10.11.10

Made In China: Approaching critical mass

Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 6:52 am by George Smith

“Made in China” as a liability has probably saved Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat here in California. Boxer’s recent political ad on Carly Fiorina, which now exists in two forms, one showing an HP office in Shanghai seems to have put a stake in her rival.

With mass unemployment in the daily news, the segment of Fiorina aridly saying work needed to be done elsewhere while enjoying life at the top is a show stopper.

It exploits class anger, of course. And over the weekend the New York Times ran a story — here — over its political utility:

In the past week or so, at least 29 candidates have unveiled advertisements suggesting that their opponents have been too sympathetic to China and, as a result, Americans have suffered.

The ads are striking not only in their volume but also in their pointed language.

In journo-fashion, it found an expert — someone from the swell class and unaffected by the Great Recession — to explain, not so expertly:

“China is a really easy scapegoat,??? said Erika Franklin Fowler, a political science professor at Wesleyan University who is director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising.

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The ads are so vivid and pervasive that some worry they will increase hostility toward the Chinese and complicate the already fraught relationship between the two countries.

Hmmm. The Boxer ad is notable for making Fiorina, and by extension her company, HP, the “easy scapegoat(s).” While there is a “Made in China” stamp in it, there’s an assertion that jobs were sent to Bangalore, instead of Burbank, too.

China is the destination of outsourcing. But it takes two to do the deal. On the other side of every one, US big business. The thought — that corporate America is antagonistic, even psychopathically adverse, to much American labor, isn’t in the Times’ report.

“Never mind that there is hardly any consensus as to what exactly constitutes outsourcing and how many of the new overseas jobs would have stayed in American hands,” waffles the piece.

“The Democrats cite studies this year from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization, that assert three million jobs have been outsourced to China since 2001 because of the growing trade imbalance.

“But Republicans, backed by some academics, say the number is much smaller. Indeed, Scott Kennedy, director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business at Indiana University, said that most of the jobs China had added in manufacturing through foreign investment had come from Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, not from the United States.”

Journalism reasons: Somewhere between the two extremes must be the truth.

Here’s another truth.

And some more, in a longer and amusingly mocking form, even if you don’t get all the jokes (tip o’ the hat to the reader who originally pointed it out):

Ha Ha Ha America was done three years ago, China Toilet Blooz around the same time, although the latter wasn’t burned into my homemade slide show until this year.

Last week, A4 of the Wall Street Journal had one story entitled Strategy This Year: Bash China.

The last sentence: “But Democrats unsuccessfully pushed a measure to end corporate tax deductions for expenses related to shifting jobs overseas.”

Its opinion page featured an essay by Dee Woo, from Beijing, where that person “teaches in the economics department at the Beijing Huija Private School.

Woo wrote ‘the US Will Lose a China Trade War.” “Before a strong yuan created any US jobs in manufacturing, it would kill jobs at Wal-Mart and elsewhere …” Woo wrote.

And if the Chinese ever get to believing that the dollar is “useless paper,” it will be very bad for this country. China is good for American corporations, Woo added. Which would seem unassailable.

“Building a harmonious society is the Chinese government’s most important imperative,” Woo informed Journal opinion page readers. “Once a Chinese person can make a living, he rarely challenges authority.”

Which is another way of saying mass unemployment leads to political and national instability.

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