News Analysis: Made-in-China remains big hit in Christmas shopping season
http://www.huanqiu.com 来源：新华网 进入论坛 2007-12-28 09:56
BEIJING, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) -- Despite a string of product recalls and negative media coverage in recent months, Chinese-made products remain the favorites for shoppers worldwide during the Christmas season, indicating that the competitive edge of Chinese products is not to be negated by some isolated incidents.
Shoppers in the world's major cities like New York, Paris, London and Toronto flock to stores, supermarkets and shopping centers to buy Chinese toys and other items in large quantities amid year-end shopping fever.
Right before Christmas, the mass circulated U.S. Today reported, citing industry experts, that sales of Chinese toys in the United States were not affected by recent product recalls, noting that the "anti-China Christmas" didn't come to pass in this year's festival shopping season.
These facts have proved that Made-in-China, like a brand name, has over the years managed to build up and maintain its competitiveness on the world market, and these may well serve as a rebuttal of prejudice against Chinese goods.
The competitive edge of the Chinese products is a result of the economic globalization, leading to a mutually beneficial and win-win result between China and the rest of the world, when consumers worldwide get inexpensive and reliable products and China boosts its economy as a whole through more job opportunities and bigger exports.
In a report published in 2005, Morgan Stanley Investment Bank said middle- and low-income U.S. consumers enjoyed many benefits from cheap imports from developing countries.
The bank estimated that buying inexpensive imports could have saved U.S. consumers up to 600 billion U.S. dollars in the last decade.
Made-in-China is also a fruit of joint venture, with an army of multi-nationals shifting manufacturing facilities to a country of 1.3 billion people to benefit from low labor costs.
The advantage rallied international support for Chinese products amid allegations about safety and recalls.
Bryan Ellis, chairman of Toy Industries Europe, told Xinhua in November that European toy industries have confidence in the expertise of Chinese manufacturers after decades of cooperation between the two sides despite the product recalls.
The Japanese government said in August that only 0.09 percent of Japan's food imports from China had problems in 2006, while the figure for U.S. food imports in the same period was 0.12 percent.
Industry experts also noted that many of the problems with Chinese toys were actually caused by bad designs, and that problems of this kind had to be addressed through cooperation between Chinese manufacturers and international toy makers.
Mattel Toy co., an American toy maker badly hit by repeated product recalls this year, acknowledged in September that the majority of its recalled toys had problems caused by the bad designs provided by the company itself.
Thomas Debrowski, an executive of Mattel, also apologized to China for the inconvenience it caused and pledged to take responsibility.
To maintain business confidence, the Chinese government has decided to tighten up control of home manufacturers while working with major trading partners like the United States, the European Union and Japan to make sure that substandard Chinese goods stay out of the international market.
A Chinese government spokesman told reporters last week that the government has been paying much attention to the quality of Chinese goods in recent years, and has enacted laws and regulations to step up supervision of the manufacturing and transportation processes.
