“The Entrepreneur” is the name of a new documentary that details the misadventures of Malcolm Bricklin, an American who dreamed of importing inexpensive, luxury cars from China. This documentary is available for free online.
The film reflects the hubris displayed by American importers in China, and for this reason some similarities might be drawn to my book. I particularly enjoyed how the movie attempted to convey emotional aspects of deal-making in China, and a few of my favorite “tactics” can been seen — including the rather common gambit whereby factory bosses take a deal entirely off the table, unwinding the progress of several days worth of negotiations, done at just the right moment to maximize the frustration of the foreign delegation.
Some might say that Bricklin is a nut, and while there is no doubt on that account, it was still interesting to see how it didn’t stop Chery Automobile from entertaining his fantasies and collecting a few million in the process. The silver screen is probably not the ideal medium for conveying the nuances of a China deal, but for what it’s worth…
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A few more reviews have come in for “Poorly Made in China” in the past couple of weeks.
1. Norway weighed in with a piece worth mentioning for the cartoon that accompanied it. The image here is of a Westerner — I guess that’s me? — barking at a dragon who is impervious to the exclamation points I’m floating its way. Quite amusing, actually.
2. Another review was done in Arabic. I don’t read it, so I’m not exactly sure what it’s about. The link is here for anyone who wants to see.
3. Mohammed Cohen at Asia Times wrote a review, offering up details from the narrative. He sums up:
“For the factory, an established relationship becomes a one-way street, not a partnership. According to Midler, the Chinese side simply looks for all the advantage it can, using every tool at its disposal. The author sees that as a cautionary tale beyond the world of manufacturers and importers to the heart of US diplomacy with China. The prospect of the US being drawn into that kind of a relationship with a nuclear armed, numerically superior China holding trillions in US Treasury securities is a lot scarier than questionable body scrub. Midler has written a fascinating, funny and important book.”
In the coming week or two, I hope to post a few notes from readers.
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This chart comes courtesy of The Alliance for American Manufacturing via NPR’s Marketplace with Scott Jagow. If you click on the image, you can get a slightly larger view.
Have a look at the last three years. Figures show just how much our trade deficit with China has skyrocketed. The percentages in 2007, 2008 and 2009 climbed to 54%, 69% and 83%, respectively. The figure really can’t go much higher. We should only hope that when the rate does level off that national leaders don’t take the flattening as a political achievement.
“Poorly Made in China” can be seen as a backwards-looking assessment of the move to open wider the doors of trade with China. There were many things wrong with the decision, one that was made during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s. This increasing trade gap statistic is just one of the pieces of evidence.
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For those who wonder about the secret to traditional Chinese medicine…
The Hong Kong Department of Health called on members of the public not to buy or use a proprietary Chinese medicine named “Kam Yuen Brand Wan Ying Yang Gan Wan” which was found to have adulterated with western medicine, sildenafil, that may cause serious side effect.
Link to the article, here.
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I’ve written plenty about “The China Game.” Now, China’s propaganda machine has issued an article for the English-reading public titled: “Is Washington Playing A Deeper Game With China?”
In this piece, China is claiming that a US-supported NGO is behind the recent rioting in the western province of Xinjiang. This is better than anything you’ll see on television tonight:
After the tragic events of July 5 in Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region in China, it would be useful to look more closely into the actual role of the US Government’s “independent” NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). All indications are that the US Government, once more acting through its “private” Non-Governmental Organization, the NED, is massively intervening into the internal politics of China.
The reasons for Washington’s intervention into Xinjiang affairs seems to have little to do with concerns over alleged human rights abuses by Beijing authorities against Uyghur people.
The major organization internationally calling for protests in front of Chinese embassies around the world is the Washington, D.C.-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC). The WUC manages to finance a staff, a very fancy website in English, and has a very close relation to the US Congress-funded NED. According to published reports by the NED itself, the World Uyghur Congress receives $215,000.00 annually from the National Endowment for Democracy for “human rights research and advocacy projects.”
The NED was intimately involved in financial support to various organizations behind the Lhasa “Crimson Revolution” in March 2008, as well as the Saffron Revolution in Burma/Myanmar and virtually every regime change destabilization in eastern Europe over the past years from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine to Kyrgystan to Teheran in the aftermath of the recent elections.
…Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in a published interview in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
This sort of article is so entertaining that I wonder if it can’t be distinguished from plainer examples of propaganda. It’s as though the effort were conscious, that the authors were shooting for a kind of “entertainment propaganda.” Or maybe they take the article as factual, that it is Beijing’s real view of what is happening in Xinjiang.
The article doesn’t reference the accompanying map, but the backstory apparently involves an oil pipeline.
admin China
We found something that looks like a Kindle, but it’s not. From Nikei Electronics, an article by Takuya Otani:
I found an electronic book (e-book) reader similar to the Kindle 2, which Amazon.com Inc released in February 2009, at Digital Publishing Fair 2009, an exhibition taking place from July 9 to 12, 2009, at Tokyo Big Sight.
The e-book reader was exhibited at the booth of Founder International Inc, which is the Japanese unit of Peking University Founder Group Corp, a major IT firm in China, and drawing attention from visitors.
“Peking University Founder Group independently developed this terminal, and it has nothing to do with the Kindle,” Founder International said.
At the first glance, the terminal looked very much like the Kindle 2. But, after carefully examining it, I found some differences, for example, in the shapes of the buttons on the right and left sides of the terminal, the width of the upper frame and, of course, the logo.
And, of course, the logo…
Where is The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart on this one, or Stephen Colbert?
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Picked up a review out of Malaysia.
Poorly Made In China shatters the notion of Chinese contract manufacturers constantly jumping through hoops to please Western customers so that the factories are kept humming. Midler frequently warns that this is an illusion. Over time, he says, the importers will be more dependent on the manufacturers than the other way round.
…Poorly Made In China is not so much a hatchet job on Chinese manufacturers than a lively dissection of the cultural clash between Chinese and Western businessmen.
admin China
For those who find reviews of interest, a brief listing of a few recent mentions…
- I was nearly turned into a poster child for the Falun Gong by Epoch Times with their glowing review. For those who don’t know, Epoch Times is the newspaper closely tied to the spiritual discipline said to be a cult by China’s Communist Party. While at first I had reservations, in the end I was glad to have agreed to an interview by their reporter. From the review: “Through a vivid narrative of his own experiences, Midler…exposes the mind-boggling risks of conducting business in a country in which norms have been turned upside down from traditional culture. Yet, the author’s style is humorous at times and often light.” When you’ve been called funny and light by Epoch Times, you know you’re onto something…
- Consumerist.com posted a short review that borrowed from an assessment by National Review’s John Derbyshire. More interesting than the post in this case were comments that followed. I found the comments oddly entertaining and often interesting. It’s an interesting website, and I recommend having a look.
- South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English newspaper, also weighed in, coming out with a nice review in which the paper suggested the book is a “must-read for people engaged in mainland business.” Registration is normally required, so I’ve gone and scanned the thing, posting it right here. If you click on the image (at right), it will become larger.
More interesting than the book reviews have been emails sent to me directly from random readers. Different parts of the book have left varying impressions, and I intend to post (anonymous) excerpts one day in future.
admin China
With the 4th of July weekend upon us, thought that it would be good to talk pyrotechnics for a moment. Did you know more than 97% of all imported fireworks come from China? And, of those, about half of shipments are found to be problematic. The US Consumer Product and Safety Commission (CPSC) did a survey last year on this:
Staff from CPSC selectively sampled and tested 211 shipments of fireworks in fiscal year 2008 to determine if they were in compliance with the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. Approximately 49% of those shipments were found to contain fireworks that were noncompliant.
Apologists for China’s manufacturing sector will of course want everyone to focus on the 51% that were compliant. These enablers are out there in great numbers. They call themselves optimists, and they complain that I see only a glass that is half empty.
There has been almost no follow through on this issue from politicians or the politically active (everyone is apparently too busy “being green”). CPSC’s interesting report is available online. For all of you celebrating the 4th of July in the American way, be safe.
admin China
Last week, a 13-story apartment block in Shanghai fell over and, rather than highlight the failure, Western media outlets chose to emphasize how the fallen building was larely intact (as if this was testament to the quality of China-made goods). Some news services pointed out that while one building toppled, the other 10 apartment blocks in the complex remained undamaged.
There is so much spin related to China, and so we should appreciate that McClatchy Newspapers ran a story on how China is responsible for the greatest amount of faulty goods in the United States.
WASHINGTON — Chinese manufacturers made more than half of the goods that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled last year, but few of them paid any price for producing defective wares. The long list of faulty products included Chinese-made highchairs whose seat backs failed, steam cleaners that burned their users, bikes whose front-wheel forks broke, saunas that overheated, illuminated exit signs that stopped working when commercial power failed, dune buggies whose seat belts broke on impact and coffee makers that overheated and started fires.
China apologists are quick to argue that product recalls have been proportional — that more than half of all product failures are coming out of China because so many products come from the one economy. It’s an incomplete logical argument; it doesn’t consider the kinds of failures that China is delivering.
You have corner cutting or laziness, or problems due to backwardness, but then you also have so many fantastic examples of willfully unethical conduct. Melamine in baby milk powder has to be the most serious case. The most frightening thing about product failures is how Chinese industrialists are willing to put lives at risk for only the smallest savings.
There ought to be more reporting on China’s quality challenge, but many media groups pretend that there is no problem. Western journalists who have worked in China for years are ending their tours of duty without ever having pulled together a meaningful piece on this one subject, and yet the story has helped define the age in which we live. Never mind the career heads (and their editors) who refuse to report on quality failures. We’re lucky to have the bloggers who report more interestingly on the subject…
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admin China
“The Entrepreneur” is the name of a new documentary that details the misadventures of Malcolm Bricklin, an American who dreamed of importing inexpensive, luxury cars from China. This documentary is available for free online.
Some might say that Bricklin is a nut, and while there is no doubt on that account, it was still interesting to see how it didn’t stop Chery Automobile from entertaining his fantasies and collecting a few million in the process. The silver screen is probably not the ideal medium for conveying the nuances of a China deal, but for what it’s worth…
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