BEIJING — Five months after the deaths of 14 animals in the United States were linked to China-exported pet food ingredients, Zhang Shuhong — the owner of Lida Toy Company in Foshan, China — hung himself in his own factory’s storage room.
This incident occurred two weeks after Mattel recalled 967,000 toys made by Lida.
There was much buzz on Chinese Web sites that the recall led to Lida’s predicament and, in turn, Zhang’s suicide.
The exact cause notwithstanding, these trade skirmishes between the two giant nations — from food fights to toy fights — are a result of rapidly transforming capitalism in China.
Today, the label “Made in China” scares the wits out of Americans.
Last Friday, I picked up a copy of U.S. News and World Report in a doctor’s waiting room and read an incendiary letter to the editor: “Whether [it’s] currency devaluations to dump cheap junk into our markets, poisonous pet food or killer car tires, China’s greed is dangerous. … In its total disregard for these basic components of a civilized society, China is, at least, consistent.”
The outrage sounds familiar, but is China really that consistent? It seems like the last time Americans felt so threatened by China, it wasn’t over greed.
During the heyday of Mao’s socialist rule, it was the color — not the goods — of “Red China” that had been the scare.
The biggest irony, of course, is that China’s export of toxic goods did not occur under Mao’s evil socialism.
It occurred three decades after China began to adopt American-style capitalism.
Nowadays, China is so much like America — it’s kind of scary.
The young generation in China wears American-style T-shirts and Nike shoes, carries cell phones and MP3 players, eats McDonald’s, drinks Starbucks, and camps out in movie theaters waiting for the opening day of Hollywood blockbusters like Transformers.
As a Chinese kid from the 1960s, I grew up reciting Mao and the Communist Party’s warning: “Do not let the American imperialist’s prediction come true!”
The Party was referring to an ingenious prophecy that foresaw China changing color in the third or fourth generation of Chinese Communists.
But even if capitalism is taking over China, Americans aren’t very happy about getting what they’ve asked for.
As the Chinese adage says: “Not both ends of the sugar cane will be sweet.”
Unfortunately, capitalism and consumerism are twin brothers. Most Chinese I talked to this summer were not very sympathetic to American woes.
In other words, they saw the food and toy fights as American-induced problems. Though biased, this view is not without merit.
In the United States, our endless demands pressure corporations to supply increasingly higher quantities of products at lower prices, so they turn to cheaper sources — like China’s food and toy industries.
As a result, we get a huge trade deficit. Trying to alleviate the deficit, we put pressure on China to raise the value of its currency, which exacerbates the need to lower the manufacturing cost on their end, putting pressure on their business people to seek alternative, often unsafe, solutions.
In the transition from Mao’s socialism to capitalism, China has yet to perfect its laws, and the laws it does have are not all well enforced.
That’s where the illegal supplies — banned additives, toxic chemicals and so on — come into play.
In capitalism, profit is God. But the latest ban comes from China, who just rejected some 18 tons of pork kidney from the United States, claiming the pork contained a growth agent called ractopamine.
Most news reports are claiming this as a retaliatory move by the Chinese government. It seems like two can play the ban game.
Xujun Eberlein is a commentator for New America Media.