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Can China Reform Itself?

I was seated next to a successful senior business executive at a dinner party last week when the topic of conversation turned to the global economy, outsourcing, and the rash of product safety scandals coming out of China. Of course, I had a few opinions having just returned from two weeks in India. And my new acquaintance had a few of his own. On the topic of China manufacturing, he flatly stated that the problem of poor product quality and safety was “inherent in the Chinese culture.”

Blatant racism always has the same effect on me: it literally takes my breath away. How otherwise educated business leaders allow themselves to nurture offensive and inaccurate cultural and ethnic generalizations continues to befuddle me. I stammered something about how I couldn’t disagree more, and that we needed to remember our own 19th century history of child labor, snake oil merchants, and Upton Sinclair’s portrait of the Chicago stockyards.

So imagine my satisfaction when I opened the Sunday New York Times to find Joseph Kahn’s opinion piece called Can China Reform Itself? Kahn reminds us of our own capitalist excesses circa 1900 when “phony fertilizer destroyed crops, store shelves were filled with deodorized rotten eggs, and chemical glucose was passed off as honey.” Apparently it was European regulators that found dangerous bacteria in packaged meat imported from America that set in motion President Theodore Roosevelt’s creation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906.

Are there problems among some China manufacturers? No question. Will new regulations correct the problems? Yes, although probably not as fast as we’d like. But to smear an entire culture and economy that exported over $1 trillion worth of goods last year is not only unfair, immoral, and bad business, but it’s not polite dinner conversation, either.