Posted on 05/28/2009 5:49:24 AM PDT by kellynla
Is China really a modern country? Can China be a modern country? Paul Midler’s book leaves you wondering.
After studying Chinese at college, Midler lived and worked in mainland China through the 1990s before returning to the U.S.A. to take a business degree. In 2001 he went back to China, setting himself up as a consultant to American importers dealing with Chinese manufacturers. This has given him profound insights into the Chinese way of doing business. In Poorly Made in China he shares those insights. After reading his book, you will find yourself thinking carefully before putting Made in China items into your shopping cart.
Midler identifies the features of China’s production environment that make a joke of all the free-trade slogans. There is, for example, “quality fade.” You cut a deal with a Chinese manufacturer to import beauty lotions in plastic bottles. You give precise specifications for the product and container. The first shipments are fine. Then customers begin to complain that the plastic of the bottles is too thin. You squeeze a bottle, it collapses. It turns out that your manufacturer has quietly adjusted the molds so that less plastic goes into making each bottle. Neither the importer nor his customers has been told of the change.
The reason for this:
Factories did not see an attention to quality as something that would improve their business prospects, but merely as a barrier to increased profitability. Working to achieve higher levels of quality did not make me a friend of the factory, but a pariah.
In this, as in much else, the Chinese are great testers of limits. Just how much “quality fade” can a supplier get away with before the business relationship breaks down? You can be sure they will find out, and stop short a millimeter before the electric fence.
Then there is intellectual-property arbitrage. Under pressure from the advanced nations, the flagrant disregard for intellectual-property rights that was on display in China through the 1980s and 1990s has been brought under some measure of control, but much of it has just gone underground. As Midler writes, “Americans somehow imagined that Chinese factories existed to manufacture merchandise only for the United States, but this was not the view from China at all.”
From the point of view of a Chinese manufacturer, the world is divided into “first” and “second” markets. In the first market — North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and some lesser outposts of legal order — new product designs originate, and the designs are protected by patent, trademark, and copyright laws. By all means go along with that: Get business relationships going with customers in those places. Manufacture according to their designs, observe their laws, give them good deals — even sell to them below cost. Then sell knock-offs of their designs to Latin America and the Middle East, where intellectual-property protection is not so valued. This arbitrage game explains the curious fact that Chinese-made products are often more expensive in the developing world than in the U.S.A. That’s where the profits are made.
The most vexing game to Midler was the one in which Chinese manufacturers relentlessly play off importers against buyers. Everyone is trying to make a profit, of course: the manufacturer from the importer, the importer from the U.S. store chain’s buyers, the store chain from the retail customer. The importer is at the Chinese end of this linkage, negotiating with the Chinese manufacturer, and must bear the brunt of Chinese gamesmanship.
Manufacturers are highly skilled at shifting profit margins from the importers to themselves. If a Chinese factory boss knows any English at all, Midler tells us, it is likely to be the phrase: “Price go up!” Whether the manufacturer’s costs actually have gone up is impossible to ascertain, accounting standards in China being, well, Chinese. Since the importer-buyer deal is fixed under American law, the importer must swallow the manufacturer’s price increases, which happened under Chinese law — which is to say, no law at all.
PAGE But then the importer can switch to another manufacturer, right? Not necessarily:
The health and beauty care industry was one that existed in a tight network. Some manufacturers in the industry were even related to one another. Others shared an educational background. . . . Others shared a kinship that was based in part on membership in the Communist Party. And then some had suppliers in common.
How skillful are Chinese manufacturers at gaming the free-trade system? Think three-card monte. One of Midler’s key import contacts in the U.S.A. is a man he calls Bernie. We learn in Chapter 4 that Bernie belongs to the Syrian-Jewish community, the most capable and exclusive of all the world’s “market-dominant minorities.” (They refer to ordinary Jews like Paul Midler rather dismissively as “jay-dubs,” from the consonants in “Jew.”)
Yet with all his savvy and connections, Bernie is outfoxed time and again by the Chinese. He turns the tables on them just once, in Chapter 21, but his advantage is merely temporary. The worldly and confident Jewish diamond dealer in Chapter 15 fares even worse. This would be a mighty King Kong vs. Godzilla clash of market-dominant minorities, except that the Chinese are on their home turf — actually a majority. Outsiders stand no chance.
With his strong background in Chinese history and culture, Midler is able to identify some of the underlying problems. Many of his vexations echo those voiced by foreigners in China for half a millennium or more: a love of excuse and pretense, the elevation of appearance over substance, admiration for unprincipled cleverness, shame a much stronger sanction than guilt. The old stereotype of the Chinese as chronic gamblers has some foundation in the Chinese psyche, too, as Midler notes:
The impression I got at some of the factories that engaged in quality manipulation schemes is that they did so after growing bored with their more conventional successes. . . . There was a great deal of excitement that came with getting a new business off the ground. These manufacturers were thrilled when they signed up their first major customer, and they got another kick from orders that were especially large. When deal flow leveled out, factory owners looked for other ways in which they could capture that hint of thrill.
All these quirks of national character would be harmlessly amusing in a business environment constrained by impartial law and rational politics, as indeed is the case in Hong Kong and Singapore, and increasingly in Taiwan. In mainland China’s barbarously low level of political and legal development, they express as poisonous pathologies — metaphorically poisonous to a healthy capitalist mentality, but sometimes literally poisonous to the unwary consumer, as we have seen in the recent scandals over toys, baby food, and pet food.
None of this will come right until the current odious dictatorship falls and the Chinese have a system of government worthy of their great talents and civilizational glories. Can we do anything to help? We might have, once. Paul Midler:
During the Clinton administration, when Most Favored Nation status for China was debated in Congress, there was a chance for the United States to hold out for political and economic reform in China, but the opportunity was lost. . . . Improved structural conditions made possible then might have more appropriately set the stage for stability going forward. Instead, American politicians and business leaders rushed headlong into greater levels of interdependency with China, a nation whose reliability is questionable.
Poorly Made in China manages to be both instructive and entertaining, with lessons not only for businesspeople looking to China for profits, but also for our politicians seeking to promote honest trade and U.S. national interests. I wish I could believe that the latter, some of them at least, might pay attention. On past experience, though, that is too much to hope for.
You pinged me for that, Newbie?
Got a cell? Call somebody who cares. LMAO
How long does a freeper have to be a member before they are no longer a newbie...
Back in the old days, what, 6-12 months??
Brilliant response. Newbie. Wow, never heard that one before.
Why don’t you join all those people who won’t use paperbags cause they destroy the forest, or have to shop at all natural grocery stores or watch out for the clothing made in sweatshops!? In other words the PC, anal crowd. Because that’s just what you’re sounding like by going for WalMart.
And if you start the thread, don’t you usually get pinged when people reply to the first post? Wow, I may be a newbie but I’m not that new. I guess it’s just reply only if I agree with you. That would make you kind of a newbie here wouldn’t it?
Now and then, we all respond to a specific person, but we’re talking to all in the thread. I feel kinda pushy writing “All” in the “To” box, so I usually don’t; but it was to all I was writing when I recommended the search engine, not to you particularly.
It’s obvious from the quality and quantity of your postings (which I notice daily!) that you, kellynla, do not need my advice about search engines. ;)
That out of the way...my favorite category for buying American is tools. Basic hand tools like hammers, pliers, wrenches; plus scissors and knives. The Chinese stuff is complete crap, but you can get a hundred-year-old American-made hammer on ebay and know that it will outlast you. If it’s an anvil, two or three hundred years old!
rhombus: “How is what Chinese manufacturing has done to Amnerican manufacturing much different than what Southern and Western manufacturing did to Northeastern manufacturing?”
You must be out of your mind! I have yet to hear, for example, of toxic wallboard coming from the south or west.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/AP-IMPACT-Chinese-drywall-apf-14904936.html
I’ve never seen a car (even made by the UAW) that had this level of crash test performance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHZqcKj7jNM
dollar stores sell a lot of toothpaste and stuff from China... I think I will stick to ice trays and shower curtains
A similar thing happened to the company my brother worked for.
"The Puritans declared the sanctity of all honorable work. In so doing, they rejected a centuries-old division of callings into “sacred” and “secular”… This Puritan rejection of the dichotomy between sacred and secular work has far-reaching implications. It judges every honorable job to be of intrinsic value, and integrates every vocation with a Christian’s spiritual life. It makes every job consequential by regarding it as the arena for glorifying and obeying God and for expressing love (through service) to a neighbor."
Puritan Work Ethic: the Dignity of Life’s Labors,
Christianity Today, October 1979, p. 15
Many things that are made in China don’t HAVE an American-made alternative.
When’s the last time you saw an American-made DVD player, or television?
“merchandise made in America”
Where? It’s rarer than hen’s teeth...at least in my neck of the woods.
bump
Ditto.
Poor translation on your part.
Our domestic unions with their populist political comrades have created the Chinese opportunity you observe so bitterly today.
If America-first is a democrat position, then Republicans are on the wrong side.
Maybe we are arguing at cross purposes. Can you give me a clarifying definition of America First?
Historically, Rhombus is right. There were quality problems and you cannot select their worse against our best to make a forceful argument.
The point being now that we know about Chinese drywall how likely will you be to purchase any? As to that Chinese car?
Choice is fundamental to the free market and liberty in general. That some cheat or abuse the system (going on since the dawn of time) isn't any reason to set up some political regime to manage our lives.
We're supposed to be a free people, able to decide for ourselves how and where we will spend our money. No one likes junk and no one fears the flame like the fool who's badly burned.
I think perhaps our difference isn’t so much how we view America, but how we view China.
Throughout American history, we have when necessary faced and overcome foreign rivals which have made the mistake of tangling tangled with America. It has made us confident - and naive.
We seem to have concluded those victories have been a result of our American-ness. That we’re somehow magic. Smarter. More capable. More industrious.
Well when I go into (any) store now - I see we don’t seem to be smarter. Or more capable. Or more industrious.
We seem to have become incredibly foolish, and lazy. Squandering history’s most incredible manufacturing base - for short term gain.
China has a 5000 year history of martial strategic planning, and a population which is young, ambitious, capable and frankly, more than a bit like that of Germany before WWII. Except China is (infinitely) more powerful than was Germany.
China now owns, operates and profits from what used to be the “arsenal of Democracy”. America’s once historic manufacturing base.
We *gave* it to them.
China is now in a position to use that manufacturing base - which was the power of the sleeping giant, which Isoroku Yamamoto once referred to.
However China wishes. Even, if they decide - against us.
And Republicans are all for that??
Then Republicans are on the wrong side. And completely blind to the real issue.
Giving away America’s sovereignty and our real power - our manufacturing and technical abilities and our workforce. To a communist nation 4 times our population.
As long as we are making live difficult for unions.
Yes. I’d say we’re arguing at cross purposes.
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