Made in China: spoiling the brand

It's perhaps important to distinguish between the two Chinas. The one which is currently acting like ExxonMobile and the Bush mafia is the bigger of the two, located on the Asian continental mainland. The other one, on a island, seems to be a bit more responsible?

bif: HK is not a manufacturing and exporting powerhouse like the mainland. How they would act if they were we don't know.

I parsed blf's comment as pertaining to Taiwan. Which is in fact a manufacturing and exporting powerhouse.

As for the Chinese mainland government, and their response that "it was only a few cases", this may reflect an attitude which I have seen displayed before.

Specifically, the attitude that small numbers of human casualties don't matter. And given the enormous human population of China, and the relatively small weight given to individual rights there, the reasons for that attitude ought to be clear.

I know a US metallurgist, a specialist in steels, who went to the PRC to consult under government auspices with some of the country's leading steel mill managers.

He reported back that the mainlanders were interested in productivity and profit, period. They could be made to pay attention to safety practices only insofar as those practices pertained to protecting expensive capital equipment from being damaged in accidents. Worker safety? Pah. You can always get more workers.

There were numerous men on the streets of the steel towns who had been visibly burned and maimed in mill accidents, and then simply turned out of the front gate without jobs, to fend for themselves at whatever menial employment they were still able to physically perform. Which was not much.

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bif, marquer: Yes, I see. You probably meant Taiwan. I don't know the answer, although the export mix is quite different. I don't think Taiwan is in the food business, although other consumer products could also be dangerous so would be relevant to your question.

Well, one solution would be to cancel MFN status. Until they stop slavery, chaining religious dissidents to trees and watching them die, ripping the organs out of prisoners, poisoning their people and ours, etc, etc.

Or we could turn a blind eye to all of this.

So far, option 2 seems to have more takers.

mono: Well, it has one particular taker.

If we care about human dignity, human rights, worker safety, consumer safety, and the environment, then why are we enriching, through trade, a regime whose values are so contrary to ours? A lot of jobs are being lost in the U.S. while China, a nation that runs over peaceful demonstrators with military tanks, is becoming wealthier and more powerful.

I would rather pay more for goods made in a progressive society than send my money to China.

Not only do we not know which products from China are dangerous, we the consumers can't even avoid the brand because we don't even necessarily know which products are from China.

For example, IIRC, the vast majority of vitamin C is manufactured in China now. I certainly wouldn't buy vitamins that said they were made in China, but unless you're buying brands that crow about how where they're made, you're not able to tell. Even vitamins which list their factories as being in Illinois or NY don't specify where those factories got their raw materials.

It makes me feel a little worse about that bottle of calcium & magnesium on the dining room table, even if it did come from a "naturals foods store", and a little better about sometimes paying more for organic vitamins which give extensive information about their provenance.

Many people voted for MFN for China. Most at the behest of corporations who promised that "engagement" with the China would result in a gradual move towards democracy. Instead, the Tyrants have solidified their power base, cracked down on dissidents and imposed even more draconian censorhip laws than they had before. Thus, it would seem a no-brainer to reverse course and cancel MFN.

But too many of the same corporations who got MFN passed in the first place are making, or hope to make, large sums of money. So the Manchurian candidates, the politicians who are jointly owned by corporations and the Chinese government, have zero interest in discussing this.

Has any candidate, Democrat or Republican, seriously discussed cancelling MFN for China if they don't move towards democracy?

As for the MFN I dont think they are doing too much. But they are hauling them down for GATT violations. This toothpaste thing is as marquer is touting . A friend, Bernard Wong in HK said that a couple of news shows said that there was a problem, it wasnt a big deal and no one should worry. All news in China has a spin on it and we are the students now, rather than the masters.

We dont want to piss them off because we are hoping to finally gain access to however many billions of customers there are there. But I doubt we will ever see it as long as the PLA and the still, "ChiComs" are in charge. Toothpaste, shrimp, melamine? Shoot, start taking a real look at what they are doing and wonder about the "low bid" processes. E.g. know why you have to get new rotors for your car each time you change your brake pads now? Its because they are all made in China and the pads are harder than the steel they are using. Little things you find out in the world.

"If we care about human dignity, human rights, worker safety, consumer safety, and the environment, then why are we enriching, through trade, a regime whose values are so contrary to ours?"

Because economic growth in China has vastly improved conditions there in terms of virtually all the issues you raise with the exception of the environment?

"A lot of jobs are being lost in the U.S."

Which somehow despite this mysteriously continues to have the lowest unemployment in about forty years.

Free trade creates problems, it also creates enormous benefits.

Incidentally, if I can find five defective American products can I use that to condemn America as a whole?

Ian.

I guess the bottom line is... are you willing to die in the future from a preventable cancer for the sake of 'Free Trade including trade in adulterated food products...and by adulterated, I mean massive levels of sulphites and formaldehyde as well as banned antibiotics and evironmental toxins...

...and by massive levels of formaldehyde, I mean extraneous formaldehyde (embalming fluid) at greater concentrations then I would use to preserve tissue sections...greater than 50 ppm.

If you are willing to accept the trade-off...great......because that is exactly what it comes down to.

I can change a flat tire, I can rebuild a house that took fire because of a bad extension cord...

...I can't tell if the food is contaminated and I can't remove what I have ingested three times a day for a lifetime, after the fact.

Also, Ian, you state that "Because economic growth in China has vastly improved conditions there in terms of virtually all the issues you raise with the exception of the environment?" Do you have any evidence of this? As far as I can tell, workers in China are still exploited, Chinese citizens don't have the protection of due process of law, the Chinese government still imprisons people who dare to say what it doesn't like, etc.

"Which somehow despite this mysteriously continues to have the lowest unemployment in about forty years." There may be low unemployment overall, but unemployment is not a measure of the quality of employment.

"Free trade creates problems, it also creates enormous benefits."

Perhaps a pro/con comparison of the problems and benefits would be enlightening.

>>"A lot of jobs are being lost in the U.S."

Which somehow despite this mysteriously continues to have the lowest unemployment in about forty years.

Ah! Ian is committing the classic economic fallacy of using first-time unemployment benefit claims as a proxy for actual unemployment. Which number is indeed presently very low.

Allow me to briefly explain. When workers become unemployed, then exhaust their benefits, and cannot find re-employment, they vanish from this statistic. (Which is why the government and business alike consider it their preferred metric.)

What is actually happening behind the scenes is that employment, as a percentage of the able-bodied adult population, is at a historic low in postwar America.

And if you look at the number of able-bodied adults who desire work, and who cannot obtain it at an even minimal level of remuneration, that number is at a postwar high.

I regularly hear coastal yuppie pundits these days talking about how tight labor markets are. I suspect that none of them live anywhere near Michigan or Ohio.

Further, Wyatt is entirely correct that employment numbers contain very little information about the quality of the jobs which in aggregate make up those numbers.

If Joe Sixpack loses a manufacturing job where he had had health insurance, sick days, a retirement plan, and was paid a wage that would let him keep his family comfortably, and then is able to find only a service-sector job with no insurance, no benefits, no pension and a quarter of his previous wage, guess what? The job total for the nation doesn't budge. Minus one job, plus one job, net zero change. But the economic status of Joe's family becomes instantly far more precarious. As does that of the community in which they live.

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China pretty much has the US over a barrel on this. If we allow possibly tainted Chinese products to come into this country, American consumers are screwed. If we cancel MFN status for China, we're also screwed in at least two ways. Who will pick up the slack for cheap manufactured goods we are clamoring for. If we don't buy for a while, the general economy will decline unless immediate substitutes are found. On the governmental scale, who is a major financer of our little expedition in Iraq? Not our citizens - we only want tax cuts and to palm off the debt to future generations. China has a nice little racket going - we buy cheap products so our foreign trade deficit grows larger and much of the money ends up in China. We want to borrow money for remortgaging our homes, and China lends us money in the private markets. And the worst is out government dbt is financed with bonds bought up by Chinese banks. What if China decides to retaliate for the loss of MFN status by no longer financing tour debts? We're screwwwwwed, thanks neocons, thanks greedy consumers, thanks [non]taxpayers, thanks preznit BUllSHit.