不浪費的奢華

China's latest – and quite literal – game of "chicken" with the United States and other trading partners runs the very high risk of triggering a global trade war. In response to bans on genuinely contaminated or defective products from China, Beijing has retaliated harshly with its own far less justifiable bans on everything from French bottled water and Australian seafood to American pork and, yes, chicken.

That China has a very serious problem with the safety of its manufactured goods, foods, and drugs should not be in dispute. Thus far, the anecdotal evidence has given us toothpaste laced with diethylene glycol, toy trains coated with lead paint, defective tires that can kill you faster than a drunk on a Saturday night, catfish loaded to the gills with antibiotics, counterfeit Lipitor without any active ingredients and, perhaps most disgustingly within China, particularly "high fiber" pork buns that are 40 percent cardboard.

Anecdotes aside, the statistics on Chinese product quality – or the lack thereof – are even more damning. The central fact in this product safety debate is this: For whatever China exports to the United States, Europe or the rest of the world, its rates of contamination and defects tend to run much higher than its market share of the particular product. For example, while China accounts for about 20 percent of seafood imports into the United States, about 40 percent of all seafood rejected by U.S. regulators comes from China. In a similar vein, China has accounted for 100 percent of all toy recalls in the United States this year and fully 60 percent of all consumer-product recalls.

It's no secret why Chinese products and foods are often of such poor quality. China has an extremely lax regulatory system, and its top regulators are highly vulnerable to corruption. Moreover, consumer advocates in China are far more likely to be bullied, beaten, and even killed rather than given a bully pulpit. Nor is there an effective "tort" system like in the United States or Europe that would allow either Chinese consumers or injured parties outside of China to be fairly compensated by its courts.

Those countries around the world now being subjected to a flood of dangerous Chinese products have every right to regulate and restrict those products without fear of Chinese retaliation. China, however, does not seem to be getting this message. Instead, what we are seeing now is the most ugly side of China's two-faced political character.

The attractive face of China is that of Deng Xiaoping – China's great pragmatist who ushered in all of the market reforms in the early 1990s that today have turned China into an economic superpower. At his best, Deng was not just charming. He was accommodative and conciliatory in dealing with the West. If Deng Xiaoping were alive today and leading China, he would be the first to acknowledge what has become an epidemic of contaminated and defective goods, and he would be the first to come clean and propose a set of constructive solutions.

Instead, what we are seeing is the ugly face of China – that of the repressive and intransigent ideologue Mao Zedong. From the Maoist perspective, it has always been tit for tat and fighting fire with fire. From this rigid point of view, China is always right, never wrong. The sad fact is that the Chinese bureaucracy remains riddled with doctrinaire relics from its Maoist past. That's precisely why the world is now being confronted with two absurdities: 1) the repeated claims of Chinese bureaucratic propagandists that Chinese products are not only safe but as safe as those from the United States and Europe, and, 2) the banning of good Western products in retaliation for the banning of bad Chinese goods in the West.

If China continues down this Maoist road, the most likely scenario is an escalating wave of protectionist tariffs and nontariff barriers that nobody wants. Thus far, China has been able to avoid protectionist restrictions despite its flagrant currency manipulation, repeated violations of the World Trade Organization rules, rampant counterfeiting and piracy and the loss of more than 2 million American jobs to unfair Chinese trading practices. That's why it would be highly ironic for a series of relatively small disputes over things like contaminated catfish and toxic toothpaste to escalate into a global trade war.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/china-chinese-states-1807337-united-products