China allegedly dumps bad chips on Russia
theregister.com
theregister.com
I can't find the comment now, but one HN member told a story here on how their POS credit card readers they sent for production to China, were being tampered with by malicious employees on the supplier side who were shaving internal parts of the case assembly to plant skimmers inside that would beam the credit card data. They were going so far as to match the weight of the tampered device to meet the spec by the milligram to avoid weight detection countermeasures. Insane.
It's something I keep arguing: there's a price associated with policing, keeping, people honest. If there is intense competition, the pressure to cheat is also intense, and what you gain from competition may well be eaten up by the cost of policing. So competition isn't a panacea, it has rapidly diminishing returns.
(My mom's wholesaler, though, were pretty much a monopoly, who did this sort of thing just because they could. A different failure case!)
This cultural difference between Russia and China isn't as big as it is to north european/US culture.
https://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production...
A good example of a problem: supplier underbids to get the business; first and second shipment are fine, then the third has an unauthorized change because now the factory wants to cut their costs to make a profit. In the author's case IIRC it was shampoo: he ordered a set in different scents (lilac, almond, coconut perhaps?). Suddenly all he got was almond because I suppose the factory got a better deal if they bought more.
Also remember that Apple gets the quality they do by having a lot of their own personnel on site to stay on top of everything that is going on. You can't afford that.
A good place to start is making sure you're paying a fair price for whatever it is you're buying. Anything too cheap is definitely trouble. (And, of course, this condition is necessary, not sufficient.)
Do you have a good QA for incoming components? If yes, you will see a pattern.
There are good reputation vendors in China, but if purchasers type in the chip model in Alibaba and simply buy the cheapest, it's likely to be bad.
Russian purchasers should know this, but maybe they don't care or they got kickbacks.
Many ICs are sold in open markets like this: https://n.sinaimg.cn/sinakd10114/107/w1024h683/20220819/c5a8...
Cash and carry, no fux given. You cannot sanction an open market like you cannot sanction open source software.
The choice was between having a commission ( and starting it there) or lose the customer.
After everything was running, all components broke within a year. The Chinese company secretely replaced an important electronic piece with a cheaper one.
They now have all the customers business back. But probably within 3 years there's going to be a new board, who will try something similar ( again).
It's basically making a deal, and them replacing the components until you notice, then making you pay more for more expensive components, even though the more expensive ones were in the original deal. Sometimes also replacing key components, because someone from the factory tought that they were 'better' (=cheaper for the company)
Also (in the case from the book - cosmetics) a lot of questionable health/hygine practices.
Also this isn't really about dumping e-waste on foreigners, China's business culture, in particular informal markets always play fast and loose, including domestically. Gotta have a little bit of an instinct who you can buy from.
If it wasn't substantial you wouldn't need to exercise caution. I, too, have bought considerable amounts of stuff from DX, AliX, from Chinese vendors on eBay etc., and it's almost always a gamble, in particular when it comes to electronics and electronic components.
I have the opposite stance. I buy components nearly entirely on Aliexpress, as it turns out that on Amazon you get the exact same stuff, with the difference that the shipping might be faster (but not always) and the price is much higher.
It does take some getting used to the platform.
> […] including domestically.
That's the key thing to understand. This isn't about dumping e-waste on foreigners specifically, it's just capitalism at its most unregulated and the same crap you can buy from AliExpress the Chinese can buy too on Taobao.
That's not always right, I did get a lot of things from Amazon thinking it's quality stuff that turn out to be just the same thing AliExpress sell with a nice white label and more markups.
For example, i got a couple of Anker USB-C hubs, but recently story here show that many hubs are made by same manufacturer who offer whitelabeling
On Amazon you can find the same exact same USB hub, for anything between 20 and 80 dollar. Exact same electronics.
To be fair, western corporations were the ones who made the big move of offshoring all goods manufacturing to China in the first place and turn them into e-waste in a constant race to the bottom of lower and lower costs and higher and higher margins along with insane executive pay for their genius move. Hardly China's fault. Hate the game, not the player, and this game was made by the west, and China has just gotten really good at playing it.
The best way to fight this is to bring back manufacturing (it's already cheaper to build certain stuff in some EU countries than in China) along with products that last longer and are more easily repaired. Western consumers would just have to stomach higher cost of goods, and western corporations would have to stomach lower margins, but it's definitely doable if desired, but it won't happen.
Sure, but there is no free lunch. You're getting cheaper stuff but for that you're sacrificing your local industry and the environment by offshoring the environmental damage to places with less environmental protection laws. There is no free lunch. The right way to lower cost is by pursuing automation, not by offshoring the environmental damage and using sweatshop workers in areas with human rights violations.
I would say Western governments did a poor jobs protecting their countries from unfair competition from China, but also the practices are indeed unfair, I can't agree Chinese government is not to blame.
Such as USA with $11B of goods manufactured by forced labour in prison camps?
(Note: this is not whataboutism, it’s pointing out hypocrisy.)
We lost our manufacturing jobs because we insisted on pretending Western wage but Chinese prices:
1- We discovered ourselves rich when we found out that a median Western wage could buy us much more stuff if spent half a planet away, but we never took the time to appreciate the consequences of such huge capital flows (hint: our wages made us rich up to the moment the wages were no more).
2- We stopped accepting polluted air in our cities, but did not tolerate the higher prices of those factories that installed filters. Net result: industries either outsourced or collapsed.
There is no bringing back manufacturing without ensuring that a Western and a non-Western blue collar enjoy the same quality of life.
That's a faulty logic. History has proven you can't just leave the responsibility to the profit-at-all-cost free market to run things and then blame the individual consumers for the consequences. Otherwise we'd still be buying polluting gas guzzlers while LA and other cities would still be smog filled hell holes.
Was it the fault of consumers that decided to only buy polluting cars 50 years ago? Or was it that consumers just had no say in what manufacturers were making and were stuck with an offer of only polluting cars?
The solution was, you guessed it, government regulation from the EPA and EU to fix this and forced all auto-makers and industry to be less polluting and it was a great collective success that improved the air quality in our cities.
Same with e-waste and wasteful consumerism. All this can, and should be government regulated for the sake of our environment. The reason it's not yet regulated, is because unlike with car emissions, the environmental damage has been offshored from the west to developing nations on the other side of the planet.
Not really: people bought cheap because they couldn't afford to buy expensive, and then they lost their job, and now they can't even afford cheap. When we started exploiting poor people from far away, in a moment we found out that our wages could give us a much better life than their wages, but we never wondered why, and we never got upset that they couldn't afford the same quality of life like ours (while doing exactly the same job).
The illusion was very sweet while it lasted, then outsourcing came and the illusion vanished, and we passed from being rich with a blue collar wage to not having any wage.
Not being able to buy expensive does not imply buying cheap: buying fewer things is still an option. We bought cheap because we were greedy, because we hated breathing pollution and we wanted strong unions in our factories, but we could not care less about the same issues for the "others". And we just kept illuding ourselves that we could keep up with a better life for the same job, just because.
We, the Western buyers, were greedy. And idiots. We swapped our jobs for cheap smartphones.
If we want to take manufacturing back to the West, just having a USB hub must be considered a privilege.
Low-wage jobs will come back to the West when we will change our definition of a decent life to include what a low wage can provide, and not expect that each kid plays with several-hundred-dollar electronic toys.
Why did the quality surprise you? Either you had some presumptions because everyone who ever spent money there - in particular when it comes to electronics and electronic components - know what a gamble it can be and are talking about it, or you have experienced this reality yourself but for some reason want to tone it down. Which is it?
By comparison getting the parts locally usually means having to talk to someone who bought them from the same place and is just charging you extra for having a postal address in the same country.
Long term, Russia used to be a strategic problem to China, as its huge, aggressive direct neighbor. This problem has now been solved, but helping Russia develop would risk it becoming a threat again in a generation or two.
China wants Ukraine to end like Afghanistan: an embarrassing and gradual defeat of the US/West - leaving behind billions in cutting edge military hardware - after a decade of being financially and militarily drained, while having nothing to show for it. Russia is the Taliban that can make that possible, and while you don't necessarily want them to be too powerful, you definitely don't want them to just collapse.
Not to mention the US will get even more ideas if they "win" in Ukraine. From the Chinese perspective (and the perspective of much of the world), Russia is currently the anchor on US imperialist aspirations.
The real big loss for China, is Germany, who has chosen to obliterate its purchasing power as part of this war. That's the loss of a huge trading partner and quite unfortunate.
Conversely other than expendable munitions hardly any of the Western capital equipment in Ukraine like M777, Caesar, MLRS, HIMARS and air defence vehicles seem to have been lost. Even if they were, the only reason those things existed is to fight Russia anyway, job done. None of them are particularly relevant to a conflict with China. That's why when the Marine Corps pivoted to focusing on the Pacific theatre they ditched all their tanks.
> Embarrassing military defeat? Check.
The war is ongoing. I have a couple of friends who share your mentality toward it, but perhaps it's better to be doubtful of the outcome and cautious about Russia's next steps.
> Leaving behind billions in hardware? Check.
The US did this in Afghanistan too. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/27/politics/afghan-weapons-l...
> Financially and militarily drained? Check.
Petroleum-based economies operate better in high-price environments. Sanctions can be painful but with oil above $80, there's no easy way to financially drain a petrostate. They keep pumping and selling. Russia's strategic position gives it unique power to manipulate the petroleum markets by affecting supply to key markets in ways that induce price volatility. Separately, the nuclear threat is real and it's hard to imagine that a country with so substantial a destructive capability is militarily drained. It's true that some young people fled Russia due to the mobilization; I met one such man earlier this month and talking to him gave me a greater understanding of Russian public sentiment toward the war. Still, it seems unreasonable to evaluate Russia's manpower without putting it in the context of the size of the substantially smaller Ukrainian military.
And yet they eventually left Afghanistan. The casualties became too much, and arguably helped toward the collapse of the USSR.
Putin may be willing to accept unlimited casualties, but the Russian population isn't. Not for annexing eastern Ukraine.
And Russia lost it before it began. Nobody knows what exactly a "win" looks like for them today, but the perfect scenario for them, Ukraine folding and them installing a friendly refine is no longer possible. Even if Russia manages to win in the field with the poorly trained conscripts with museum pieces they're currently fielding, they don't have the manpower to keep the tens of millions of Ukrainian citizens that will survive under their control. And as we can all see, Ukrainians won't give up. So there is no scenario in which Russia wins. Nuking Ukraine gets them a nuclear wasteland, radiation probably impacting them, and obliterates any chance of relations and trade being restored to the status quo ante bellum with pretty much most of the world, so that's not a win.
Putin probably knows this (hopefully he hasn't become that dumb). Maybe he's stalling trying to think of a way to paint anything as a win.
The US yelled at Turkey for buying Russian air defense systems because they feared information getting back to Russia on how well they fare against F-35s. That conceptual risk is now very real, but for Russia; the West now knows how to target Russian air defenses with drones, how good Russian counter-battery fire is, etc.