29 Aug 2007
Toy recall highlights rife corner-cutting in China

There is no doubt that there are "quality issues" with Chinese made products: from toothpaste to dog food to this latest fit over leaded toys. There's no way to defend these practices by Chinese manufacturers, but we shouldn't be surprised by them, either. Every nation in the throes of rapid industrialization goes through a period like this:

The world has seen its iron age, its silver age, its golden age and its brazen age. This is the age of shoddy. The new brown stone palaces on Fifth Avenue, the new equipages at the Park, the new diamonds which dazzle unaccustomed eyes, the new silks and satins which rustle over loudly, as if to demand attention, the new people who live in the palaces and ride in the carriages and wear the diamonds and silks: all are shoddy. From devil's dust they sprang, and unto devil's dust they shall return. They live in shoddy houses. They ride in shoddy carnages, drawn by shoddy horses, and driven by shoddy coachmen who wear shoddy liveries.

They lie upon shoddy beds which have just come from the upholsterers and still smell of shoddy varnish. They wear shoddy clothes purchased from shoddy merchants who have erected mammoth stores, which appear to be marble, but are really shoddy. They set or follow the shoddy fashions, and fondly imagine themselves a la mode de Paris when they are only a la mode de shoddy. Their professions and occupations are pure shoddy. They are shoddy brokers in Wall Street or shoddy manufacturers of shoddy goods, or shoddy contractors for shoddy articles for a shoddy government. Six days in the week they are shoddy business men. On the seventh they are shoddy Christians...

And that's from an editorial in the New York Herald, dated October 6th, 1863.

Reuters - Boxes stacked in the factory window are labeled clearly: "Fisher-Price," "toys," "preschool." The future of the plant, though, is not so clear.

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