Shut off the Chinese import spigot
China is a bad trading partner. I know it’s hard to remember before 9-11-01, but China knocked one of our recon flights down and held the crew hostage for 11 days. That’s how they began their dealings with this administration. After 9-11, they went through the motions of fighting terrorists, but only as the term could be applied to their enemies, not in the interests of the civilized world.
The Chinese have since then amassed a fortune by counterfeiting everything they could get their grimey little paws on – usually at the expense of US manufacturers. As an example, from BusinessWeek;
General Motors Corp. execs would agree with that — which is why they’re apoplectic. GM Daewoo Auto & Technology Co., the Korean subsidiary of GM, says the QQ is a knockoff of its own Matiz minicar, sold in China as the Chevrolet Spark since 2003. “The cars are more than similar,” says Rob Leggat, vice-president for corporate affairs at GM Daewoo. “It really approaches being an exact copy.” Same cute, snubby nose. Same bug-eyed headlights. Same rounded, high back. And most components in the QQ, Leggat says, can easily be interchanged with parts on the Spark. So on Dec. 16, GM Daewoo filed suit in a Shanghai court alleging that Chery Automobile Co. stole its trade secrets to make the QQ. Chery declined to comment.
This isn’t the first time a foreign auto maker has felt ripped off in China. In 2003, Toyota Motor Corp. sued Hangzhou-based Geely Group Co. for copying the Japanese company’s logo and slapping it on Geely models. Toyota lost the case. Yet Honda Motor Co. (HMC ) in December won a ruling that bars Chongqing Lifan Industrial from selling motorcycles under the “Hongda” brand. Honda is also suing Shuanghuan Automobile Co., saying the Chinese company’s Laibao SRV is a copy of the Honda CR-V sport-utility vehicle. “Chinese car companies still have limited [design] capabilities,” says Jia Xinguang, an analyst at China National Automotive Industry Consulting & Developing Corp., a consultancy. “That is why so many [of them] copy bigger car companies’ models.”I still don’t know why the idiots at GM thought buying Daewoo was a good idea, nonetheless, the Chinese ripping off their designs, similarly naming vehicles and mounting misleading trademarks on cars is not the act of a good trading partner.Â
I still don’t know why the idiots at GM thought buying Daewoo was a good idea, nonetheless, the Chinese ripping off their designs, similarly naming vehicles and mounting misleading trademarks on cars is not the act of a good trading partner. In Panama, Chinese drug manufacturers managed to kill 51 people by lacing cough syrup with antifreeze (in some cases some as much as 99%). From an AP story;
A Chinese company that sold a batch of diethylene glycol, a chemical cousin of antifreeze that killed at least 51 people in Panama, had no license to sell pharmaceuticals, the government said Tuesday.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said an investigation into the source of the deadly medicine revealed that the Chinese company that originally sold it, was authorized to sell only chemicals for industrial use.
“This morning we contacted the State Food and Drug Administration, which investigated the matter half a year ago,” said Jiang. “According to the investigation, the relevant company is not an enterprise for medicine production but is licensed to make chemical-grade material.”
“The production of medicine and supplementary materials is strictly regulated in China,” she said.
But the deadly concoction was exported, nonetheless. And the Chinese are not accepting any culpability, apparently. And now their indifference is affecting US imports. From today’s Washington Post;
Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.
Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.
Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.
Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.
These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.
For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught — many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.
Now the confluence of two events — the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week’s resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China — has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up.
The Wall Street Journal reports that software piracy is down in China;
Software piracy is still high by international standards: The study, conducted by research firm International Data Corp. for the Business Software Alliance, estimated 82% of software used in China in 2006 was pirated, down from 86% in 2005. That compares with a global average of 35% both years.
Illegal software usage in China stood at 92% as recently as 2003. The reduction of 10 percentage points in China’s piracy rate over three years avoided $864 million in losses for legitimate software providers, according to IDC.
Meanwhile, the size of China’s legitimate software market grew to $1.2 billion in 2006, an 88% increase from the previous year, said the report, issued yesterday.Â
But you can bet that the illegal software economy in China funds the legal software portion. Even if they stopped pirating today, the damage (and profits) has been done.
The WSJ also reports that China has promised to improve on their exported food standards, too;
The Chinese government said it is cracking down on dangerous domestic food-industry practices, in Beijing’s first top-level policy response to the recent storm over tainted pet food in the U.S. The response suggests Beijing is sensitive to the outcry, but the plan lacked specifics, an indication that its impact could be limited.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s too late. They export inferior products and they’ve made money doing so. If I’d been treated the same way by a local merchant, it’s happen just once. I’d take my business elsewhere.
The Chinese also have not been very useful in controlling their client, North Korea, either – probably for the same reasons they can’t control their economy – it doesn’t affect the Chinese government, so it doesn’t matter. As long as the money is rolling in and the US is more involved in quelling the world’s troubles than in combating illegal trade, the Chinese economy has been booming.
Maybe it’s time we just pack up and leave them to their own devices until they can join the civilized world instead of acting like some third world goat ropers.
Category: Economy, Foreign Policy
[…] Sunday, I wrote about the low quality control on Chinese imports and today, by way of the Drudge Report, I find this from the New York Times; Authorities in the Dominican Republic said they seized 36,000 tubes of toothpaste suspected of containing diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze. Included were tubes of toothpaste marketed for children with bubble gum and strawberry flavors sold under the name of “Mr. Cool Junior.†[…]