NOTE: The Moderate Voice runs Guest Voice posts from time to time by readers who don’t have their own websites, or people who have websites but would like to post something for TMV’s diverse and thoughtful readership. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Moderate Voice or its writers. This is another post by Matt Pearl and is cross posted from his own blog.
Don’t Buy Chinese Goods
By Matt Pearl
The last straw for me has been broken recently, and, as a result, I am going to try to refrain from buying Chinese goods. It is going to be very hard, mainly to find cheap alternatives, but hopefully, after seeing my thought process on this issue, more people will agree with me and join me in this quest.
The first reason that I am doing this is philosophical. The Chinese Government is one of the worst Human Rights abusers in recent history. Ever since the communist regime came in to existence in that country, the country has been marked by political prisoners, suppression of speech and civil rights, unfair economic practices, and horrible environmental degradation.
On the Economic front, the Chinese Yuan is not traded on a market-based exchange rate. The result is that that currency is massively undervalued, giving Chinese goods and companies an extremely unfair advantage in the international market place. That undervaluation, coupled with the complete lack of environmental and safety safeguards, makes it nearly impossible for non-Chinese companies to compete with the sheer low cost of doing business. This leads to less scrupulous American companies shipping jobs overseas, leading to unemployment on the home front. The quality of Chinese goods shipped to America has also taken a downturn. Most recently, we have learned that the Chinese have reused chopsticks without even sanitizing them.
China has also become one of the biggest polluters in the world. The rise of a Chinese middle class has lead to an explosion of coal-fired power plants across the nation, with the resultant black haze, as power needs skyrocket. That, coupled with increased foreign (American) demand for Chinese goods, China is fast becoming the world’s dirtiest country.
The other main reason as to why I am going to attempt to stop buying Chinese goods (they are pervasive) is a mere safety thing. Everything from tainted dog food, dangerous toys, and dirty chopsticks to tainted tooth paste and bad fish are coming out of that country. They don’t have the health regulations in place like we do, so the quality of their goods suffers. I don’t want to be on the receiving end of the next Chinese goods scare, so I’m just going to try and remove myself from the situation entirely.
In a perfect world, our government would practice what it preaches and only trade with countries that allot their people the freedoms and work conditions that we strive for ourselves. Seeing as how that’s not the case and how we, as a country, are seemingly irrevocably reliant on China for our everyday needs, I will do my best to cut that reliance at least a little bit.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.