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 shit: 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 shitty 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:
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Reply to
David Nebenzahl
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True.

However, going by various comments written by people in the industry, there also seems to be a cultural impetus to try and push the lower boundaries of the quality standards. So if a Chinese factory contracts for a given level of quality there is a tendency for that level to drop over time unless the company that hired them keeps on top of things.

I suspect this holds true to a certain extent in many places, but he impression that I have gotten (from various places) is that this is worse when dealing with Chinese manufacturers.

Chris

Reply to
Chris Friesen

You mean like drywall, C-Less' "64GB USB Drive", and the stuff at Harbor Fright?

A rose by any other name ...

Fuck China, and "Made in USA", for that matter ... I'm buying "European" like Laguna, Festool, Omer, et al products every chance I get these days.

I want value for what few of my hard earned $$ I get to keep, not some price point engineered POS with an advertising budget.

Reply to
Swingman

Funny you mention Laguna...some of their stuff is made in China.

What about Lie-Nielsen and Starrett? Or General and Veritas and Oneway from Canada?

Chris

Reply to
Chris Friesen

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.

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)

Reply to
norminn

They'll build what they're paid to build, no more and no less. There are talented folk there, same as anywhere else - but if people want to pay for crap that breaks after a few months so that they then have to go out and buy more crap, then that's what the Chinese will happily make...

Problem is, *everyone* does it. It's almost impossible for a company to exist on the basis of making a 'quality' product any more - which means that even if the individual wants to pay extra for something that'll last, the product simply doesn't exist.

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules

They are excellent copy cats, but there is NOTHING like European engineering for built-in quality, from handsaws and screwdrivers, to spaceships.

Reply to
Swingman

The Europeans built a spaceship? I think Flash Gordon was an American...

Last I heard, the Europeans were trying to put up their own GPS satellite system - for reasons passing understanding.

Reply to
HeyBub

Yeah, Japanese saws suck.

Reply to
keithw86

interested in photography, I don't think any American cameras were considered high quality. The really good stuff was Leica (German) and Hasselblad (Swedish? -- both mucho expensivo). Praktica (E. German) was OK. Some of the Japanese brands were coming onto the market, IIRC. I'm not sure that Kodak was considered a serious photographer's camera.

Perce

Reply to
Percival P. Cassidy

Olympus made at least one fantastic camera around that time - or was it the early sixties? I had an Olympus PenE, half frame SLR that took fantastic pictures.

Reply to
norminn

I suspect Tiawan, I could be wrong. Also Bulgaria, and Italy.

Reply to
Leon

You got something Italian on order again? Lagu....

Reply to
Leon

No, Flesh Gordon was the American... ;~)

Reply to
Leon

------------------------------------------- During my days on the design board in the late 50s, had several European immigrants in my design group.

They would spend all kinds of time designing complex weldments to use the least amount of material but usually involved lots of welding time.

It was understandable.

Europe had been flattened during WWII and materials were scarce in Europe.

Had to constantly remind these guys that the equipment we were designing was being sold by the pound, not the complexity of design.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

THIS PART is the best.....

Seems like this has already happened with the Japanese and Germans

Reply to
cselby

As another poster said. They make what we ask them to make, or they make what we will buy. I think the latter is the truer statement. If everybody who said (myself included) "I am sick of buying cheap crap from China" actually stopped buying cheap crap from China. They would make better crap. How do we all stop buying stuff made in China. I have no idea. While picking up the family Christmas cards at Wal-Mart tonight the kids wanted Santa hats. $1.50 a piece - made in China. I bought 2, my Dunkins this morning cost more.

To the poster who mentioned about how Japanese made used to be a joke. When I was a kid, I am 46 now, my dad owned a NAPA store. I can remember the comments when a customer came in to purchase parts for a Datsun or a Toyota. The joke was the price of the replacement part would double the value of the car. Not so much anymore.

Larry C

Reply to
Larry C

As for European engineering in general, anybody who thinks that it's all high quality hasn't fettled a brand new British-made Stanley shoulder plane.

Reply to
J. Clarke

What nonsense. I've had plenty of Euro made items that were junk, including German made. Italy makes enough crap to drag the whole continent's curve below avg! ;)

nb

Reply to
notbob

Tsk, tsk ... you get into space on "rockets", Bubba ... Wernher Von Braun

Nuff said ...

Reply to
Swingman

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