China, Rush to the Bottom and the Toxic Sewer
For those who have been blissfully unaware, there have been some problems with products made in China recently. I'm not sure how you could miss it, but lets refresh your memory: antifreeze in the toothpaste, date-rape beads for children, exploding candles, fish raised in sewer and toxic-waste-dump conditions. There are more, but you get the idea. Did you actually just eat that Chinese-raised fish? Personally, I won't take anything internally that I know is made in China.
Just why do you think things made in China are so cheap? Little regulation in the country along with a desperate need to get bids seems to be one major root problem. It's hard to meet the cutthroat race to be the lowest bidder against all the other Chinese companies who want the contracts and have little understanding of what the costs really are. As Businessweek noted, quoting a Chinese scholar, "given the low emphasis on profits and the unsophisticated accounting of many Chinese companies, often their pricing isn't based on a full understanding of costs" (see The China Price in Businessweek).
So what do you do when you can't produce something for the exaggeratedly low cost you agreed to? It seems one popular solution in China is to cut costs by adding out-of-spec, cheap materials. Simply do something like fill the pet food with plastic waste, or use a chemical that is 4 times cheaper than the one specified for the beads. So it sends a few children into date-rape comas or kills some pets, so what?
Let's be clear, this isn't only China's fault and these things happen in all countries and all times. US and multinational corporations do their part when demanding something be made for an unreasonably low price, in a country with little enforced regulation and when they fail to provide quality control of their own products or oversight in a poorly regulated country. When the only goal of these corporations and their Chinese counterparts is making money is it very surprising that life is as cheap as their products? Like Arthur Miller's play All My Sons, which was based on a real incident of cost cutting and deception in the US, is it really so surprising when these things start killing our sons and daughters, as literally happens in his play?
The slew of problems hasn't been that much of a concern to most in the US since the problems and side effects haven't been obviously in our own back yard until now. Finally, they've been very obviously exported along with so many cheap, defective and dangerous products to us.
In China, the side effects of their "economic miracle" have been clearer for the Chinese people as Pan Yue of the Chinese government points out:
- "Habitable and usable land has been halved over the past 50 years."
- "Five of the ten most polluted cities worldwide are in China."
- "Acid rain is falling on one third of the Chinese territory."
- "Half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless."
- "One fourth of our citizens does not have access to clean drinking water."
- "Because air and water are polluted, we are losing between 8 and 15 percent of our gross domestic product. And that doesn't include the costs for health."
- "In Bejing alone, 70 to 80 percent of all deadly cancer cases are related to the environment."
- "Lung cancer has emerged as the No. 1 cause of death."
- "We will need to resettle 186 million residents from 22 provinces and cities."
- "Economically we won't be strong enough to overcome [our environmental crises]."
Does this sound like an "economic miracle" to you or more like a cross between The Jungle and Silent Spring? And these are only the problems that are being talked about, what about the ones that aren't? It seems that neither our sons and daughters, and especially not any Chinese sons and daughters are particularly safe from this situation. Like the cathartic "miracle" of All My Sons, this miracle is sure to bring death and suffering if nothing changes and changes fast. All of this tragedy in the name of the cheapest, most worthless baubles we can get made (in China).
