Made in China Tuesday, January 10, 2012
There is a line in the second film of the Back to the Future
series which has Doc saying, “No wonder there was a problem. This transistor
was made in Japan,” with Marty responding, “What do you mean, Doc? All the best
stuff is made in Japan.”
In 1950s, there term “made in Japan” signified shoddy
craftsmanship, something that changed dramatically by the 1980s when Japan
became the leading manufacturer of cars and electronics, we all ached to own.
Now, “Made in China” equates to the 1950s version of lack of
quality – mainland China that is, and I never once imagined I would look back
at “made in Taiwan” with affection, but I do.
This weekend, I found out why products out of China suck.
It seems that everything is being made in one city, a city
that the good communists of China decided they needed in order to compete with
Western Capitalists. Although short of natural resources, China has more than
enough labor, and being the good communistic, anti-capitalistic state, Chinese
leaders decided to create a capitalistic slum and invite capitalistic
corporations in to exploit its people – but only those who work and play in
this mega manufacturing slum.
China put us all on notice about its ambitions when it
quelled its Democratic uprising in the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square when
the Chinese Spring was largely ignored because western nations ached to get a
piece of the Chinese market. Perhaps also the bribery the Chinese conducted in
the U.S. Congress in the 1970s may have successfully kept Americans from being
as involve with the uprising as we were in Libya or Syria, or even contemporary
Russia and Iran. When it comes to business interests, American corporations
know which side its bread is buttered on and wouldn’t aggravate the Chinese
government by making it live up to his communistic ideals.
Already trained by exploitation in Africa where we get most
of the rare minerals for our commuters, international corporations turned this
new Chinese industrial city into an economic whore any capitalist could be
proud of – far better than anything before done by American business in places
like Mexico, and as a result, created a system of inferior products that could
be sold again and again to the same suckers here in America.
This is most relevant to my purchase of a can opener
recently. One can opener I’d had for years finally bit the ghost. So, I went to
a local house wares store and bought another at full price, not thinking much
about the label, made in China.
This lasted two days before it broke, too, which led me to
purchase another at a different store, and yet another and another and another,
finally getting it into my head that “Made in China” means badly made, and that
if I wanted to get anything well-made, I would have to get something made by
good communists prior to Tiananmen Square.
Weeks after this, I finally found an old can opener in my
tool shed, with an imprint from what must have been the late 1960s saying,
“made in Japan,” and as Marty would later point out, all the best stuff is made
in Japan.
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