

Poorly Made in China: Why So Many Chinese Products are Born to be Bad - dpapathanasiou
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13642306

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russell
When I was a kid, Japanese products were visibly cheap and poorly made.
American products were also poorly made, but not quite so bad as the Japanese.
The quality gap was relatively easy to overcome. The American electronics
manufacturers were not very innovative. When Sony came out with transistor
pocket radios, American radios were still table top vacuum tube boxes. When
the Japanese captured the TV market with integrated circuits, Zenith was
advertising the benefits of hand soldered components. Ampex invented the VCR,
but couldnt produce the recording heads needed for the home. The Japanese got
their reputation by concentrating in quality on a few key industries. By 1984
HP was refusing American made memory chips, because they were so inferior.
That triggered a restructuring of industry that powered the economy for the
next 20 years.

Interestingly enough, the Japanese had a similar structure to the Chinese with
large companies and lots of subcontractors. However, their motivation was to
have the subcontractor absorb employment fluctuations and cost squeezes, not
to hide violations of quality standards.

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phoxix2
William Deming is the reason the Japanese had high quality electronics.
American's wouldn't listen to him, the Japanese needed him desperately. Today
the Japanese love that man.

(While the Americans weren't listening to Deming, Harvard Biz Profs even went
as far as to predict that Deming/Japan's love for quality would not be
sustainable and its competitive advantage would erode. It turns out they were
right, the Koreans are the example of this.)

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ojbyrne
I don't think I've ever heard of him referred to as William Deming (it took me
a second to recognize who you were talking about). I've always heard Edwards
Deming or W. Edwards Deming.

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jbrun
This article struck me as rather superficial. Though quality fade and IP are
big problems, I fail to see how the problems are different from early Japanese
or American industry.

Having lived in China for a year (Beijing and elsewhere), I can state two
things: They are getting better, very quickly and they are starting to clamp
down on environmental, health and compensation issues. It takes time, China
started to really develop in the mid 90s, so it has only been 15 years or so.
It takes time to develop environmental, health, workers compensation and IP
regulations.

Even once you have the regulations in place, it takes years to make the
business community aware and respectful of them. Many (if not most) of the
factory bosses are former peasants or lower class people who have little to no
education. They are just trying to build a small company. That does not excuse
the gross abuses of power, but it does explain them.

There needs to be a certain "societal" education on these issues, it took a
hundred years in the west, and the environmental (sustainability) mouvement,
started in the 1950s is only mainstream since 2006ish. Oh and don't forget,
China is 3 times bigger than the US and 10 times bigger than Japan.

See this other NYT article from 2005 on the topic:

[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E2DD1239F...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E2DD1239F93AA35752C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1)

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megaduck
Many good points, but I have a few quibbles. While I agree that things are
getting better, I'm increasingly mistrustful of the "progress" being made on
the regulatory front. There's a lot of new rules on the books, but I don't see
a lot of real change occurring.

Good regulation requires independent monitoring and enforcement, and right now
there's neither. The majority of large businesses have at least some level of
government involvement and control, and many are outright state-owned.
Moreover, the level of corruption is pretty staggering, to the point where
being a government official is currently the best (and often the only) path to
real wealth and power. Quality control and product safety are remarkably
difficult in that kind of environment.

Hopefully you're right, and solving these things will just take time. However,
I don't think we have the option of sanguinely standing by and waiting for
things to get better. Consumers and business clients need to demand better
quality, the Chinese public needs to demand a more transparent and honest
government, and those demands have to be made constantly and consistently.
That's the only way change is going to happen.

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Chocobean
So they went into details about how, exactly, "paying poorly gets you poor
goods" works. We all know this, but perhaps not all of us understood the
intricacies of

1) Quality Fade

2) 3rd party testing companies

3) cultural differences such as whistle blowing, information sharing and
available "official"

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dxjones
great explanation of the "quality fade" phenomenon

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kailoa
Good article, but all problem description, no solutions.

I'd like to understand what drove the Japanese and American industries to turn
around, and how much of that is applicable to China.

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zcrar70
_Good article, but all problem description, no solutions._

That's true of this article, and often of Economist articles generally; this
isn't necessarily a negative though, because it provided an enlightening
insight into circumstances that weren't necessarily obvious beforehand (to me
anyway.)

 _I'd like to understand what drove the Japanese and American industries to
turn around, and how much of that is applicable to China._

I get the impression that the business models of America, Japan and China are
quite different; I don't think the US or Japan started out like China and then
changed, on the contrary I think they set out in different circumstances and
therefore with different aims.

I get the impression China is attempting to compete almost solely on cost,
which wasn't the case of the US (innovation) or Japan (a combination of
cost/quality and innovation.)

~~~
chaostheory
China may be very different from Japan in terms of culture and industrial
history, but I'm not so sure China's current industrial evolution is that
different from the US.

If you read books about the US's industrial revolution (both modern ones and
ones written during the era), I'm sure you can find a lot of parallels with
modern China (even with issues such as IP - Charles Dickens was angry seeing
bootleg copies of his books in the US)

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known
Japan and China have become world leaders in manufacturing sector by IMPORTING
American products (for eg a Ford car) to their countries and EXPORTING back
the same to USA by incrementally remodeling,renaming and re-engineering it.
And they were exporting these products back to America at a reduced price.

