What a ball pen tells us about China’s manufacturing weakness | Hacker News Reader

What a ball pen tells us about China’s manufacturing weakness

ejinsight.com

29 pointsjseliger31 comments

No it doesn't. Rather it says a lot about global supply chains. This is bullying and shaming with some nationalism thrown in for good measure (the one entrepreneuress saying, importing those spherules ships your profits overseas, bad, bad!). If Chinese manufacturers thought there was a big market for precision ball point pens, they'd make them. But there isn't such market in most of the world.

In any Chinese office, you'll have plenty of semi disposable pens, the likes of papermates and bics. They don't really explode in your pocket.

Most of the world just want pens that write, they don't see pens as status symbols. Other things take their place.

And even if we took the reprimand at face value, really, are the Swiss taking in and rolling in the dough by selling these small spherules?

It was opportunistic bashing by some apparatchik who saw it fit to bash industry who actually pulled the country out of dire poverty in a mere thirty years.

You missed some key details in the article - China does make 38 billion ball-point pens per year, but doesn't make any of the balls in those pens. This is a commentary on their ability to make the single precision element within the pen.

Why would the socket require less precision than the ball that goes into that socket?

Clearly it is otherwise they wouldn't import them.

Without getting into whether or not China does or doesn't have this level of manufacturing capability, I would suggest that it's not a case that the socket requires less precision; it's that making a socket to the tolerance required is significantly easier than making the sphere of metal to the tolerance required.

They both have to be precise; the ball is harder to make to that precision.

I also don't buy the story on just how much precision is required, considering the ballpoint pen is a 128-year-old invention.

> it requires state-of-the-art machinery and cutting-edge computerized measurement equipment with pinpoint precision to produce, not to mention the ability to produce the high-quality steel material of which it is made.

Nobody had this in 1950, say nothing about 1888.

I don't know but I'm guessing you just crimp it on. The ball has to be perfectly spherical though or else it will jam.

My impression, and it could be wrong, is that China does make the stainless steel spheres for most cheap pens, they just don't make the "high quality" high precision spherules made out of other more expensive alloys.

Evenso, I think this is like someone bashing Specialized, Bianchi, Gary Fisher, etc., for using Shimano derailleurs.

Le Keqiang is not "some apparatchik" - he's the #2 leader in all of China, and a superlative scientist.

I'm reasonably certain ball point pens existed long before computerized manufacturing, despite the claims of the article. I'm no material scientist but I believe there has to be better ways to manufacture a ball bearing than computer controlled cutting?

Came here to say exactly the same. I'm old enough that the ball pens of my childhood were made without computers.

Perhaps advances in the other components - say, ink - rely on tighter tolerances in the ball. Or perhaps consumers expect a level of quality that only current balls provide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoint_pen -- Wikipedia suggests that the ball point pen was first invented in the late 19th century, but that they didn't catch on until after WWII because they need "modern chemistry and precision manufacturing capabilities", which sounds consistent with the claims in this article.

In USA Ballpoint pen was introduced on 29 Oct 1945, but the reliable ones (made by BIC) was launched in 1959. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-enduring-genius-of-the-ballp...

Anything produced in 50s, I'm sure can be easily produced by any nation today, leave alone China.

Any nation could produce supersonic aircraft, nuclear reactors, and satellites and the launchers to send them to space?

> Any nation could produce supersonic aircraft, nuclear reactors...

These are not industrial mass produced items made by machines. 1950s industrial setup can be duplicated by any country today on their own.

But the article claims you need "state-of-the-art machinery and cutting-edge computerized measurement equipment with pinpoint precision to produce, not to mention the ability to produce the high-quality steel material of which it is made."

None of this was available post-WW II, like the advanced steel alloys the article talks about. China's industrial capacity is more advanced than the US's was in the 1950's and if China does not produce those little metal spheres there must be something else at play.

My guess would be that thanks to modern production processes, a competitor with older machinery would not stand a chance in the marktplace and investing in the production of those balls is economically not very attractive because margins are already razor-thing. But I'd like to read from someone who actually knows.

Precision equipment manufacturing is hard. It's easy to get round balls, but to get them consistently within a certain tolerance in yields that would beat just importing them is even harder.

I can't find the article now, but I remember reading about the manufacture of a certain kind of high quality lenses and at the time, the place with the highest quality manufacturing capacity was a couple tiny factories in Japan. At some point the technology to make lenses at that quality and yield had been R&D'd in Japan and there it sits.

Nobody feels like dumping a few hundred million (or billion) into matching that capability when they can just order them from these places at $20 a pop in volume.

"But", people say, "China makes all kinds of high-tech goods!". Sorta, is the answer. China does final assembly on tons of things, but many of the components, ultra-precision parts, are made elsewhere: CPUs, DSPs, Memory, Displays etc. China is getting there as market forces allow, but there often isn't a good reason to try to achieve parity or leapfrog suppliers who you already have good relationships with and who sell you product at reasonable prices.

Presumably plenty of higher end shops in China could produce such a ball, but inertia and economies of scale from current producers probably make it less valuable to pursue.

Some high end optics, semiconductors, etc perhaps China really cannot yet produce.

The article claims that they could produce such a ball, but choose not to because of the high initial investment combined with the weak IP law in China.

No sense in footing the bill for the needed R&D, when your investment will be quickly stolen by the local competition.

I suspect IP isn't really the question here. After all, the required balls are made in "Germany, Switzerland or Japan" so I doubt they couldn't be made in China, if someone wished to.

On another note, the article neatly taps into the chip many Chinese have on their shoulder when it comes to be recognized as "equal" to Western countries. In reality, and according to the principle of comparative advantage, no two countries would ever be equal in all things. And that's not a bad thing.

I'm no expert, but we do import quite a bit of a specific type of electronics from China. The various companies steal from each other with impunity. Not just ideas...like specific microcode for example. The physical proximity, plus the fact that it's not technically illegal makes it easy.

Stealing from Germany/Switzerland/Japan might have consequences, at least for exporting to where you stole from. It's also not as easy as just hiring away an expert from down the street.

In the early days a joke circulated around Beijing in "China hand" circles as follows:

What's the difference between a Hong Kong Chinese and a mainland Chinese?

The Hong Kong Chinese knows the difference between 1/100th and 1/1000th of an inch.

By the way, Li Keqiang (#2 in China leadership) is a fantastic scientist, wonderfully inquisitive/open-minded about knowledge, and is encyclopedic. Great guy.

Alibaba is full of chinese manufacturers offering tungsten carbide balls for pens, pen tips and all sorts of precision pen parts.

Ball point pens were made since the 19th century the balls were (and I'm pretty much sure that still are) made by dropping liquid metal into a coolant with high viscosity so they'll turn into spheres and then tumbled with an abrasive material usually fine sand or glass to make them smooth.

You do not need sophisticated equipment and especially not some high end CNC machining to make balls from metal what is this nonsense?

EDIT: Found a video from BIC basically tungsten carbide droplets abrasively tumbled into perfect spheres (this is basic physics as they always want to tumble around their center of mass they end up being pretty close to being perfect spheres) https://youtu.be/D0OyjRgUBns?t=43

What a biased article. I'm interested in learning about the strengths and weaknesses of many cultures and countries (including China) but reducing it to "China can't build working pens therefore they suck" is not just cheap but also an insult to our intelligence.

I don't think that the article said "China can't build working pens therefore they suck" and I also do not think it was offering any sort of commentary on "culture" in the first place. Instead it was offering opinions on how the structure of the economy, etc. was holding the country back from moving up the value-added production food chain.

I though this sounded familiar. Here's another article on it from a few weeks ago. Some of you might like the tone a bit better: http://www.marketplace.org/2015/12/10/world/why-cant-china-m...

0.1mm balls are unusual - 1.0mm is more typical (eg. standard BIC pens).

I thought that was the whole point of trade, that you specialize. What nonsense.

Milton Friedman has a wonderful short lecture on this, about pencils no less.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8

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