Made in China

[ducatilover]

nobody mention the pinto

Don't be fuggin rude you

[Katman]

Do you think that their being a superpower makes a difference when your being ripped off by inferior junk???

It certainly makes a difference to the scale of it.

[jafar]

It certainly makes a difference to the scale of it.

Scale yes, but they are far from the only ones. Rip offs & crap are made everywhere. Sad but true.

[Katman]

Scale yes, but they are far from the only ones. Rip offs & crap are made everywhere. Sad but true.

I've not ever said they were the only guilty party.

However, all the other rip offs & crap in the world added together probably don't come close to the scale of rip offs & crap coming out of China.

[onearmedbandit]

Ultimately the manufacturers are not to blame. If there wasn't a market for cheap crap, the majority of which is sourced from China, then they wouldn't survive. I remember as a lad my father having an extensive tool collection in his workshop, and I remember all too well the lectures on how much each tool would cost to replace. Not all my friends had the same access to tools as I did, simply because they were pricey and you couldn't buy cheap. Now every man and his dog can buy a 52pce socket set for $53. And then curse about poor quality piece of shit tools breaking. And how this never happened in his old man's day.

Can't stop a fool and his money being parted.

[gammaguy]

The point is that the Chinese will sell down to the lowest common denominator,and will only stop when the consumer stops buying them.they do not understand any other message.

This means that a few guinea pigs along the way will learn the hard way as people buy products that look acceptable but in fact are not(drive chains for example)

Its the old story,if it is too good(or too cheap)to be true,then it probably is.

All the major importers are supplied with regular bulletins from the factories of how to identify counterfeit or knock off items,whether they choose to implement or police this knowledge is a different matter entirely.

[R6_kid:Me]

I'll buy cheap and nasty as long as my health and safety aren't at risk.

[Katman]

I'll buy cheap and nasty as long as my health and safety aren't at risk.

And unfortunately, the customer's health and safety is the last thing on the minds of a huge portion of China's manufacturing machine.

[ducatilover]

Them skinny eyes should start selling tobacco.

[Katman]

Googling 'Unsafe Chinese products' makes for sobering reading.

From toys, to food, to machinery - they've got all bases covered.

[ducatilover]

They're fuckin' good at it, yes

But, we can make teh internets tell us anything too, just so wankers like me can annoy people.
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/...gerous-imports


See?

[Katman]

They're fuckin' good at it, yes

But, we can make teh internets tell us anything too, just so wankers like me can annoy people.
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/...gerous-imports


See?

Yeah, but that article says nothing more than "Meh, so we put melamine in your dog's pet food but we didn't force you to feed it to Rover. It's your place to catch us out poisoning your animals".

Or "Meh, so we put enough lead in the toy to stop a charging Rhino but we didn't force your baby to put it in it's mouth".

Not exactly the level of integrity you'd hope for from a nation that is fast becoming (or already is) the world's largest manufacturer and exporter.

[Scuba_Steve]

Your also ignoring that Japan, Taiwan, & Korea all went through the "shit" phase before making good quality products. China's actually starting to emerge from the "shit" phase now, as Top Gear pointed out the progress that China has made with cars in the past 5 years is such that in another 5 years you'll be driving a Chinese car.
If they decide to fully emerge from the "shit" phase however, costs will go up & manufacturing will be moved to another low cost country like has always happened in the past & we'll all be able to complain about another countries cheap shit products. So to some extent it's in China's best interest to keep producing the cheap shit along with the good quality.

[pzkpfw]

A year or two ago there was a kerfuffle at some N.Z. University about Chinese students who'd been caught cheating. Basically copying each others work.

Some dude (who studied China) was arguing for leniency, claiming it was a cultural thing. The claim was that in China it was standard to be taught something, and that's just the way it was. Learning was often about how well one was able to memorise and regurgitate the material being taught. There's less emphasis (according to him) on free thought, extrapolation and such. Accurate copying was itself an aim.

(No, I can't provide references right now. It's something I read in the DomPost a year or so ago.)

So on top of all the other stuff (economics; the factories are there anyway; ...), I do wonder if copying products is an ingrained cultural thing over there.

[Katman]

Your also ignoring that Japan, Taiwan, & Korea all went through the "shit" phase before making good quality products.

Japan's manufacturing progress was actually very different.

They didn't set out to make exact replicas of existing products nor did they try to fool the world with counterfeit products nor did they set about intentionally/knowingly using lethal substances in their products.

While the quality may have been less than was available elsewhere (although that is actually debatable*) a large part of the "Jap crap" sentiment was a carry over of bad feeling from WW2.

*It's debatable whether the earliest Japanese motorcycles were in fact any worse than the bikes the British were producing at the time.