Spin Doctors - The Chinese and product recalls

The Chinese are putting an interesting spin on the whole tainted product problem... From Reuters:

China says toy recall scare shows protectionist agenda
Mattel has only itself to blame for a huge toy recall that has stoked global alarm about Chinese-made goods, state media said on Thursday, charging that a slew of foreign safety scares had exposed a protectionist agenda.

Mattel Inc, the world's largest toymaker, recalled over 18 million Chinese-made toys this month because of risks from small magnets that can injure children if swallowed, just two weeks after it recalled 1.5 million toys due to fears over lead paint.

Coming in the wake of warnings over Chinese-made toothpaste, pet food, tires, eels and seafood, and lethal chemicals that had found their way into medicine, the toy recall has magnified calls in Washington for much tougher scrutiny of such imports.

And a bit more:

A China-based company that let lead in the toy paint would be punished, but even here Mattel must share blame, the paper said, noting that the U.S. firm had worked with it for over a decade.

The paper said foreign media reports about unsafe Chinese food and products were exaggerated and ignored the good record of nearly all the country's exporters.

And a bit more:

Over half of China's exports were produced by foreign investors and joint ventures, the paper said.

"If product quality is sub-standard, foreign businesses and joint ventures cannot shirk their blame", it said.

The problem lies with the US Companies wanting to get a lower price, moving the manufacturing process overseas and then not supervising it. Given the chance, a Chinese factory owner will do anything to boost their profits including compromising the quality of the manufactured object. I buy a lot of tools from Grizzly and given the choice, I will get something manufactured in India or in Taiwan. The Chinese machine tools may look nice but they will generally have bad castings, be put together sloppily and will need several days of "tune-up" to hold tolerences... The last Chinese tool I bought was a 4" by 6" metal cutting bandsaw and I was pulling teeth to get it to square up. Finally had to rebuild the entire stand as part of it was a warped casting. It works now but the $199 purchase price failed to include about 15 hours of my labor.