What is it about Chinese goods?
I was going to say “Chinese manufacturing”, but in my experience there are plenty of products conceived in the US (or Canada, or Europe), produced in China that are perfectly fine from a quality standpoint. Clearly, there’s nothing wrong with Chinese manufacturing as such.
But when it comes to products and goods “designed” in China, things really fall apart—often quite literally. It doesn’t seem to make a difference if it’s tools, electronics, household goods, toys, food, even cars: what superficially looks like a decent product often turns out to be shoddy, even downright unsafe. I use “design” in quotes because as often as not, the Chinese product is a knockoff of a well-designed, well-made genuine article produced by another company.
You’d think that if they’re copying an existing product they could at least manage to replicate that product’s quality, but perplexingly that’s also rarely the case. Sure, it may cost more than the $20 or so my friend paid for the “Lolex” (as we jokingly call it) watch he brought me back from his China trip, to produce a real Rolex watch, but it doesn’t cost the thousands that the real thing is priced at, either. You’d expect to find quality knockoffs filling that middle ground, but you simply don’t. It’s as if they had one or two tries at duplicating the real thing, stopped trying, and started producing the result en masse.
To say nothing of the various fake/tainted food scandals that have plagued the country in recent years. What kind of mindset does it take to put inedible or sometimes toxic ingredients into food products and assume that no-one will be able to tell the difference? The mind boggles.
Is it a cultural thing?
Are inadequate laws and regulations and/or inadequate oversight to blame, or is there something else at play here? Here in the US, the FDA vigilantly monitors food and drug production… but food inadvertently tainted by pathogens still manage to make it to the consumer on a fairly frequent basis, proving the FDA and other regulators aren’t all-seeing and all-knowing, either. Accidental, even occasionally negligent tainting of products still happen, but what you don’t see is deliberate introduction of non-food ingredients into food products as is apparently often the case in China.
It really makes me wonder, what motivates the perpetrators? What mentality does it take to make a product that they know may be harmful to others? As far as I know, farmers and food producers in China are not desperately poor. Sure, no doubt many face dire financial straits, but the same could be said of farmers here and elsewhere. Greed? That’s an easy accusation to make, but again, there are greedy people everywhere.
I think it’s more to do with the population and the sociopolitical regime. In a country with over a billion people, a government without any accountability to its citizens who are given no voice, everybody becomes depersonalized, disconnected. The loss of accountability isn’t just between the government and the average citizen, it also occurs between people: if other people are reduced to nothing but a faceless set of numbers, the individual producer doesn’t feel personally accountable to whomever his product may ultimately reach.
Culture is a two-way road, of course: part of the reason the Chinese (and others) make cheap, shoddy goods is that people seem to be content to buy them. Almost everything we buy is regarded as “disposable”; infusing technology into many products somehow infuses with them with built-in obsolescence.
My parents bought many household appliances that served them for twenty, thirty or more years. I’m not that optimistic about my $10 toaster, nor any of the other appliances in my home. Sure, they’re cheap and easily replaced, but I have a feeling what they lack in longevity will ultimately result in a higher amortized price.
On one hand, I wouldn’t want a computer built to last longer than, say, five years; on the other, I wouldn’t mind paying more for a toaster that works well and lasts decades. The balance to be struck, I think, lies in doing one thing, and doing it well. Adding on techy features on to a product to “add value” will in the long run do the opposite. I don’t want my toaster to play music; I don’t need my fridge to surf the Web or play DVDs.
We got more winter rains this week, and of course, this being California, it meant that people started crashing left and right again. Every time it rains I get a bit of perverse satisfaction from watching 
Death, taxes and stupid CA laws
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009As if the California government hasn’t done enough to increase misery and suffering through tax increases and budget cuts, last week they took the initiative to do it in a more direct fashion. The state Senate approved SB 484, a bill that once signed into law would make pseudoephedrine, the only truly effective decongestant component of cold medications, available only as a prescription medication.
The motivation as most people already understand is that pseudoephedrine is a key ingredient in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamines, so measures reducing its availability may discourage people who can’t easily obtain it from making their own drugs.
What many people don’t know about is that pseudoephedrine’s over-the-counter replacement, phenylephrine, simply is not effective taken as a pill or syrup which is how it’s most often packaged. Have you noticed your cold medication hasn’t worked worth a damn lately? Take a close look at the active ingredients list; most drug makers have quietly substituted phenylephrine for pseudoephedrine in their cold remedies.
Moreover, what the law’s proponents have so far overlooked is that addicts and the criminal elements who supply them are highly motivated. Making prescription-only a medication that would remain available over the counter in other states, not to mention more readily and cheaply from, say, Mexico, would have negligible impact on methamphetamine addiction. What the proposed law might instead do is shift the manufacture of meth to areas where pseudoephedrine is more easily obtained like, say, Mexico. (As if the Mexican drug gangs needed any more business and by extension, money and power…)
What the proposed law will certainly do is make effective cold symptom remedies more expensive and less accessible to law-abiding citizens, thereby generally increasing the level of suffering (since the common cold isn’t going away anytime soon)… One might plausibly speculate that there would also be some economic impact due to reduced productivity, with more workers immobilized at any given time by cold symptoms.
The bill is currently before the state assembly; Californians, contact your Assemblymember and let them know that this proposed law is a bad idea that needs to be nipped in the bud.
In the meantime, I’ll be stocking up on pseudoephedrine, just in case the law passes and forces cold-relief-seeking citizens to become drug smugglers.
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