chapotraphouse

my dad says the same thing as you about merchants here in Palestine ,that they only buy the cheap stuff from china and not their good stuff

I know someone who's job was mostly to go to China and find the cheapest workable products to slap his company's logo on. He talked about how sometimes they'd commision stuff from a factory that would later get shut down for labor violations and the like a year or two later. And then rinse, wash, repeat.

His take away was EVIL CHINA and not the fact that his job kept running to the lowest bidder that was skirting regulations left and right.

I remember when a friend of mine came back from living in some agricultural communities in West Africa. he and his wife were there for ~2 years. he and I had done a lot of farm work together for a year, so when he got back we talked about how things worked there.

one thing I will never forget is that among the big exports was rice. everybody was involved in the production labor side.

he said the rice grown for export was completely different from the rice they grew for themselves. and that the rice they grew for themselves was absolutely incredible quality, beyond what he understood rice could be like in texture and taste. the export was like cheap junk and went to western nations (Europe mostly) with locals saying that it was fine because they didn't know any better and they seemed to like it because they kept buying it.

in the decade+ since, I have found this paradigm to be far more common than not across agricultural products and it is unsurprising to see it exist in other realms of decoupled production/consumption loops mediated by capitalism.

Westerners broadly don't understand that companies who contract factories in China to make shit are ultimately in control of the quality. They will only pay a certain price for goods, so corners need to be cut, worse materials, skipped steps, less QA, etc..

Idk my Anker headphones and Lenovo laptop are pretty great

There's a paradigm shift happening but you still get people freaking out over chinese bicycle parts like handlebars or bottle cages. Like I probably wouldn't buy cheap ass carbon stuff directly of temu because the QA is gonna be ass and carbon doesn't really tell you anything before it fucks up, but imagine being scared to order a metal road because it's made in china. It's a metal rod! It's not hard to do!

We're perfectly capable of making garbage right here in the US as well. Especially when the workers on the shop floor are overworked, underpaid, and as a result, don't give a shit. And when they keep firing the most experienced people for bullshit transgressions like calling in sick a couple too many times, or complaining about the planners being absolute fucking idiots.

There is an old story about Japanese manufacturing circa late 70s being contracted by an American corp. Not sure how truthful it is, but the Americans create a contract that specifies an acceptable failure rate of 5% for the widgets. The Americans meet with the Japanese to receive the first shipment, and they provide the package with another small box. The Americans are perplexed. "What's is this other small box?" "Oh, those are the 5% of failures specified in our contract."

American business had to learn quality control from Asia, and yet the racist chauvinism still overrides this material reality.

What I've found striking in the last couple of years is that even the bargain basement garbage coming out of China has surprisingly good build quality. Like, you get something that is lacking essential features and perhaps poorly designed, but the plastics are the kind of thing you'd expect in a premium product built in the West

This is it. Websites like Taobao and 1688 are the Alibaba and Aliexpress for China internally and there is amazing shit on there. I've got a chrome extension that can scan photos to see if they're sold on those sites and I can often find the same clothes at a 10x markup

Made in China was garbage.

They're moving into more sophisticated manufacturing with each Five Year Plan.

Joe Public doesn't always update his worldview.

There's a confusion about China. Let me at least give you my opinion. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost.

I'm not sure what part of China they go to but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago and that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view.

The reason is because of the skill and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill. The products we do require really advanced tooling and the the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with the materials that we do are state-of-the-art and the tooling skill is very deep here.

In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.

It's that vocational expertise is very, very deep here and I give the the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even when others were de-emphasizing vocational.

Now I think many countries in the world have woke up and said you know this is a key thing and we've got to correct that but China called that right from the beginning.

Tim Apple in 2017 https://youtu.be/_ng8xQ-SNGc?t=566

The same person who says this to you will have a phone in their pocket Made in China.

China are very good at high quality manufacturing, that's why they do all the manufacturing of practically everything. Cheap shit that's low quality has caused an undue reputation to form because bad experiences are s more memorable than every single high quality product.

I really miss ordering the nice stuff direct from factories in China. Things like fountain pens, pencils, other art supplies I use, got a nice watch, etc.

Even with tariffs there are things I’m willing to pay +145% on because I already thought it was ridiculous the quality for price I could find compared to the other crap out there. Like my watch; 80 bucks, would turn into a little over 200 I think, and that’s still almost 300 less than an equivalent European made watch with the exact same movement and similar case materials.

one hope i have for tariff negotiations is that china forces the US to open market again for Huawei and BYD. Need those sweet, sweet treats

Would this be an example of survivorship bias? Where people for decades have been assuming cheap Chinese goods are crap, only because they notice the cheap shit breaking and not the high end stuff?

The propaganda is more sophisticated than just quality though. I have a friend who insists that using Temu is evil because it’s all made by “slave labour” and even though she accepts Amazon is also bad, “it’s not the same”.

No offense, but I don't hear anyone saying that Chinese only make garbage anymore; not in years. Maybe the Americans (libs and non-libs) are coping, but most Americans know that the Chinese manufacture all of their good stuff too now.

Remember when Americans used to diss Chinese steel? Not in a long time.