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Book: Made in Anywhere-But-China
Another great podcast from asap:
Making peace with ‘Made in China’
The new book “A Year Without ‘Made in China’” details business journalist Sara Bongiorni’s efforts not to buy any products made in that booming country for 12 months — from sneakers to mousetraps, toy swords to cargo pants.
Bongiorni emphasizes her intention to present her book from the perspective of an “ordinary person.” Her book is more of a memoir than an in-depth analysis of the global economy. Bongiorni, a business writer, writes in the first person, interspersing her prose with bits of cutesy dialogue and carefully selected literary devices. The book’s back cover talks of a “boycott” of Chinese goods, but in the asap podcast, Bongiorni stresses that she had no political agenda while writing the book.
Despite Bongiorni’s playful tone (”It will be fun,” she convinces her husband, “sort of like an adventure,”) there is an obvious feeling of anxiety regarding China’s infiltration of the American marketplace. This unease probably stems from stereotypes and media depictions of China as a menacing dragon figure–how many news reports have you read in the past five years warning you to be fearful/suspicious/worried of China’s ascent to power?
Bongiorni’s decision to avoid the “Made in China” label is inspired by nothing more than a feeling of being overwhelmed and perhaps annoyed that everything from toys to coffeemakers are, yup, MADE IN CHINA. I think Bongiorni’s little “experiment” of forced avoidance says more about our crippling habits of consumerism than it does with China’s meteoric rise to our shopping mall shelves.
“A China boycott is likely to turn our lives upside down,” Bongiorni writes.
So what does she and her family learn from a year without Chinese goods? “Coming to terms with the fact that we’re really no longer self-reliant.” And also, a newfound appreciation for buying cheap stuff, à la Wal-Mart and Payless. Yay! More shopping!
From her interview with Foreign Policy:
A lot of people think that China makes only shoddy and cheap things, but I found that not to be true. There are a lot of increasingly high-end products coming from there. I saw everything from Barbie-shaped chocolates to wedding dresses from China. It was an eye-popping view of just how much we rely on China for the daily products we use . . . .
People know about the downside of trade with China—they think about lost U.S. manufacturing jobs, and of course that’s a painful issue for a lot of people—but one of the things I also got to understand in a personal way was the benefit of access to often good-quality, low-cost goods.
And notes from while she was in the process of writing (notice the state of emergency–broken blenders, faulty mousetraps and mismatched flip-flops, oh my!):
A year without ‘Made in China’
The Christian Science Monitor
Commentary by Sara Bongiorni
December 20, 2005
Mini crises erupted when our blender and television broke down. The television sputtered back to life without intervention, but it was a long, hot summer without smoothies. We killed four mice with old-fashioned snapping traps because the catch-and-release ones we prefer are made in China. Last summer at the beach my husband wore a pair of mismatched flip-flops my mother found in her garage. He’d run out of options at the drug store.
For more on globalization and China:
Column: Tainted Chinese products create fear of buying
MLive.com
By Rick Haglund
July 25, 2007
It used to be that the biggest downside of importing low-cost products from China, Malaysia, Thailand and other countries was the loss of U.S. jobs by Americans who used to make the same products.
But now it’s become downright dangerous to use and consume products from other countries, many of them from China.
Hug the Asian who’s taking your job
The Seattle Times
By Tom Plate
What’s very sad right now is that most of the time in the U.S. you hear only about that one side of the coin. This is irresponsible because if enough Americans understood how much Asia is contributing to our prosperity, we might want to give Asians a hug rather than the back of our hand.
U.S. angst grows over globalization
Reuters
By Emily Kaiser
July 16, 2007
Manufacturing job losses and recalls of potentially harmful Chinese-made goods have hardened negative attitudes. A recent survey from the Financial Services Forum found that 49 percent of Americans had a favorable view of globalization, down from 54 percent a year earlier.
And for a fun read:
A Mickey Mouse Approach to Globalization
YaleGlobal
By Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
June 16, 2003
According to Wasserstrom, the key to understanding cultural globalization is to identify “who is doing the wearing, singing, drinking, or shopping.” To a Beijing university student, a Big Mac might mean romance, but to Friedman, it’s just a burger.
[tags]Made in China, Sara Bongiorni, China, globalization, consumerism, podcast[/tags]
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