On May 30th, I posted my review of the outstanding historical fiction novel, The Concubine Saga by Lloyd Lofthouse. There was a giveaway as well and it is still happening, here.

Now I would like to welcome Lloyd to So Many Precious Books, welcome Lloyd.

In 1999 when I was first introduced to Robert Hart (1835 – 1911), an Irishman from Northern Ireland that went to China at age 19 in 1854 as a translator at the British consulate in Ningpo and returned home in 1908 knighted as a Baron by Queen Victoria, Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Senior Guardian of the Heir to the Qing Dynasty, and the only foreigner the Emperor of China trusted, I had no idea that I was about to breathe life into a hidden and forgotten 19th-century love story and discover a China few Americans know or understand.

Researching and writing the rough draft of “The Concubine Saga” was where this journey of discovery started, and where I learned about the Opium Wars (1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860), caused by the British and French Empires so opium could be sold legally to the Chinese people, and The Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest rebellion in world history, launched by a converted Chinese Christian that claimed to be Jesus Christ’s younger brother.

In fact, from Sterling Seagrave’s “Dragon Lady“, I learned that China’s 19th and early 20th century leaders were demonized by a liar and the truth would not be known until 1992 when Seagrave’s book revealed it. What that London Times reporter, Edmund Trelawny Backhouse (1873 to 1944), wrote about China and its leaders was a fraud. Hugh Trevor-Roper, his biographer, described him as “a confidence man with few equals.”

However, my real education would not start until January 2010 when I launched iLookChina.net, and started to write about China in this Blog. Since then, iLookChina has grown to more than 1,500 posts with about 600,000 words.

In the West, the media continues to remind us of the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958 – 1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976) while convincing us that thirty-five years later China is still ruled by a brutal dictator.

What most Americans do not know is that China’s 1982 Constitution limited its president and its premier to two five-year terms and these leaders are formally elected by the consensus of the 3,000 delegates to the National People’s Congress (NPC) and there is a clause in China’s Constitution that allows the NPC to impeach its leaders if necessary.

In 1981, Ye Jianying was elected by the NPC to served as the president of China and he stepped down in 1983 (two years); Li Xianian served from 1983 to 1988 (5 years); Yang Shangkun served 1988 to 1993 (five years); Jiang Zemin served 1993 to 2003 (ten years) and Hu Jintao from 2003 to 2013 (ten years) when his second term ends.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was taught that dictators served for life and held all the power in the country they ruled sort of like Adolf Hitler who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945—12 years; Saddam Hussein who ruled Iraq from 1979 until 2003—24 years, and Chiang Kai-shek, who ruled Taiwan from 1950 to 1976—26 years.  None of these men left office due to an election.  One killed himself, one was executed and one died of old age.

How is today’s China different from the United States where its president is chosen by the consensus of the 538 members of the US Electoral College? The 538 electors are a popularly elected body of men and women chosen by the States and the District of Columbia.

The United States has had 44 (to Obama) presidents since 1776 and it is a fact that while all were elected by the members of The Electoral College, only four became president without the popular vote too: John Quincy Adams (1824), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), Benjamin Harrison (1888), and George W. Bush (2000). In America, the majority vote of the people does not elect the US president.

In addition, China’s president is more of a figurehead and does not have as much power as the President of the United States, which is why China’s modern president has a hot line in his office that goes to China’s top 300 ministers. If a vital decision must be made quickly, China’s president has no choice but to seek consensus among those members of the CCP or China’s Central Politburo Standing Committee.  It also is interesting to know that in China, a politician must retire at age 67.  However, in the US, the longest-serving senator in the history of the United States Congress was Robert Carlyle Byrd who died at 93 after serving for 57 years.

If it had not been for Robert Hart’s attempt to destroy all evidence of his bitter-sweet romance with Ayoau, his concubine, I would have never been curious enough to learn more about China after I wrote “The Concubine Saga“.

Thanks for being my guest Lloyd!  Please note the opinions expressed by Lloyd are his alone.

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