Not To Be Alarmed...

It seems that scarcely a day passes without word of another dangerously economical Chinese product being recalled due to safety concerns. Notably, Mattel just issued a global recall of millions of toys:

This week, Mattel (nyse: MAT - news - people ) recalled nationwide 9.3 million Chinese-made toys because of tiny magnets that could be swallowed and another 265,000 toy cars because of possible lead-paint hazards for children. Those figures were for toys sold in the United States. Worldwide, Mattel recalled 18.6 million toys, including 18.2 million magnetic toys and 436,000 die cast toy cars.

Well, duh. American manufacturing moved it's factories to overseas to cut costs- including those incurred by adhering to America's more stringent safety and labor regulations- and we were rewarded with cheap goods, the only drawback being that the products might kill you, your pets or your children.


According to at least one TV 'expert', this is a good thing and China is our "greatest friend":

A lot of people like to say, uh, scaremonger about China, right? A lot of politicians, and I know you talk about that issue all the time. I think people should be careful what they wish for on China. Ya know, if China were to revalue it’s currency or China is to start making say, toys that don’t have lead in them or food that isn’t poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up and that means prices at Wal-Mart here in the United States are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now, they’re keeping prices low and they’re keeping the prices for mortgages low, too.”
-Erin Burnett, CNBC

Burnett implies that it's worth risking toxicity to ourselves and our families if we can save a few pennies.
I vehemently disagree. Perhaps I don't fit the conventional consumer profile, but I don't mind paying a bit more for cat food if it means my cats can survive eating it. If I had children, I suspect this same sense of protection would extend to them.

A big thanks to Crooks and Liars for posting a video clip of Ms. Burnett's shill...maybe it's a product of my Nixonian childhood, but I have never considered China to be America's "greatest friend". In fact, I used to have a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory that China had launched a covert war to destroy America and that all those $29 DVD players contained hidden incendiary devices; once a certain quota of units were sold, ensuring that the players were widely distributed, a remote signal would be issued and the DVDs would ignite, burning down a great deal of homes and causing large-scale mayhem of all sorts, paving the way for the Yellow Horde to invade...or was it the Red Menace? Red Dawn? Fiendish Fluoridators?

Of course, this was just a joke- the obvious flaw being that the Chinese own a great deal of American real estate and it might not be in their best interest to commit mass arson on their own properties-unless much of that real estate suddenly plummeted in value due to a market crash...but that's just more crazy talk.

I have a more rational theory about the Chinese toy recall. It's based on one of the most traditional incentives- vengeance. The production of these hazardous toys is payback for the American treatment of an entire generation of Chinese immigrants during the construction of our once-mighty railroad system.

The American citizens regarded the Chinese
immigrants as serious competition for their employment opportunities. This type of sentiment was further intensified by two other factors. The first was an increase in Chinese immigration after 1860. The second was the depression that started in 1873. In San Francisco, an Irish immigrant named Denis Kearny started a movement to fight the "Oriental menace". Throughout the West, there were anti-Chinese riots. Finally prompted by anti-Chinese sentiments, congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It ended the immigration of Chinese laborers. The Geary Act of 1892 extended the 1882 exclusion policy.

Well, guess what eventually happened to the railroads? A few weeks ago I saw a Discovery Channel show about the steel industry. In it, a factory foreman explained how his plant received thousands of tons of steel in the form of old train rails. A great deal of this was recycled and sold to China, which apparently has a nearly insatiable appetite for cheap metal...at the time I thought it was ironic that the railroads were being dismantled and sold as scrap to the descendants of the people who helped build them.

It hadn't occurred to me that some of those rails might be melted down, converted into toys, coated with lead paint , accessorized with ingestible magnets and sold back to us at our own peril.

I mean, that sounds crazy doesn't it?