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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.