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Marcos RicoOpening ceremony will be October 24th, 2018. It took nine year to complete and the cost wss about 20 billion dollars. It is a 34 mile long bridge.
Odd thing is most owners of private vehicles in Honk Kong, will not be allowed to use their vehicles to go across the bridge. The arcticle says that they will have to park their vehicle on the Honk Kong side and rent a car once they get through customs. It does not mention if mainland Chinese will have to do the same. Could this be a measure to prevent smuggling of goods into China?
According to the article people from Honk Kong are not happy with the bridge,it is seen as a tool of the Chinese to increase their grip on Honk Kong.
Marcos Ricohttps://www.haaretz.com/.premium-how-close-to-china-is-too-close-for-israel-1.6576714
The article wonders about the consequences that this visit might have on the relations between Israel and it’s number one trading partner, the USA. China is Israel’s second largest trading partner. China will be building and operation two new ports in Israel. This has already created conflict with the USA, the U.S. Sixth Fleet might considere no longer using those ports.
In the past the USA has forced Israel to cancel deals to sell weapons to China. The article wonders if Natanyahu is getting too friendly with the Chinese governement, and endangering Israel”s relationship with the USA.
Marcos RicoIn the past couple of months China has denied the existance of interment camps on the Xinjiang territory. Where it is estimated that about a million of Uighurs, Kazakhs and Muslims are being detained indefinitely and forced to take reeducation classes at detention centers. Finally in the past couple of days Chinese officials have talked about this centers, refering to them as Free Vocational Centers. China’s state broadcaster even aired a 15 minute segment where they showed reporters visitong the centers.
Here is the link to the video, but I do not understand Chinese.
http://tv.cctv.com/v/v1/VIDEVvr9aq34SsDMrB6IRGnh181016.html
In one part it shows “Students” in a “classroom” with about 5 surveillance cameras.
Marcos RicoThis lecture shows us what happened in China when they followed a top - down management on their agriculture, it was a failure and there was famine. Farmers were not motivated to work hard, they were getting paid by the number of d ays that they worked the fields not by the outcome of their work. Eventually the farmers were able to reorganize and followed a bottom - up management. It was a great success, ( without governement input) the farmers redistributed the land, and decided that once government production quotas were meet, the families could keep all the production surplus that they had farmed. This motivated farmers to work hard and increase their production in order to have a larger surplus. All of this helped to greatly improve the economy. Of course the great Chinese leader took all the credit for the improvement of the country’s economy.
Marcos RicoNira,
I am planning to show my 4th graders the video before we do the Hour of Code in December. A common complain that I hear from elementary school students is that everything was already invented in the past. There is nothing else left to invent. I see Wechat is a great example of modifying a product tha already exists and improving it. People were already sending text messages, but it was not very practical due to the large number of characters needed to write in Chinese. (https://www.hutong-school.com says that “With 3,500 characters you can read up to 99.48 %, which means pretty much everything!” Wow!!!! in the same website It mentions that in order to read 90% of the newspaper you only need to know about 900 Chinese characters, compared to how we only have 26 letters in the English alphabet.) The introduction of voice message with WeChat made it easier to send messages in Chinese making this app very popular.
It is a good example of how there are posibilities to improve on other products and technologies.
Marcos RicoI found this video very informative. I was aware of China’s one child policy, and how it was a measure implemented to curb overpopulation, and all the other issues associated with it such as food shortages (starvation), lack of natural resources, civil unrest, etc. It sounded like a tough, but necessary measure to improve the well being of the nation as a whole. I know that some third world countries have approached overpopulation by promoting birth planning (no negative consequences for parents who have several children), but Chinese leaders opted to use birth controlling (Negative consequences for parents that have more than one child). I was unsure about what kind of negative consenquenses the families faced for breaking the one child policy, it was not addressed on the video either, but reading some of the comments from my peers I have learned that citizens who broke the policy coul face heavy fines, forced abortions and even forced sterilization.
The one child policy in China had other unintended consequences. China like many other countries is bias against women. This bias is more accentuated in rural areas, where a boy will grow up and help in the farm work becoming a valuable asset to the family. A girl will grow up and get married moving to a new family, where she will become an asset to that family and not for her parents. Due to this ideology, and the one child policy, many families would abort their babies when they found out that they were girls. Opting to try again until they could have a son. According to the video, after more than 30 years of the one child policy, there are about 40 million more young men than women. It is estimated than 1 of every 5 men will not be able to find a bride. Due to the inequalities that exist in the country, the concentration of this older bachelors aka “Dead Branches” is happening more in rural areas. There many villages with only a handful of women, this villages are known as bachelor villages. What is going to happen when these young men age out, and they do not have children of their own to replace them in working the land?
Many of the men from these bachelor villages are moving to the city trying to meet women and get married ( moving out of their registered Hukou has other consequenses, too). Some of these bachelor men and their families save money for several years, to allow the men to travel to other Asian countries in search of a bride. Many times they end up paying a middle man to “help” them find a wife (some times the middle man will use part of the money to pay the father of the future bride for his daughter).
Other bachelors are using highly illegal means of finding a wife such as kidnapping young women from other towns or cities. Some of this kidnapings are being commited by individuals desperate to find a bride, while others are commited by organized criminals who then sell them as wives/ slaves. The video showed how some of the victims were young women and sometimes even married women. Of course their families and husbands are looking for them, but appears as if they are not receiving much help from the police. The Chinese police claims to have saved more than 30 thousand women who were victims of this type of kidnapping.
A policy that seem as a good solution to overpopulation (it did work to control it), has created a new host of problems due to several unexpected variables.
Marcos RicoHello Jane,
Thanks for explaining the benefits of the Hukou system for the urban citizens. I was wondering how the government was able to implement such a harsh system that restricted the freedom of internal migration of its citizens. Now I have a better understanding of how the government was able to implement Hukou system on the cities (they were getting the benefits of food at cheaper prices, and social services). Now I just wonder about how it achieved implementation on the agricultural communities. What would have been the benefit for the people living on those agricultural communities?
Marcos RicoI am going to keep on looking for that documentary, already check on Netflix but it is not available. Any other ideas or suggestions of where to find it? I will check on Amazon.
Marcos RicoI had never heard of the Hukou system, before. It seems like a very harsh system to treat the population of a country, taking away their freedoom of internal migration and residence, which was part of their original rights under their constitution. From a government standpoint, it is a good tool to control the economy and people, but not a nice one. Improving the country’s economical develoment, at the expense of the farmers and other poor citizens. How was the government able to convince or brainwash the people into accepting the implementation of the Hukou system?
Marcos RicoI knew that there where more than one Chinese dialect, but I did not know that there are more than 7 dialects. Thinking about it, it kind of makes sense, I used to teach Spanish and my students where surpised to know that in Spain they speak more than 7 different “Spanish” languages: Castilian aka Spanish, Aragonés, Asturian, Euraska, Català, Galego and Gascon, etc. Spain is much smaller than China with only 505,990km2 vs 9,326,410km.
Marcos RicoAfter watching the video about Geography an Demography, I was surprised to find out that China and the United States are about the same size. Due to their large population, about 1,4 billion people, I always assumed that China was much larger than the USA, with only about 320 million people. I did a quick search online, http://www.worldatlas.com, China has 9,326,410 km2 of land, plus 270,550km2 of water for a total of 9,596,410km2 (about 3,705 million mi2), while the USA has 9,147,593km2 of land, plus 685,924km2 for a total of 9,833,517km2 (about 3,797 million mi2). China only has about 178,817 more km2 of land that the USA, but yet has 1,1 billion more people than the USA living in their country. I find that hard to believe!
I can use this information for Mathematics, we are currently working on estimates, and subtraction of large numbers.
Marcos RicoHello Everyone,
My name is Marcos Rico. I was born and raised in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Immigrated to the U.S.A. in 1993, (10th grade) Talk about culture shock. Thanks to the support of my teachers and the AVID program, I was able to enroll straight into San Diego State University. I earned my BCLAD through an intership program at SDUSD.
I currently teach 4th grade at The Language Academy in San Diego. Our school is a Magnet school, we have students from all over the world. It is an interesting mix of different cultures and languages. Our two biliteracy programs are French/ English and Spanish/ English. People are surprised when they find out that I am part of the French program. I have been teaching 18 years at San Diego Unified School District, one of my favorite grades is 4 grade. California history is a complex and intereresting topic to teach.
Looking forward to learn more about China and share the knowledge with my 4th graders.
