Poorly Made in China: Why So Many Chinese Products are Born to be Bad

(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.)

JPN: Well... that's very difficult. But I think... yes, yes I think we can do it.

6 months later, he returns with a very large box and a very small one

JPN: This was much more difficult than we thought, but we managed to modify our processes to obtain the exact defect rate you requested. Here are the defect-free chips.

USA: Well, I'm very impressed! To be honest, I didn't think you could do it. But tell me, what's in the small box?

JPN: Those are the 10 defects.

Just, if you are, this moment, ready to hire a Chinese plant to do your manufacturing, this is what you have to be careful of. A year later, who knows. In terms of "high notes" in technological strengths and quality, China has long ago passed US and Japan. Just that no investor is paying for the best, so, things that aren't the best are shipped.

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.

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.)

I am no historian or economist, but I will suggest that perhaps the States had the "protestant work ethic", and that the Japanese had "loyalty to manager, company, and country."

The Chinese have neither; in a country that went from Corrupt and Dying Monarchy to War to Communist Revolution to Rapid Modernization, Materialism and Capitalism in a hundred years, the Chinese are still searching for a culturally unifying identity. Esp the last 50 years has been cut-throat, sell-your-mother-to-prosper survival mode, and the way businesses are run now reflect this. When the people feel more in control, feel ownership of their lives, they will start to feel more responsible towards themselves, their families, and to their communities.

I don't know, that's just what I think/hope. Anyone else?

Among other factors, a free press and an independent judiciary, neither of which China has yet.

Left as an exercise for the reader. Good.

Seriously, now that you made me think about it, we are much too much inured to articles by writers who have solutions, and are damn well going to find problems for them.