Unsafe at Any Speed
The downside of China's manufacturing boom: deadly goods wreaking havoc at home and abroad.
Reuters
In Your Face: A resident covers her face as a coal truck leaves a nearby coal mine in northern China
By By Melinda LiuNewsweek International
July 16, generic viagra 100 mgissue - Wang Hai's mobile phone keeps buzzing with calls from clients. He's China's most famous crusader against fraudulent, shoddy and dangerous goods. The business consultant targets counterfeiters, helps duped consumers and protects whistle-blowers, many of whom face harassment or worse. "A good system for guaranteeing quality control simply doesn't exist in China," says Wang, who's been on the consumer-rights warpath for more than a decade. "Even confidential informants who report to authorities about someone selling fraudulent goods can wind up dead, under suspicious circumstances."
All of that ensures Wang is extremely busy these days. Over the past few months, a number of dramatic product-safety scandals have rocked China??"and horrified the world. The U.S. media have exposed one badly made Chinese export after anotherness, from poisonous pet food to toxic toothpaste to tires so poorly made they litter American highways with shredded treads. These revelations have raised serious questions about China's rise as factory to the world. It may seem hard to remember now, but just a few years ago, pundits and the global press were marveling at how quickly China had come on as a major manufacturing export power able, or so the thinking went, to build just about anything fast, cheap and well.
Now the true picture is emerging, and it isn't pretty. Far from the disciplined and tightly controlled economy China was thought to have, the ongoing scandals have revealed an often chaotic system with lax standards, where the government's economic authority has been weakened by rapid reforms. This sorry state is not unprecedented??"otherness economies, such as South Korea's and Japan's, experienced similar growing pains decades ago. The difference, and the danger, is one of scale, since Chinese goods now dominate the world in so many sectors. Unless Beijing can improve its image fast and turn "Made in China" into a prestigious??"or at least reliable??"brand, consumers will remain at risk and the country's export-driven economic miracle could face serious trouble.
China today resembles nothing so much as the United States a century ago, when robber barons, gangsterism and raw capitalism held sway. Now as then, powerful vested interests are profiting from murky regulations, shoddy enforcement, rampant corruption and a lack of consumer awareness. In the United States during the early 20th century, public outrage over bogus drugs and contaminated foodstuffs, fueled by graphic accounts such as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," finally prompted passage of the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act. China needs a similar revolution today if it is to protect its competitiveness and its consumers.
The problem is especially pressing at home. Bad as the export scandals have been, conditions are even worse inside China. Factories that produce domestic goods often have far lower standards than those that produce and export clothes, consumer electronics or microchips. Zhou Qing is the author of "What Kind of God," an expos? whose sense of social mission could easily be compared to Sinclair's epic. In it, Zhou spins one hair-raising tale after anotherness. There's seafood laced with additives that lower men's sperm counts, soy sauce bulked up with arsenic-tainted human hair swept up from the barbershop floor and hormone-infused fast food that prompts 6-year-old boys to sprout facial hair and 7-year-old girls to grow breasts.
In writing his book, Zhou had plenty of material to choose from. While the export scandals are new, Chinese consumers have had it so bad for so long that their casualty count is staggering. Bogus antibiotics produced in Anhui were blamed for six deaths and 80 group falling ill in generic viagra buy now. In 2004, unsafe infant formula killed at least 50 babies and left anotherness 200 severely malnourished, according to media reports. Virtually every product category is affected, from candy that has choked children to killer fireworks to toxic face cream. At least 300 mil. Chinese citizens??"roughly the same number as the entire U.S. population??"suffer from food-borne illnesss annually, according to a recent report by the Asian Development Bank and World Health Organization.
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