China and my “bubble man” experience

Oct 04, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I have bad, very bad memories of goods produced in China. It happened in Miami. I left the hospital with both eyes bandaged, after an operation to save my sight.

The wrapping did not prevent me from seeing. The car was taking me straight to the airport. But I couldn’t return to Guyana without a toy for my three-year-old daughter — my only kid.

I asked the driver to get me to the nearest toy store. I ended up in one of the fashionable districts in Florida, shopping at an elite mall. My extravagance was unavoidable.

I bought a “bubble man” for a price that I would never, I repeat never, pay again for such an item. When you patronize an expensive store, you have to pay for its name.

If I had one more day in Miami, I would have gone in the heart of the city and shopped for my kid. The bubble man is a little guy who walks around and sprouts soap bubbles that you put into him.

He has a type of paraphernalia with him that allows him to blow the bubbles into the air. My money went into the skies after I got home in Guyana. My bubble man did not work.

Before the bubble man incident, I was aware that quite a large array of Chinese goods were not up to international standards.

Every Guyanese that has experience with Chinese products would have felt the frustration at least once. The world is becoming scared of things made in China.

First, it was a dangerous chemical found in tooth paste, now the world has discovered that some top food products enjoyed all over the globe are tainted, some with life-threatening chemicals. One such item is Cadbury’s chocolate.

Readers would believe that I am making up the story I am about to tell them, but it is the truth. I am typing this article at 21:00 hours on Monday after I read a BBC report about these food products, including Cadbury’s chocolate. But at 14:00 hours on the same day, I bought two huge bars of Cadbury’s at the DSL outlet on Mandela Avenue.

I stopped typing and went into the fridge to see if the sweets were made in China. They were not. To comprehend why China has become so rich that it lends money to the US Government, one has to understand the rapidly changing nature of capitalism in Europe and the US.

As cyberspace technology developed and as financial services reached greater heights with the expansion of Internet technology, the developed economies moved away from production of consumer items.

It was no longer profitable for North America and Europe to manufacture consumer items of all types and description.

Capitalist wage structures did not allow for it. A seamstress in the US probably gets two hundred times more than what her Chinese counterpart earns.

China then took over the global market for consumer goods, both light and durable. China’s unbelievably low wages caused manufacturing companies in the US and Europe (now joined by Japan) to transfer their companies to the communist giant.

Foods, electronic stuff, some capital-intensive goods of the world’s top manufacturers were now being produced in China.

The result is that China has an endless global market for these products. This explains that country’s fantastic accumulation of wealth in less than thirty years.

China, apart from producing the world’s most sought after stuff through license and patents from Europe and the US, has been doing a nasty, really nasty thing.

State-owned companies in China are violating, in the most egregious way, international laws on patents, trademarks and copyrights. This fraud is making China super rich.

What these state owned manufacturers do is that they duplicate brand names and sell them to the Third World for a higher price, but the durability collapses sooner than later.

If you go into a hardware store and ask for the best toilet system, which is Armitage, you will get it. But it is not the Armitage that comes from the UK.

It is Chinese-made, and it is going to conk out on you in the first year. I like Twyford English toilet sets. They have it in Guyana, but it is the bogus type from China. I got conned with this.

Last week, the father of one of my colleagues at Kaieteur News had to come to my home to fix all the handles of our Twyford tanks. My genuine Armitage has given no trouble so far.

So a dangerous chemical, melamine, has been found in Cadbury, but also in eminent brands like Kraft food products, and in a biscuit popular among Guyanese, Oreo. Would you buy a Chinese car?

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China and my “bubble man” experience

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