David Nebenzahl wrote:
This post is aimed at all you sinophobes out there.

I'm getting a little tired of hearing the complaint "___ is a piece of
****: what do you expect? It's made in China!".

Now it is true that a lot of crap--boatloads of it, literally--does come
from that great country. We've all seen it, used it, chucked it out.

But bear in mind the historical precedent: some of you are probably old
enough to remember the similar tarring of anything that had the label
"Made in Japan" on it. Anything Japanese was considered worthless.
Compare to today.

I'm finding more and more that "Made in China" really doesn't mean
anything about the quality of an item. Clearly, Chinese workers, as
underpaid as they may be, are quite capable of making anything as well
as anyone else in any other part of the world.

Part of the problem is that we're placing blame in the wrong place. The
*real* problem seems to be "Made in [anyplace] but designed in the U.S.
[or some other place]". A lot, if not most, of what I would call
"Chinese junk" is actually made as well as the design would allow for,

Anyone who wants to sell anything in a competing market has to make it
as cheaply as can be done in Mexico, China, Bangladesh, etc....what they
make is done under an entirely different labor economy (and socialized
medicine, probably). But you know that already.

including the materials used and the amount of labor committed to
finishing the item. So in many cases Chinese factories are making
faithful copies of a ****ty design that may well have come from some
designer's computah right here in The Greatest Industrial Power on Earth
(the US of A).

I predict the Chinese are following the same arc that the Japanese did
after WWII, with variations, of course; there's no Marshall Plan, and
the countries are vastly different. Nonetheless, I can forsee the day
when "Made in China" is no longer a call for derision.

By way of showing just how wrong people can be when predicting who's
winning the industrial game, here's a hilariously and astoundingly wrong
prediction about the Japanese and American photographic industries from
1946: http://rick_oleson.tripod.com/index-136.html


When I was a little kid, we always included "the starving children in
China" in our prayers (hadn't discovered Africa yet). Just to show how
times have changed.....just the other day, this wonderful, sweet
missionary knocked on our door. He handed me $5, a bag of rice and a
dead duck. He didn't speak clear English, but left a pamphlet in
Chinese and badly translated English inviting all of the neighborhood
children to Buddhist services. It also mentioned that all the
neighborhood children would be welcome at classes to learn to speak and
write Chinese, gardening, raising livestock, building inexpensive
housing, cooking with a wok, using alternative fuels, and respect for
elders. It also said that the Chinese had saved so much money, they
were buying America and sending homesteaders over to run the country
properly. ;o)