able to work. Nearly three-quarters of China’s rural poor live in households where every member has the ability to do work, and 97% live in households with at least two members who are able to work. (”Able to work” means any person over 16, including the elderly, who is physically capable of working). Only 7% of the rural poor lacked the capacity to work. Poverty is more closely correlated with low levels of education, the report says.
• Children, especially girls, are more likely to be poor than the elderly. Overall, poverty rates for male and female adults and the elderly population is very close – between 12% and 13%. But poverty rates are higher among children under 16 years old: 16% of boys and 17% of girls are poor. Girls are also more at risk than boys of becoming poor.
–Sky Canaves
07.4.09
Current Facts & Stats About “Age” in China
Here are a few current facts, stats and news items about China taken from a survey of the ageing population in China.
“Old people’s homes are a rarity in China, catering for only about 1% of the over-65s, far less than in most Western countries. The vast majority of older Chinese live with their families. Care for the old within the family is not only a cultural expectation, based on the Confucian tradition of respect for age and experience; under a law passed in 1996 it is also a legal obligation. Elderly people have been known to sue their families for maintenance if they fail to comply.”
“For the past three decades China has been operating a strict population-control policy, so there are now far fewer young people around to take care of the elderly. This state of affairs is usually referred to by the nifty formula “4-2-1”, meaning that the typical only child today will have two parents and four grandparents to look after—a bit of an exaggeration, but not that far off.”
“China is still a relatively young country, with a median age of around 30. But, uniquely among developing countries, it is ageing extraordinarily fast, so by 2050 its median age will have risen to about 45. Over the next few decades the ratio of elderly dependants to people of working age will rise steeply, from 10% now to 40% by 2050. From about 2030 the country will have more elderly dependants than children…”
“Average life expectancy at birth, at 74, is now 25 years higher than it was 50 years ago, yet the retirement age has remained at the same low level. Unless it goes up, any comprehensive pension system that China might eventually introduce will be hideously expensive.”
“There is no explicit population target, but the latest forecasts suggest that numbers will keep growing from about 1.3 billion now to a peak of around 1.46 billion by 2030 and then start declining gently.”
Read the full article: A Special Report on Ageing Populations: China’s Predicament
01.16.09
China’s Population of Web Users
China’s population of Web users hits 298 million (January 13, 2009, AP)
China’s fast-growing population of Internet users has risen to 298 million after passing the United States last year to become the world’s largest, a government-sanctioned research group said Tuesday. The latest figure is a 41.9 percent increase over the same period last year, the China Internet Network Information Center said in a report. China’s Internet penetration is still low at just 22.6 percent, leaving more room for rapid growth, according to CNNIC. The Pew Internet and American Life Project places U.S. online penetration at 71 percent. The United States had an estimated 223.1 million Internet users in June, according to Nielsen Online, a research firm.
China has more than 50 mln web bloggers (January 7, 2009, Xinhua)
There were more than 50 million bloggers in China by the end of November 2008, a growth of some 6.38 percent from the end of November 2007, said Gao Lulin, deputy head of the Internet Society of China on Tuesday. The number of bloggers, or blog authors, which are personal online journals intended for public consumption, was 47 million at the end of November 2007. Currently, there are more than 290 million netizens in China, ranking the country first in the world in terms of its online population.
09.18.08
Fun Trivia About China
Paper , Compass , Explosive Powder and Printing qualify as the “ Four Great Inventions of China ”. They are also credited with having invented the wheel and the first calender. Ice Cream was invented in China in 2000 BC, by packing a milk and rice mixture in the snow. Marco Polo took the recipe of Ice Cream and Noodles back with him to Europe. Century Eggs, also known as One Hundred Year or One Thousand Year old Eggs are a delicacy in China . Usually these eggs are processed with special ingredients and buried underground for some days or weeks. China has 3240 Television Broadcast Stations and 259 FM channels. In Hong Kong , cars are driven to the left side of the road, following the British way, but the rest of China drives on the right side. People have been drinking tea in China for over 1800 years. Chinese White Tea is basically boiled water. Chi Le Mei You – “Have you eaten?” is the most traditional Chinese greeting . The Martial Art Kung Fu was invented by the Shaolin Monks who used it to protect themselves from robbers in lonely mountain roads.
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