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From Cover, issue no. 347, Dec 24th 2007
Original article: [Chinese]

In her book published last year, A Year Without "Made in China", US-based business reporter Sara Bongiorni describes how she and her family search for non-China-made products. "After a year without China I can tell you this," she says, "you can still live without them, but it's getting trickier and costlier by the day. And a decade from now I may not be brave enough to try it again."

The boycott, as Bongiorni stresses in the book, "was no fault of China's", but rather was an experiment in alternative consumption in an era of globalized products, which, in her opinion, should benefit more countries than China alone. Despite such attempts to avoid subjectivity, even mentioning twice her Chinese background, the book still conveys a conflicting American mentality toward China and Chinese products.

This is not the first time Americans have shunned products from a country. The American market was once filled with Japan-made household appliances, autos, machine tools, cameras, printers and so on. What’s more, "made in Japan" equaled "good quality". Americans finally learned that they were not the best in the world at everything. In response to challenges from this island on the other side of Pacific, the US let its dollar fall.

And today history appears to have repeated.

It’s the "made in China" era. China-free living could be an option, but an unrealistic one. That said, differences remain between the two eras. When "made in Japan" flourished, Japan was developing comprehensively-- in education, research, national income, and consumption. When it comes to "made in China", cheap clothes, household appliances, toys etc. occur to most of us. While the whole world is discussing how Chinese manufacturers maintain low prices, the influence and competitiveness of China-made seem to have gone beyond even our own expectations.

Concepts like "China-made", "Chinese prices", and "Chinese capital" have, to some extent, given currency to the "China threat" theory. So is China a threat? First of all, China is still far from being powerful enough to be a threat. Secondly, China has the right to develop itself to be equally strong as other countries. But when massive foreign capital bets on China, when products surge out of the country, when both foreign trade and capital accounts balloon, and when proud high-welfare states lose to these low-welfare countries, our strength becomes an unreliable illusion.