Far East Culture

Steady Agricultural Development
In 1997, the total output of grain, cotton and edible oil came to 490 million tons, 4.6 million tons and 21.57 million tons, increasing respectively by 62.1 percent, 112.4 percent and 313.5 percent over 1978. The output of milk and eggs was 4.5 times and 2.7 times as much as those in the early 1980s. The output of grain and cotton jumped to No.1 in the world. The total output value of agriculture, forestry, husbandry and fishery reached 2.4709 trillion yuan, 2.4-fold increase over 1978 after adjustment for price factors with an average annual increase of 6.6 percent which is 2.8 times as much as that before the initiation of reform and opening to the outside world. By the end of 1997, township and town enterprises throughout the country added up to 2,015 and provided 130 million job opportunities for the surplus labor force in the countryside. At the end of 1997, the original value of fixed assets of township and town enterprises exceeded one trillion yuan, current assets came to over 1.3 trillion yuan, business income totaled 3.8 trillion yuan, tax paid and profit turned to the state amounted to 323.8 billion yuan and these enterprises retained nearly 200 billion yuan of profit.

A cultural market is fast emerging.
The reform program has given rise to a booming cultural market. That market encompasses performances, books, newspapers and magazines, fine arts, films, audio and video products, entertainment, historical relics, Sino-foreign cultural exchanges and art training. Meanwhile, problems have arisen along with the booming market. In 1993, a national working conference was held on regulating the burgeoning cultural market. At that meeting, the principle of "attaching equal importance to cultural prosperity and market regulation" was set forth. A series of related policies and regulations have been formulated and promulgated since. The promulgation of the Regulations on Commercial Performance Administration in 1997, in particular, represented a major milestone in cultural market legislation. Over the past years, a planned and step-by-step effort to tackle problems in the cultural market has been made and the result has been good. The macro-control measures taken to regulate the performance market, in particular, have created a positive market environment for the growth of traditional Chinese arts and classical Western arts. The rearrangement of the audio and video market has resulted in an obvious increase in the market share of authentic products. Since January 1997, a program-supply system has been introduced to ensure that video projection rooms all over the country play only authentic films, thereby ensuring the healthy development of the market.
Statistics show that by 1997 there were 257,378 business entities nationwide affiliated with cultural institutions, employing 1,160,385. That market represents not only a place for entertainment but also a source of employment and tax revenue. The cultural industry, as part of the service industry, is playing an increasingly important role.

Quote of the week

Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus) was one of the greatest theologians of Western Christianity. (In his day the Mediterranean world consisted of an Eastern, Greek-speaking half and a Western, Latin-speaking half, with different ways of looking at things, and different habits of thought.) He was born 13 November 354 in North Africa, about 45 miles south of the Mediterranean, in the town of Tagaste (36:14 N 8:00 E) in Numidia (now Souk-Ahras in Algeria), near ancient Carthage (modern Tunis, 36:50 N 10:13 E). His mother, Monnica, was a Christian , and his father for many years a pagan (although he became a Christian before his death). His mother undertook to bring him up as a Christian, and on one level he always found something attractive about Christ, but in the short run he was more interested in the attractions of sex, fame, and pride in his own cleverness. After a moderate amount of running around as a teen-ager, he took a mistress, who bore him a son when he was about eighteen. Theirs was a long-term relationship, apparently with faithfulness on both sides, and the modern reader is left wondering why he did not simply marry the girl. He never tells us this (and in fact never tells us her name), so that we can only guess. It seems likely that she was a freedwoman, and the laws forbade marriage between a free-born Roman citizen and a slave, or an ex-slave. In a well-known chapter, Augustine describes his conversion. His intellectual objections had lost their force, and he was at a point where the difficulty was that he seemed unable to make a commitment to living chastely, or unable to make a commitment, period. He heard of a group of young men, Christians, one of whom decided to become a desert hermit, whereupon the others, one at a time, made the same commitment, encouraged and inspired by the examples of those in the group who had already done so. (In many circles at that time, becoming a desert hermit had the same overtones as joining the Peace Corps did for many young persons in the 1960's, or joining the armed forces for many in the weeks immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor.) Augustine went aside to ponder the question, "How is it that these young men can make so drastic a commitment, and I cannot take even the first step of declaring myself a Christian?" He heard what seemed to be a child's voice coming from next door, saying over and over, "Tolle, lege; tolle, lege," or, "Pick up and read; pick up and read." Since he could not think of any reason why a child would be saying that, he took it as an omen, and picked up a copy of Paul's Epistle to the Romans. As he opened it, his eye fell on the end of the thirteenth chapter: The night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. As he read, he experienced this as God speaking directly to him, convicting him of his past sins, and offering him forgiveness; calling him to amend his life, and promising him the grace and power to do it. He burst into tears, and surrendered. Later, he wrote: Late have I loved Thee, O Lord; and behold, Thou wast within and I without, and there I sought Thee. Thou was with me when I was not with Thee. Thou didst call, and cry, and burst my deafness. Thou didst gleam, and glow, and dispell my blindness. Thou didst touch me, and I burned for Thy peace. For Thyself Thou hast made us,and restless our hearts until in Thee they find their ease. Late have I loved Thee, Thou Beauty ever old and ever new. Thou hast burst my bonds asunder; unto Thee will I offer up an offering of praise.

THE BEATIFIC VISION

To see God is the promised goal of all our actions and the promised height of all our joys."

Far East Culture

Ethnic Groups
There are 56 ethnic groups in China. The Han people form the largest, numbering 1.1 billion and making up 93.3 percent of the country's population. The other ethnic groups, that is the minority nationalities, total 160 million, only 6.7 percent of the Chinese nation. Of the minority nationalities, 15 have over a million people each; 13 over 100,000 each; 7 over 50,000 each; and 20 have fewer than 50,000 people each. The Han people live all over the country but their compact communities are in the Huanghe, Changjiang and Zhujiang valleys and the Songhua-Liaohe Plain of the northeast. The minority nationalities inhabit 60 percent of the country's total area, and they live mainly in the border regions. All nationalities in China are equal, as stipulated by the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, They take part in the administration of state affairs as equals, irrespective of their numbers or the size of areas they inhabit. Every minority nationality is represented in the National People's Congress, which is the highest organ of state power of the People's Republic of China.

Fast Industrial Growth
In 1997, industrial enterprises at the township level and above achieved a total output value of 11.2 trillion yuan, 13-fold increase over 1978 after adjustment for price factors with an average annual increase of 14.9 percent. The state-owned enterprises and collective-owned enterprises increased annually by 7.6 percent and 19.7 percent respectively on the average. The quality of various industrial products improved constantly and the passive state resulting from long-term shortage of industrial products in the country came to an end. As a result, there was a sufficient supply of daily consumer goods in the market. Even the insufficiency of some basic industrial products such as coal and power, which had restricted the growth of Chinese economy, was also noticeably eased up.In the past two decades, China has completed and put into operation 1,906 large and medium-sized industrial projects and increased an investment of 3.2877 trillion yuan in industrial fixed assets. The completion of such large projects as the Beijing-Kowloon Railway, the Nanchang-Kunming Railway and Qinshan and Daya Bay Atomic Power Stations strengthened the national economy for continued development.

source:peopledaily.com

Quote of the week

French theologian John Calvin was after Martin Luther the guiding spirit of the Protestant Reformation. If Luther sounded the trumpet for reform Calvin orchestrated the score by which the Reformation became a part of Western civilization. Calvin studied in Paris probably from 1521 to 1526 where he was introduced to humanistic scholarship and to appeals for reform of the church. He then studied law at his father's bidding from about 1525 to 1530. When his father died in 1531 Calvin turned immediately to his first love - study of the classics and theology. Between 1526 and 1531 he experienced a distinctly Protestant conversion. "God" he wrote much later "at last turned my course in another direction by the secret rein of his providence." Calvin's first published work was a commentary on Seneca's De Clementia (1532). A profusion of influential commentaries on books of the Bible followed.



“All the blessings we enjoy are Divine deposits, committed to our trust on this condition, that they should be dispensed for the benefit of our neighbors”

Far East Culture

China
The People's Republic of China is the world's argest country by population and is the third largest country by area. China`s recent rapid development has made it a major force in world affairs.

POPULATION

Population: 1.3 billion
Density: 138 per sq km
92% ethnic Han Chinese
55 ethnic minorities (according to the government)
Most of the population live in the east—the historical heartland of China—so density is greater than statistics suggest. Population growth has been controlled by the government promoting late marriages and inducing parents to have only one child. Abortion is legal. Shanghai has a population of 13.5 million and Beijing, the capital, 14.5 million. China is 60 percent rural with an increasing migration of workers to urban areas.

RELIGIONS

Non-religious 49.58%
Chinese religions 28.5%
Buddhist 8.38%
Christian 7.25%
Traditional ethnic 4.29%
Muslim 2%

The Communist party in the 1960s attempted to eliminate organized religion. Previously the dominant religions in China had been Confucianism [more a moral philosophy than a religion], Daoism and Buddhism. Muslim minority peoples such as the Uyghurs, Kazaks and Kirgiz number 20 million and now practice their religion openly. It is illegal to spread the gospel to anyone under 18. resource from OMF