The quality problems of Chinese products show up almost every month. It is the experience of most developing countries on their way to a developed country. The last one is S. Korean which adopted a similar model as Japan.
What have not been reported extensively are the improvement of the Chinese products and why Chinese will compete with the best in the world.
The following article reports BYM company but it is only one of the many innovative companies in China. How can the west compete with the engineers in China working 12 hours a day at about 10% of the salary?
http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/13/technology/gunther_electric.fortune/index.htm
Charles Liu says
I don’t know if poor product quality is a reputation that China still deserves, but relatively speaking Chinese product design quality on average still lags behind US/Japan/Taiwan. That’s not to say they won’t catch up, or Americans all sh!t gold (we have our share of Sanlu brand peanut butter, pistachio.)
And just for chuckles, someone brought home couple cans of Sanlu brand Lychees. I was laughing it off until I tasted the content – it’s packed in funny tasting water not syrup as labeled. I’m having serious thoughts about consuming the 2nd can:
(Talk about quality – in the background is the Tatung rice cooker since college… the &*#%er refuses to die.)
Wukailong says
I tend to use cars as a benchmark. China recently began exporting cars, so I guess around 20 years from now, Chinese cars will be competing with the best foreign brands.
TonyP4 says
Hi folks,
* 30 years is still a short time to catch up with the best but China is catching up fast (I use the yardstick of India as both have the advantage of large internal market).
* China will not compete with the best in today’s cars running on gasoline at least for a while (except in Africa when price is the prime concern). The advantage of cheap labor cannot offset the transportation cost esp. when oil goes back to $70 range.
All the auto parts except the engine, transmission and pollution control are competitive as we can find a lot of auto parts under our cars in US. However, China is competitive with the next generation of cars – the electric cars (about 40% cheaper than the proposed US model).
* From the article, I still do not know how the west will compete with China with the huge gap of salary. These Chinese engineers are the best in major corporations. They’re not second to the west and highly dedicated. How many US engineers would live in the dorm. type environment and work long hours? Most US students would not seek science and technology as their major. It is more cost effective to be in finance (used to be), managers (used to be), and not be called ‘geeks’.