China Industries International
their new corporate logo...
Posted on 07/11/2007 3:50:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
China's global customers are learning cheap products can be quite expensive --and deadly.
Shoddy workmanship may be a judgment call, but lethality is not. In Panama, cheap exacted the highest price: Over 100 Panamanians died after swallowing a Chinese-made cough syrup.
The list goes on. In March, pet food made with Chinese-manufactured ingredients killed or sickened several thousand American pets when a Chinese exporter "bulked" food ingredient shipments by adding melamine, a byproduct of plastic. Tainted Chinese-made toothpaste turned up in Central America, the United States and Canada. Canadian authorities later identified 24 different toothpastes (all from China) containing hazardous material. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently restricted the sale of Chinese seafood products after discovering high levels of carcinogens and antibiotic drugs in recent shipments. A recall of Chinese-made tires is also underway.
Belatedly, U.S. regulators have begun removing other Chinese-made processed foods, manufactured goods and personal products for American shelves.
We'll return to exports in a moment -- but China's risky products also plague its own domestic market. China's nascent regulatory agency, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, examined domestically sold Chinese agricultural products and manufactured goods and estimated almost 20 percent of the products and food sold to its own citizens were "substandard or tainted."
China depends on exports, and the United States is China's chief export customer. Exports are key to China's entire modernization strategy. Its lethal products are killing its customers and, in doing so, seriously damaging its own economic engine.
Which is why China will eventually adopt U.S. and European Union regulatory standards, to everyone's benefit.
At least, that's the argument made in a fascinating new book, "All Politics Is Global," by Daniel Drezner and published by Princeton University Press. Drezner teaches international politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
This is a detailed, scholarly book that explicates the arcane aspects of regulatory law and regulatory agreements. It won't crack the popular market. However, it will percolate and influence because it also explains quite well the "big picture" elements of global trade and global regulation.
The book was published earlier this year, before China's tsunami of tainted exports, but it accurately anticipates just this kind of a global trade regulatory conflict -- or conflict based on a lack of agreed-upon and enforced product and liability regulations.
Drezner slams globalization popularizers like Thomas Friedman and his "The World Is Flat." That includes the crowd that has written off the nation-state as dying or already dead.
Drezner says bluntly that, on this planet, "states make the rules," and rules matter a great deal. He provides case study after case study of agreements ranging from Internet protocols to money laundering to prescription drug safety. He scotches claims of a borderless globe where standards are "a race to the bottom." The "pop globalization" description Drezner concludes is "simple, pithy and wrong."
Drezner examines the case of exporters abandoning markets, perhaps based on regulatory issues, but a competitor fills the niche. No, all regulations don't necessarily "converge" to a single standard, but globalization does increase the "rewards for policy coordination."
And who enforces the rules in a global political economy? The nation-states.
The size of a nation's market ("aggregate demand") is a very powerful force, and the United States is the superpower of markets. "Global exporters who kill American pets and sicken American seafood lovers will be shut out of the market. When shut out, they impoverish themselves."
IOW you don’t prosper by killing your customers.
The only way to make that happen is to slap restrictions on Chinese imports. Hitting them where it hurts, in the wallet, will be the only incentive the Chinese have to change things.
On a related note, don't people normally start revolutions over this sort of thing?
Time to take China of the most favorite nation list
China Industries InternationalAnd long past time for people to demand truth in advertising.
I want to know where my food and medicine is made, including the ingredients.
Communists are really good liars they’ll never change. They’ll clean up their act for a while but it won’t last.
China really doesn’t care much about the lives of its own people and could care less about ours.
“globalization is good”
“globalization is good”
“globalization is good”
“globalization is good”
“globalization is good”
“globalization is good”
Where are these freepers?
Heck, the FDA cannot even control the BS greed or oversight mistakes in our own country with respect to 'bad' food.....now just how are we gonna be protected? Heck, the feds cannot even control 2000 miles of border or get 750 miles of wall / fence built in 2 years.
I never buy anything from China anymore, or Asia with regards to food and I won't the remainder of my days left on this earth... I'll grow my own or shop at the farmers market.
EXACTLY!
LOL.....EXACTLY!
There is a candidate running for President who happens to be adored and idolized that is a GLOBALIST.......{{shudder}}
ping
Push for the COOL law. Not much buzz on talk radio or other conservative sites about it. It’s a shame because it would aid free market rather than inhibit. All about choices for consumers.
Bump.
Simple answer: Don’t buy Chinese goods. It will be tough for a bit, but manufacturers will get the message.
That’s what I’m trying to do, but it’s hard when the distributor is all that’s mentioned and you just don’t know.
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