Yet another book on China. While Richard McGregor’s The Party (2012) was a criticism of the Communist rulers of China (see review here), Paul Midler’s Poorly Made in China: An Insider’s Account of the China Production Game (Rev. Ed., 2011) is about the duplicity of Chinese entrepreneurs.
Midler is a middleman who works out of China introducing American promoters to Chinese suppliers. This book is about the experiences an American promoter named Bernie has with a Chinese supplier named “Sister” Zhen who owns a health and beauty care company. “Sister” Zhen is at first desperate for Bernie’s business and agrees to all sorts of price cuts that leaves Bernie wondering how “Sister” actually makes a profit. He soon finds out how.
One of the themes of Midler’s book is the phenomenon of ‘quality fade’ – “the incremental degradation of a product over time. [Chinese factories] quietly reduced the amount of materials or else manipulated the quality of raw inputs. The changes were gradual, almost imperceptible. The importer was neither asked for permission nor told.”
Another theme of the book is the blatant violation of contracts by Chinese suppliers. To the Western businessmen, honouring a contract is sacrosanct, but that is not the way it is seen by the Chinese producers.
Thus Bernie has to deal with crumbling cardboard packaging, plastic bottles that were becoming thinner and thinner, missing ingredients in the formulations that caused the shampoos to gel in cold weather, and replacement of one fragrance with another in the formulations to save money.
As Midler puts it: “[“Sister” Zhen] had turned the business into a game….Our job in the cat-and-mouse game … was to discover where the product was being manipulated. If we found the distortion, the factory might be convinced to revert to the original design. If we failed to uncover its scheme, the factory pocketed the savings. In any case, it was left to us to do the uncovering. The factory gained sometimes, but it never lost.”
When confronted with these shortcomings, “Sister” Zhen does not acquiesce but becomes equally confrontational. As Midler explains, “The Cultural Revolution ingrained certain survival skills in people, one of which had to do with defending oneself against perceived face loss. The answer when threatened was to strike back fast and hard, and not to relent until the threatening party retreated.”
One of the moral underpinnings of capitalism is the trust that develops between the buyer and the seller. It is this basic trust that is hard to attain in dealing with Chinese entrepreneurs; it is thus difficult to describe their practices as capitalistic.
Midler is a middleman who works out of China introducing American promoters to Chinese suppliers. This book is about the experiences an American promoter named Bernie has with a Chinese supplier named “Sister” Zhen who owns a health and beauty care company. “Sister” Zhen is at first desperate for Bernie’s business and agrees to all sorts of price cuts that leaves Bernie wondering how “Sister” actually makes a profit. He soon finds out how.
One of the themes of Midler’s book is the phenomenon of ‘quality fade’ – “the incremental degradation of a product over time. [Chinese factories] quietly reduced the amount of materials or else manipulated the quality of raw inputs. The changes were gradual, almost imperceptible. The importer was neither asked for permission nor told.”
Another theme of the book is the blatant violation of contracts by Chinese suppliers. To the Western businessmen, honouring a contract is sacrosanct, but that is not the way it is seen by the Chinese producers.
Thus Bernie has to deal with crumbling cardboard packaging, plastic bottles that were becoming thinner and thinner, missing ingredients in the formulations that caused the shampoos to gel in cold weather, and replacement of one fragrance with another in the formulations to save money.
As Midler puts it: “[“Sister” Zhen] had turned the business into a game….Our job in the cat-and-mouse game … was to discover where the product was being manipulated. If we found the distortion, the factory might be convinced to revert to the original design. If we failed to uncover its scheme, the factory pocketed the savings. In any case, it was left to us to do the uncovering. The factory gained sometimes, but it never lost.”
When confronted with these shortcomings, “Sister” Zhen does not acquiesce but becomes equally confrontational. As Midler explains, “The Cultural Revolution ingrained certain survival skills in people, one of which had to do with defending oneself against perceived face loss. The answer when threatened was to strike back fast and hard, and not to relent until the threatening party retreated.”
One of the moral underpinnings of capitalism is the trust that develops between the buyer and the seller. It is this basic trust that is hard to attain in dealing with Chinese entrepreneurs; it is thus difficult to describe their practices as capitalistic.
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