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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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.

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For those who find reviews of interest, a brief listing of a few recent mentions…

1. 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…
2. 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.
3. 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.

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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.

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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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Foreign Policy ran a piece in which U.S. International Trade Commission economists suggest that there is no such thing as “Made in China.”

Here’s the punch line…

Although China’s processing export model may be proving a keeper in times of economic crisis, what might need changing is the way we look at trade deficits. With truly global supply chains, perhaps it’s time for a more accurate stamp: “Made Everywhere.”

It’s a Jedi mind trick, a slick argument. It’s a line of thought that, if accepted, means we can no longer have to trouble ourselves with debate or discussion. How could anyone raise issue with China quality failures, for example, when there is no China?

The number of industrial problems out of China are numerous and include: milk, toothpaste, tires, toys, pet food, blood thinner, drywall. The list goes on. It is not accurate in any case to say that these products were made “everywhere,” or that their failures were without a geographic source.

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Metals from China are more likely to include recycled inputs, which means a higher opportunity for contamination. Just caught a news item that highlights the incidence of radioactive materials in everyday consumer products, and it’s definitely worth a look. 

A recent example emerged last summer, when a Flint, Mich., scrap plant discovered a beat-up kitchen cheese grater that was radioactive. The China-made grater bearing the well-known EKCO brand name was laced with the isotope Cobalt-60. Tests showed the gadget to be giving off the equivalent of a chest X-ray over 36 hours of use, according to NRC documents.

Irony, of course, would be a geiger counter that was made in China!

The Scripps News report was filed by Isaac Wolf and can be found at the link here. 

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A friend sent me the link. This image was recently taken from space by an astronauts, and I especially like the level of detail offered:

Astronaut photograph ISS019-E-7720 was acquired on April 15, 2009, with a Nikon 2DXs digital camera fitted with a 180 mm lens.

Some more information on the Three Gorges Dam project… 

A new reservoir is filling in central China. The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River—the world’s largest dam—was completed in 2006, and the river is filling up its valley behind the dam to form a narrow reservoir extending more than 600 kilometers. This image from April 15, 2009, is one of the first images that astronauts on the International Space Station have been able to capture of the flooding behind the dam. The main objective for the dam is to supply water for the largest hydroelectric plant in the world and to help control the devastating floodsthat plague the lowlands downstream from the dam.

The epic scale of the dam project is matched by the level of controversy it continues to generate. Concerns about major environmental impacts, the relocation of 1.2 million people, and the flooding of 13 cities, more than 1300 villages, archeological locations, and hazardous waste dumps were raised throughout the planning and implementation. Environmental concerns include increased seismicity from the loading of the water, landslides, changed ecosystems, accumulated pollution, increased chances for waterborne diseases, and salinity changes in the Yangtze estuary.

It doesn’t look all that crowded down there. Does it?

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American politicians are currently debating a bill that would require radio stations to pay a “performer’s royalty” for music when it airs. Until now, the only royalties paid for on-air play were to songwriters who held copyright. 

The idea to pay performers sounds fair and due, but there are problems with the bill. One is that smaller stations may be get squeezed. Already not earning much, some stations will be forced into bankruptcy. The short-term workaround proposed by those pushing the bill has been to grant a three-year grace period to these stations, but this will serve only to postpone the inevitable.

It’s wonderful that performers might also be compensated for radio play, but anything that pushes us towards more consolidation in media can’t be good. There’s another reason to oppose the bill: The new system might actually provide less incentive to create better songs

Thinking for a moment of the first track on Bruce Springsteen’s first album, one that never went anywhere in a commercial way. “Blinded by the Light” was produced a few years later by Manfred Mann, and that version went all the way to the #1 slot on the Billboard 100. Evidence like that suggests that it’s more about the performer, but you can’t ignore the songwriting…  

Some brimstone baritone, anti-cyclone rolling stone, preacher from the east

He says: “Dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone, that’s where they expect it least.”

The United States is one of the few countries that doesn’t pay performer royalties. An editorial in the Detroit Free Press noted that Iran, North Korea, China and Rwanda all pay artists when their songs are played on the radio.