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Rethinking "Made in China"
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, 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 -- I am a Canadian who was born and raised in The Netherlands. I live on Planet Earth on a spot of land called Canada. We have noisy neighbours. - harvested from Usenet |
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