Chinese factory

It was stated as "polishing". Maybe they just send 25% back for a bit of rework. Not enough information.

--sp

Long ago, a very wise trader once told me that he could go to Japan and negotiate a $100 product down to $75 and they'd make exactly the same product with the same quality and sell it to him for $75. Do that in China and they'll find a way to make a $75 product for you.

My subsequent experience confirmed that, but of course paying more in itself is no guarantee.

--sp

Exactly.

Yes, I read that. But as far as I can tell the article was originally written in Chinese and the "polishing", that several have mentioned, may simply be the translation of a word that can mean several things, one of which is "polish". Think of the common U.S. use of "Cool" or "Tactical" - I recently saw an advert for a pocket knife being a "tactical color", i.e. black, and I can't even imagine how the phrase, "Oh Man, it is Soooo cool" would turn out when translated to Chinese :-)

The furore a while back about the dolls painted with lead based paint is very likely an example. The Buyer, who is probably not an expert in anything, contracts to "make us some blue dolls" and the Chinese company does exactly they.

Than there is all kinds of Hell raised about the lead based paint, but the Chinese company did exactly as ordered. Blue dolls were ordered and blue dolls were supplied. :-)

And before someone comes up with the "they should have known" argument I can tell you that when an international oil company writes a contract to build, say a pipeline or an off shore platform, the paint, if any, is spelled out in great deal - the type of paint, the color, complete with a color chart reference, the type and quantity of ingredients in the paint and the number of coats and thickness of each coat, and often a specific reference - "XYZ company Ultra Protection Enamel, or equal", for example.

That's an interesting thought, and a possibility, but as I mentioned, the original article was published in the English edition of the People's Daily -- which prints the government line. Without getting too involved with it, the entire newspaper is dedicated NOT to informative journalism, but to communicate *ideas* the government of China wants people to hear.

Details like accuracy and technical understanding are not exactly high priorities. The way it was written, it sounds like something written by a general assignment reporter.

I agree with Spehro that there is not enough information here to judge the case. I also suspect that the story is not very accurate.

Well of course. Whoever would want to sponsor a news outlet that didn't print what they wished it to print. Or perhaps to put it in more capitalistic terms, do writers pan the product of their largest advertiser?

That is probably the norm in many (most?) newspapers. The Bangkok Post had, for a time, a sub-editor of the weekly published Computer Section, who was firstly a computer nut and secondly sensible enough to contract outsiders to write technical articles. The Sub-Editor retired and the Computer Section became the Technical Section and now prints copies of reviews of hand phones :-(

It depends on the quality of the publication. I've had advertisers pull out on two occassions over things I've written -- one was a $40,000 program, back in the late '70s, when that was real money -- and my publishers have backed me on both occasions. Writers know exactly what the level of journalistic integrity is for the publishers in their field, and I've only worked for the best.

In the 1930's, a few employees died on the job at National Steel Co. (Pittsburgh), and American Machinist (my old employer) blasted National Steel for not caring about the lives of their employees.

The executives of Nat. Steel demanded a meeting with the Editor and publisher of AM, so they went out there by train, top hats and all. When they walked into the meeting, the AM publisher spoke first: "We've come here for one purpose," he said. "It's to inform you that we con't accept advertising from murderers." With that, they turned around, walked out, and went home to New York.

It was 20 years before National Steel was allowed to advertise in AM again. AM was that powerful, and a big part of it was their reputation for integrity, accuracy, and fearlessness.

In the case of People's Daily, it's only nominally a journalistic enterprise. It's really Communist Party PR. Writing the wrong thing for them probably could get you "disappeared."

Good beat reporters are hard to come by. d8-)

Exactly. And while Nat. steel might have been a major advertising client I suspect that your Editors had decided that honesty was really the best path to riches.

The company I worked for in Indonesia had exactly the same view point. In fact we gloried in telling the truth (and early on we got caught lying and it cost us a bundle to repair the problem) but my, admittedly limited, experience is that this altitude is less than universal. The Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers and the Spanish-American War come to mind here.

I don't believe that being "disappeared" is quite prevalent as it might used to have been but if you were to write an article that the government doesn't like in the Singapore Straits Times you will get fired (The Singapore government owns a considerable portion of the parent holding company). If you wrote an article in a Jakarta newspaper that the government didn't like you might find that your apportionment of news print, might not be delivered. And so on :-)

The Pattaya newspaper recently reported that a Chinese tourist was found dead on the beach resulting in much furor. Two days later the police reported that she actually died and was found on the balcony of a condo owned by a female business associate and that she had complained of stomach pains on arrival in Thailand and visited a doctor or clinic and was given "some pills" before setting out for Pattaya and that the police were not discussing a cause of death until after the autopsy. :-)

Back in the early days "Made in Japan" was a synonym for "junk". Now it is a mark of high quality and the same thing is true of Korea, who now are the largest ship builders in the world, and I think that the Chinese are even smarter as they initially started with essentially low tech manufacturing and got the money just rolling in. Now, I suspect, they will start improving the quality of certain items and raising prices. They just devaluated their currency which makes their exports even cheaper and should increase sales greatly while essentially having no effect on their own people.

Niu bi! (or in mixed company just niu)

(literall translation- 'Cow c*nt'). The second character rarely even appears in print - even in older dictionaries. Slang does not translate literally..

--sp

Unless it's national security related it would probably be similar to what would happen if a Fox News reporter heaped praise on Nancy Peolosi.

Abrupt and irrevocable truncation of one's career at that particular establishment.

--sp

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

-- Warren G. Bennis; As cited in: Mark Fisher (1991) The millionaire's book of quotations.

--sp

It's not really a devaluation- the US dollar has been soaring recently compared to other currencies (must be the Obama recovery, LOL), and CNY has been rising against the US dollar for some time. They sell a lot of stuff to markets such as the EU that are decoupled from the US dollar, and they're seeing their currency become uncompetive against countries with continually depreciating currencies (such as India for really low end stuff- like 30% down) and against EU countries.

In Euros 100 Yuan was 10.50 to 12.70 from 2011 to 2014, then it shot up to more than 15.00 before falling back to 14.00 or so now. Still

20% higher than 2011-2014. Against the US dollar it was continually rising from about 15.00 to 16.50, now at 15.60.

Hopefully it gave some of the speculators who thought the CNY could only move higher a good haircut.

--sp

So, what happened when Megan bushwhacked The Donald the other night? Is she still working there? Talk about self-destructive, Fox/Megan.

On the other hand, "stupidforeigner" seems to be a word in several Asian (and maybe European) languages :-)

I had someone who represented a chines OEM that bragged they had a .1% failure rate on their passives. Considering there were 1800 passives in one of our products the chance of anything working right out of production was too low. So what if they cost less than half of the approved vendors, when the troubleshooting and rework costs would cost much more than the passives?

Even well known vendors would ship shoddy parts. I removed Beckman from our AVL because they refused to admit they were shipping us defective washable trimpots. Six months later, we received a letter that blamed the defective parts on defective o-rings. That was after in house testing revealed a failure rate approaching 25%. Boards would be tested and calibrated, but by the time the systems were complete, the water and approved board cleaning solvent had mostly baked out. That require a second, third or even more rounds of calibration. We switched to Bourns, with a failure rate so low that we didn't even track it.