Advertisement ::

Enlarge Cartoon

China is in the shoddy products and poor safety standards hot seat, with the US doing much of the finger-pointing and trade-blocking, which China says is unfair. Most people in the West read Western media and much of that comes from the same handful of news agencies who cover China. How critical are we as readers, I wonder.

An article widely picked up by media from Reuters yesterday gave me pause, as an example of how easy it is to string together facts and come to damning conclusions which may or may not be accurate. Worse, if journalists are not careful we can turn people against each other rather than helping find diplomatic solutions. Another article, in Australia’s The Age today, cheers me up, for it tries to redress the balance a bit. It shows the human face behind the toy scandals.

Toys from China have been recalled, first by Mattel in the US and Toys r Us and this week Migros in Switzerland is doing the same. They are being recalled because of safety concerns. None of us want our children swallowing magnets or eating lead paint.

A few weeks earlier scares about tainted food and unsafe medicines from China made headlines in other countries. Between these two bouts of worrisome news a bridge that had just been completed and had not yet opened collapsed, killing several people. The bridge was in China.

Now we hear that hundreds of thousands of disposable chopsticks were packaged and sold in China with no sterilization. The story is one of Reuters’s most popular ones of the week.

This last article is a good example of how you can string together several bits of information, add in one or two subjective statements and create a picture that comes across as fact, when it is not. I probably agree with much of the article about shoddy products and health issues in China, but I’m bothered by this sentence:

"Counterfeit, shoddy and dangerous products are widespread in China,
whose exports have been rocked in recent months by a spate of safety
scandals, ranging from pet food to medicine, tires, toothpaste and toys." It follows this opening sentence which says nothing about counterfeit goods, a major concern for Western companies, but one that is not necessarily linked to safety: "A Beijing factory sold up to 100,000 pairs of disposable chopsticks
a day without any form of disinfection, a newspaper said on Wednesday,
the latest in a string of food and product safety scares."

The authors then explain about the chopsticks scandal and end it with this sentence, which is an opinion, not fact, and it is not attributed to anyone: "China lacks the manpower to enforce food and drug safety regulations
at home or for export. Imports are generally carefully scrutinized."

A little further down a similar statement is made, presented as fact but with no information to back it and no one quoted: "A lack of business ethics and a spiritual vacuum after China embraced
economic reforms in the late 1970s have been blamed for unscrupulous
business practices and corruption."

The closest we come to backup information is something in the following paragraphs about criticisms Chinese officials have made of their system. The links are too weak and there is a lot of innuendo here.

I’m not writing in defense of China’s recent safety performance: there are clearly problems. But we won’t help China improve them with muddled understanding on our part of the source of the problem – and the extent of it.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.