Media Curmudgeon: Media Coverage of Chinese Product Failures

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November 21, 2007

Media Coverage of Chinese Product Failures

Guest blogger Chuck Wooldridge writes:

"I had a question for the knowledgeable readers of Media Curmudgeon, and Charlie suggested I post as a guest blogger. I wanted to hear their thoughts on media coverage of China, and his readers' opinions about the responsibility of management in various recent product safety scandals.

My question is: to what extent are different media outlets blaming the Chinese government for what could easily be considered the management failures of companies operating in China?

I will admit that my own background gives me a certain bias in this matter. I teach Chinese history at the university level, and I see a great deal of bad information being spread about China. An example of something I think I do understand better than most is the history of Tibet. Those advocating Tibetan independence typically claim that Tibet was an independent state prior to the Chinese invasion of 1950.

Supporters of the current regime claim that Tibet had been part of the Qing Empire, the last imperial Chinese dynasty, and that the "invasion" of Tibet was really the final step in a "reunification" following many years of civil war.

The facts of the matter don't really support either interpretation.
Tibet was indeed quite independent; prior to 1950, Chinese law had never applied to Tibet, and China did not collect taxes from Tibet.
But the Qing Empire had taken on a role previously held by Mongolian states as protectors of Tibetan security, giving the Dalai Lama (in charge of Tibet's largest monastery complex) support through military might. In domestic affairs Tibet was autonomous; in foreign affairs it was a protectorate of the emperor of China.

The point of this long digression is that, with regards to China, people tend to find what they wish to look for. It seems to me that some of the things that people wish to stress about China are its great economic growth, its potential military power, and its failure to abide by the rule of law. All of these things are true. Local governments often collude with businessmen to confiscate land illegally, to underpay workers (here meaning: paying workers less than contractually obligated to pay), and to quell any form of protest.

And certainly the current government of China is in no way democratic. It has, for example, recently begun a campaign to confiscate Lonely Planet guides because of a map that makes Taiwan appear to be a separate country. So there's plenty of room to criticize various levels of Chinese government.

I wonder, however, about whether the government is really at fault in the recent product safety cases. Foreign companies have chosen to move their factories to China. Isn't the management of those companies just as responsible for quality control in China as it would be if the factories were in the United States? Is the (very real) corruption of the Chinese government in this case a scapegoat for the failures of individual companies? Are the media giving us a full picture of the story? When Mattel, for example, apologized to the Chinese government for its own failures to ensure product safety, do you think the story was adequately covered?

I'd love to know what the Media Curmudgeon and your readers think."

Posted by Charles Warner at November 21, 2007 10:05 AM

Comments

Chuck Wooldridge at November 22, 2007 09:21 AM writes:

Uhh... we are all in agreement about Tibet. I think the invasion in 1950 was horrible, and that Chinese policy toward Tibet is mostly very horrible. I in no way mean to be an apologist for the Chinese government. My only point was that the argument about Tibet should concern what is happening there right now, not its history.

Michael Weiskopf -- The better analogy for Tibet would be Native Americans. Surely we can all agree that what the United States propagated against indigenous populations here was tantamount to genocide. But if a foreign country (Venezuela, say)started trying to impose sanctions on the U.S. in the name of Native Americans, we would be rightly suspicious of Venezuela's intentions.

I agree that Yahoo and Google have caved to the Chinese government. Yahoo, at least, is starting to show some signs of repentance. If you are really interested in changing the Chinese government, you need to understand how these matters are perceived within China. The main Chinese search engine, Baidu, is doing much better than Google, mainly by appealing to nationalist sentiments. For example, when Google has to censor something, it posts a message telling you that you can't get a result because of government interference. Baidu just leaves out the results without saying anything. A lot of Chinese people see the Google message as patronizing, a way for foreigners to try to get a dig in. So they go with Baidu, even though it's the more politically repressive option.

(An aside -- when the government censors web sites, it claims it is doing so in the name of harmony. So among bloggers, "harmonized" is now a verb meaning "shut down" -- as in "I posted something about the Party Congress but it got harmonized.")

digibandit -- So speaking mandarin is a marker of a cloistered life, but leaving a sharply worded comment on a blog post distinguishes you as a man of action? If you really want a free Tibet, you're going to have to fight a war for it. Tally ho and good luck! If you aren't ready to sign the United States on to a hopeless war in high Himalayas, then you're points are just as academic as anything I might say about Ming vases. Which, by the way, are worth a hell of a lot of money, and the market growing.

Both of you seem to be asking -- why do I post about this small point when there are bigger points to be made? Why worry about product liability when China is evil, evil, evil? Well, I have three answers.

First, in China, the issue is a big one. The perception among a lot of ordinary people is that the United States is trying to blame China for its own incompetence, which generates resentment, which those of us who deal with China have to deal with. So what seems to you like a side issue appears to many Chinese as a central question.

Second, this post began with me e-mailing a question to Charlie. I asked Charlie because he writes about management, and I was curious about how companies deal with these problems. I'm not in the habit of e-mailing Charlie with questions about the Dalai Lama. I don't pretend it's the most important problem facing China or the U.S., but it's something I wanted to know more about, and its a subject on which I trust Charlie's expertise..

Third, arguments about evil people have gotten us into trouble in the recent past. Saddam Hussein, for example, was clearly evil -- and so we were told, don't worry about the little details of what is actually happening, stick with the big picture -- evil, evil, evil!

I said in my post that I thought the Chinese government is bad. But that doesn't justify the enormous quantities of BS that get relayed in the U.S. media as news. There is a competent way to show what's going on (see, for example, Jim Yardley's recent pieces in the New York Times, the Dai Qing article in the New York Review of Books, or a whole series by Reuters, all on the Three Gorges Dam), but there's also a way of reporting that is totally irresponsible and false (a recent book on China as a threat to the United States began with a missile attack by China on the U.S. -- only to reveal in chapter 2 that what had been described was purely hypothetical).

My job is to spot bogus arguments, and to teach others to spot them. If you don't see how bogus arguments can have catastrophic real-world consequences, you haven't been paying attention.

Media Curmudgeon at November 21, 2007 09:09 PM writes:

Michael Weiscopf writes:

"The issue of product liability is a sideshow when compared to the routine cooperation that the thugs who run the Chinese government demand and receive from U.S. companies like Yahoo and Google. One example is the high profile case of the Chinese journalist Shi Tao who is serving a ten year sentence after Yahoo gave him up to the Chinese secret police. According to a Congressman Tom Lantos there are likely thousands of political prisoners in China that have been incarcerated under similar circumstances.

Reporters Without Borders rates China something like 163 out of the 169 countries that they monitor for media openness. Both Google and Yahoo continue to cooperate with the Chinese to develop internet monitoring and censorship software. Since the Chinese now appear to hold the mortgage on our house, the issue of human rights has become taboo. It seems that American bankers and industrialists are now making foreign policy, not our elected officials (is there a difference)?

You can make all of the apologies you wish about their justification for oppressing the population of Tibet, the fact is that regardless of their legal claims to that region, they are systematically destroying a heritage and culture against the will of the people that live there. It would be the same as our Federal government deciding to close all the Baptist churches in South Carolina simply because they could."

digibandit at November 21, 2007 12:26 PM writes:

Your Chinese rolled into Tibet and slaughtered defenseless peace loving people and destroyed an ancient culture so they could begin to expand the Capitalism -- for which they previously slaughterd over fifty million men woman and children to obstruct.

Who cares about a few tainted products in light of the carnage and ruin that the Chinese have perpetuated throughout their tyrannical and fascist history.

You intellectuals sit around talking Mandarin and oohing and ahing over Ming vases while refusing to perceive what Chinese rule is still all about -- hegemony and xenophobia and conquwest and subtle terror.

And parsing over product liability? - jeez!

Media Curmudgeon

Charles Warner writes about the media from a management, strategic, and ethical point of view.

November 21, 2007

Media Coverage of Chinese Product Failures

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