The `Quality' Wars Heat Up...

All Roads:

With respect to FTS - Hongce, what bothers me the most about this is that the everyone has agreed (FTS, Hongce, and gov't agencies) the tires meet the minimum safety standards. i.e. that the tires were safe.

However, FTS by their own admission states that the tires Hongce was to produce were to incorporate that extra safety feature as they put their customers safety first.

Yet, when FTS (keeping in mind they specifically requested this piece be added) suspected the piece was missing TWO YEARS AGO, what did they do?

Did they test the tires to confirm their suspicions? NO

Did they visit the factory during the production run to see the tires being made? NO

Did they stop ordering the tires? NO

Set aside the fact that for TWO YEARS, FTS thought Hongce was selling them unsafe tires... set that aside.

and just think about the fact that for 2 years FTS allowed Hongce to steal from them that added cost of adding the extra layer.

If I were FTS, and I thought Hongce were ripping me off, I would have perfrmed the tests, confirmed my suspicious, demanded a refund, and notified buyers.

hongce may very well have decided not to put in that extra layer, but we will never know. FTS's responsibility to the American consumers was set aside, and so where their commercial interests.

If they really believed that the extra layer provided a measure of safety, then every tire that they put on the road was potential accident waiting to happen.

Hopefully, through all this, foreign companies will stop passing the buck and will begin investing in their quality control systems. If not for the concern they all have for their customers, you would think they would put these in place to ensure they are not being cheated.

Rich
www.allroadsleadtochina.com

Posted by All Roads | July 20, 2007 6:53 AM

John Smith:

It is "Buyers be aware" time.

It is the Chinese government's responsibility to protect all their businesses. Chinese government must do all they can to ensure that their own businesses are not taken advantage of, and Chinese products have a good name in the world market.

It is our responsibility to pick the right product for ourselves. That's market economy. So, don't blame China for producing goods at quality they choose to produce, blame ourselves for not choosing wisely, with eyes open.

Posted by John Smith | July 20, 2007 1:08 PM

Sha:

All Roads,

That is a surpised fact to me too--a unsafe tire can meet US safety standard.

I think the QA model of Fireworks industry maybe a good way to go.

Posted by Sha | July 20, 2007 1:10 PM

Anonymous:

Wow. an american problem that's made in the good old US of A that absolutely cannot be blamed on china because this time it is 100% american's fault for importing unsafe tires they KNEW were unsafe.

Posted by Anonymous | July 20, 2007 2:04 PM

Sha:

Ya. That is also a problem.

You told Chinese that their tires are not safe, then they pointed out it met American safety standard.

Then you can argue that even with the standard it is not safe, so if they don't do this gum thing, you will not import it. Then Chinese may say that they have to increase the price a little by adding this thing up. Then problem resolved.

Posted by Sha | July 20, 2007 3:32 PM

James Kang:

Posted by James Kang | July 20, 2007 3:46 PM

Xiao Lei:

Kang, I think you have been brain-washed. America is still many light years ahead of China. Even though China is the world's No. 3 economic power house (only behind U.S. and Japan), the U.S.'s GDP is about the size of the next 4 countries. In other words,

Japan + China + Germany + UK = U.S.A.

I am Chinese living in America. I feel sorry for those Chinese who are so blinded by narrow-minded nationalism.

Posted by Xiao Lei | July 20, 2007 4:20 PM

Anonymous:

Xiao Lei, you are not Chinese, you are a banana "yellow outside white inside"

The irony is that the whites don't trust you and the Chinese don't trust you.

Posted by Anonymous | July 20, 2007 4:51 PM

Anonymous:

Xiao Lei,

At this forum, having said what you said makes your the public enemy No. # 1 among our Anonymous'. We will ridicule your post, smear your image, attack your personality until you submit to the old golden "China rules all" rule. If you don't think you can withstand this type of physiological stresses, you better leave this forum or simply stay quite.

Look at a guy nicknamed nanheyangrouchuan. S/he used to be sane. Now s/he has gone crazy under our preferential treatments.

Disclaimer: You only get one warning.

Posted by Anonymous | July 20, 2007 5:48 PM

James Kang:

æè¯´"ä¸å½çå´èµ·". I did not say U.S. rank after China. æç±æçç¥å½, è¿æ¯æ¯«ä¸å¯ç. ä¸ç®¡å¨åªéä½, ä½ çç®è¤æ°¸è¿é»è²ç.
è¦æå¾ç±èªå·±çç¥å½, æä¼åå°å«äººçå°é!

Posted by James Kang | July 20, 2007 6:41 PM

Anonymous:

Xiao Lei,

Good news for you. The author of the following post has been identified as the new public enemy No. 1. You are No. 2 now.

ããè¿æ¯æè¥¿éå¾çæåå¨åäº¬çä¸æ¬¡ç»å.

Posted by Anonymous | July 20, 2007 7:27 PM

Mainlander:

Can some Chinese/English genius please translate this article in total for the benefits of our English readers?

âä¸åè£½é å¨èè«âæ¯è¥¿æ¹çé½è¬
http://www.chinareviewnews.com 2007-07-21 10:38:45

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ç¸éæ°èï¼
å¼µæºæ°ï¼æçæ§è§£è®ä¸ç¾é£åå®å¨ä¹ç (2007-07-21 12:10:17)
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è¦æå¦éåâä¸åè£½é âçä¼å (2007-07-10 07:31:40)

Posted by Mainlander | July 20, 2007 11:04 PM

Sha:

Don't be surprised. It is exactly like 1980s of "Japan Threat". But only problem is that Japan is stil American colony but China is not.

2008 will be a REALLY interesting year.

Posted by Sha | July 21, 2007 3:24 AM

zuraffo:

I support Amerikan's consumer to boycott China's Import! Please PLEASE stop buying anything from China. Please demand your congress to slap tariffs on imported goods from China. Please PLEASE stop buying from any retail chain or any manufacturer that imported from China or have their factories located in China.

And boycott Beijing Olympic too while you are at it. Anyway why do you need Olympic while you have american football, baseball and soccer? And wrestling. Not to mention hotdog eating contest and spellingbees. Those sissies in Olypmic know nuts about sports.

Punish the evil communist Beijing government in the name of demokracy! You don't need China to be your factory. You still have India, Vietnam and Indonesia!

Posted by zuraffo | July 21, 2007 11:34 AM

zuraffo:

Xiao Lei,

Don't worry about anonymouses on this forum. They are simply hell hounds that have to hide in their dark cave with a pentagon seal and will instantly go puff or melt once they meet the sun.

America is a great place. I hope you enjoy your stay there. Why bother about China? After all, nobody sane wants to come (back) to China. Beside making money, that is.

Posted by zuraffo | July 21, 2007 11:47 AM

swagger:

High time for chinadaily newspaper launch an open-ended debate edition bombarding the insanely ferocious and barbaric crime or nominal war on terrorism,sparring and denouncing the unprecedented hegemonist cloaking totalitarianism and dictatorship of which the mealy-mouthed,lousy satan encroach the resources of middle east,intrude frivolously with others' internal affairs,and flail turbulently with Russia,China,North korea,and mostly overwhelming Iran.

Honestly,living in the glass house is your priority being clam and silent,how dare you relentlessly throw stones to the innocent,THAT IS YOUR IDIOSYNCRATIC PERSONALITY BEING RUTHLESS AND POMPOUS.Maybe, who cares.

Posted by swagger | July 21, 2007 12:22 PM

China Law Blog:

Remember though, there is much much more to China than its food. On top of that, and I do find this very troubling, but there really is no way most of the time to know from what country our food in stores in the US comes.

Posted by China Law Blog | July 21, 2007 4:50 PM

Anonymous:

Xiao Lei

I do think u love your country and u're diffierent with some of your mal-intention compatriots who only say"love your mother-country" with insane,blind nationalism in this blog frequently.

Posted by Anonymous | July 21, 2007 6:26 PM

nanheyangrouchuan:

Everyone already knows that China is THE source of cheap, crappy consumer products. So it is the responsibility of greedy, dirty, low down outsourcers to ensure that relevant safety standards are met. Mr Frank deserves to be fined and sued into a janitorial career.

Posted by nanheyangrouchuan | July 21, 2007 7:54 PM

Law Office of Todd L. Platek:

All these comments about what the Chinese officials say and Mr. Frank's sublimely meaningless statement are fascinating but of no legal value at this point. Follow the litigation to see what comes out of it.

Posted by Law Office of Todd L. Platek | July 22, 2007 12:57 AM

James Kang:

nanheyangrouchuan, ä½ è¯´"Everyone already knows..."è°æ¯everybody, è°æ¯æ¯ä¸ä¸ªäºº. ä¸åä»¥ä¸ççè¨èé½è§å¾è¿ä»¶äºæå¾èå. ä½ æ¯ç²ªåéçç³å¤´, åèåç¡¬!

Posted by James Kang | July 22, 2007 2:21 AM

China Tsunami:

James Kang

As one Anonymous put it:

"Look at a guy nicknamed nanheyangrouchuan. S/he used to be sane. Now s/he has gone crazy under our preferential treatments."

It seems the sudden appearance of this guy made you insane.

Posted by China Tsunami | July 22, 2007 6:47 AM

theprophet:

Posted by China Tsunami
July 22, 2007
I am absolutely against preaching moral absolutism! Rather, I am advocating hegemony by hook or by cook,...Everybody knows Uncle Sam is the fastest gun in the world. Only idiots would ...as told by the rules of the game....Soviet Union was such a fool to fight with Uncle Sam the âhonorableâ way - dueling at âhigh noonâ of a nuclear showdown, but dropped dead unexpectedly. This is a China century. China Tsunami will flood the world without a single shot being fired. The villain will be drowned and wiped out before he could draw his gun.... one step ahead of strategic planning as to what to do âthe morning afterâ tsunami wiping out the world."

China is not going to wipe out the West if that is what you are prophesying. No Yellow Peril, no China tidal wave to subdue the world. The West uses "Democracy" and "Freedom" only it is White democracy and white freedom they are fighting for. Much of China is fighting to stay afloat against the torrents of conspired slanders and flash floods of temperamental boycotts. Its people are only now slowly exposed to the stinging elements of racism, awakening to the realization that their nation has just sailed into the terrain where the howling Northwest winds are, as ever, punishing, condescending and most barbaric.
No, C.T. please, perhaps thou should consult thy oracle and take heart to harken deeper. Your alarmist vision might have been distorted or your signals crossed with western paranoia. As you know, in olden days, false prophets were met with painful slow deaths by public execution of mob stoning! Thank goodness we can pontificate here all we want without the prospect of such high stacked risk.
The days of plenty are far away. No, there will not be perilious yellow waves nor Bao Fa Hu riding the tidal crests toward the destruction of the west. Live and let live, earthlings.

Posted by theprophet | July 22, 2007 8:30 AM

Sheron Gilat:

First of all West is HYPOCRYTICAL and LIAR. So what ever propoganda comes from West is a lie.

Secondly it is funny to see how America is jumping around with Chinese Success.

What about Americans selling sub-standard medicine (which is disqualifies in America itself) to 3rd world countries.

What about American using poor nations as gini-pigs for drug testing. Before medicine perfects and only after complete success sold in West.

America is an evil power. A murder machine. Butcher and Snatcher from week.

Why not rest of the world should boycot Murderers.

China is the future and hope for fair world. Evil-willed blood thirsty murderer America will go down the drain under Bush's leadership. Chinese on the other hand don't snatch and kill other habitants of planet by telling lies.

No body in world chants DEATH to China. This great honor is reserved by millions on planet for Dummy AMERICA only.

American Democracy is a TERROR of MANY on other nations of the world.

Shame on America. Shame!!!

Posted by Sheron Gilat | July 22, 2007 9:14 AM

John Smith:

Lu Xun, a Chinese pro-communist author author in the early 20th century was really good. He actually depicted the behaviour of Chinese posters here exceptionally accurate. Go read some of his books. They will surprise you of how accurate they were.

Posted by John Smith | July 22, 2007 9:43 AM

John Smith:

The Americans are really despicable. They even hire under age child workers to slave in their factories and mines in Henan. Now the Henan province is going to fine them for doing such criminal things, as they deserve. The fine is 5000 yuan for every month every child used in factories and mines. This is still cheap price to pay, as it is only a few US dollar a day per child. I would think a month in jail for every child every month used in a factory is much better.

And, of course, this is from China Youth Daily, it must be a western smearing campaign on China.

Posted by John Smith | July 22, 2007 9:55 AM

China Tsunami:

Allah is great!...China is great!

I think I've the SARS, not just flu.

Posted by China Tsunami | July 22, 2007 10:05 AM

Anonymous:

theprophet, you wrote an excellent rebuttal of that Tsunami dipstick.

Posted by Anonymous | July 22, 2007 11:13 AM

theprophet:

Posted by slkf
July 22, 2007
American media, including these bloggers here, are preaching moral absolutism on China, the Middle East, Russia and South America everyday.

Mr. Elegant, Ramzy and Powell may not want to face their own moral dilemma about the US. But until you start to declare your daily moral apprehension of legalized gun sale, abortion, corporate looting, human right violation on undocumented immigrants, and many, many other "immoral" behaviors in America, how do you expect Chinese to take you seriously about your daily indignation of Chinese immorality?

The last thing you want to compromise as an intellectual is your morality. Every time you do that, you are making a deal with the devil. Please take some of that enthuiasm you have on criticizing China and use it on problems in the United States. Exercise your intellectual honesty or you will forget about it soon, if you haven't already.

Bravo! Well said, dude!

Posted by theprophet | July 22, 2007 2:30 PM

Sha:

Well, Americans always enjoy the economic benifits from shaddy labor practices meanwhile show high moral standard. For example, Americans are enjoying all good services from cheap illegal Mexican labors but mainwhile bashing those people for breaking laws. US senetors would rip off those illegal people but that not stopping them to hire bunch to work for their babysitting and gardenning service.

If you look back the current bad labor praticing and bad product qualities occured in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan before. You probably will not see this kind of intensity in Western media to go after those places. Why? Because US hold the military powers that it always able to exert economic benefits from those governments. China is different, for getting concessions out of China is not like such easy thing as Japan by a phone call to Tokyo. It has to really put on military power to do the work, but need the popular support from the society. What is the best way to do it? Demonaze China and Chinese in the media, so the "brainwashed" folks will support a hardline policy toward China to get the economic concessions out of China.

Too bad that China may apporach a point that US market may become irrelevent for China and China also has no problem to shut its huge market to US companies. Tit for tat. For any weapons that end up in Taiwan, there will be weapons end up in Iran that may or may not show up in Iraq and Afghan. Who know. Poor American GIs.

Posted by Sha | July 22, 2007 6:00 PM

John Smith:

With stories like the ones below, there is no fear of Chinese ever have to compromise on morals and ethics. This really shows how superior Chinese are morallly.

Posted by John Smith | July 22, 2007 7:06 PM

nanheyangrouchuan:

EAST-ASIA-INTEL.COM

Thursday, July 19, 2007

China official's closed meetings with candidates' advisors raise eyebrows

A senior Chinese government official's closed meetings with top foreign policy advisers to leading U.S. presidential candidates have come under fire from critics of U.S. policy towards China.

China's Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo. AFP

China's Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo met on June 19 with advisers to Democrats candidates, including New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. He also met Republicans including Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Washington Post reported June 28.
"United Front tactics at their best - getting Americans to adopt the habit of receiving lectures from PRC officials on how to limit the scope of American interests," said Richard Fisher, a China specialist with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, noting that such interaction is a "massive mistake" on the part of the candidates.

Conservative critics of China said the move appears to be a pre-emptive influence effort by Beijing, which was caught funneling cash into the 1996 reelection campaign of President Bill Clinton and also sought to influence the Bush administration through FBI double agent Katrina Leung.
The Dai meeting was arranged by former Clinton administration Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre. Others involved in arranging the discussions were former Carter administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Reagan administration Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci.

The campaign aides included former CIA general counsel Jeffrey H. Smith, representing the Clinton campaign; former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, representing Obama; former State Department official Derek Chollet, representing Edwards; former State Department policy planning chief Mitchell B. Reiss, representing Romney; McCain's national security adviser Randy Scheunemann; and Antony J. Blinken, staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an adviser to Biden.

"This deserves close watching," Fisher said."

Posted by nanheyangrouchuan | July 22, 2007 7:55 PM

Focus:

John Edwards: the worst presidential candidate ever?

Many judged Dubya to be the worst US President ever. And now, ladies and gentlemen, unlikely but possibly the next Commander-in-chief of these United States, minor candidate,John Edwards... might be the worst presidential candidate ever. I don't mean the most inept campaigner - he's not. I mean, intrinsically the worst candidate: the phoniest, slickest, most disingenuous, least electable.
Read more:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/

Posted by Focus | July 23, 2007 2:46 AM

nanheyangrouchuan:

SCIENCE JOURNAL
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ

Huge Dust Plumes
From China Cause
Changes in Climate
July 20, 2007; Page B1

One tainted export from China can't be avoided in North America -- air.

An outpouring of dust layered with man-made sulfates, smog, industrial fumes, carbon grit and nitrates is crossing the Pacific Ocean on prevailing winds from booming Asian economies in plumes so vast they alter the climate. These rivers of polluted air can be wider than the Amazon and deeper than the Grand Canyon.

"There are times when it covers the entire Pacific Ocean basin like a ribbon bent back and forth," said atmospheric physicist V. Ramanathan at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.
A GLOBAL POLLUTION PROBLEM

[Science Forum]
â¢ Can the U.S. help stop global traffic in aerosol pollution? And what's the international responsibility here? Share your thoughts in an online forum.

On some days, almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia. With it comes up to three-quarters of the black carbon particulate pollution that reaches the West Coast, Dr. Ramanathan and his colleagues recently reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

This transcontinental pollution is part of a growing global traffic in dust and aerosol particles made worse by drought and deforestation, said Steven Cliff, who studies the problem at the University of California at Davis.

Aerosols -- airborne microscopic particles -- are produced naturally every time a breeze catches sea salt from ocean spray, or a volcano erupts, or a forest burns, or a windstorm kicks up dust, for example. They also are released in exhaust fumes, factory vapors and coal-fired power plant emissions.
[science journal]
Courtesy SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and ORBIMAGE
A satellite view from 2001 shows dust arriving in California from Asian deserts. Concentrations of dust are visible to the south, near the coastline (lower right); To the west the dust is mixed with clouds over open ocean. This dust event caused a persistent haze in places like Death Valley, California, where skies are usually crystal clear.

Over the Pacific itself, the plumes are seeding ocean clouds and spawning fiercer thunderstorms, researchers at Texas A&M University reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March.

The influence of these plumes on climate is complex because they can have both a cooling and a warming effect, the scientists said. Scientists are convinced these plumes contain so many cooling sulfate particles that they may be masking half of the effect of global warming. The plumes may block more than 10% of the sunlight over the Pacific.

But while the sulfates they carry lower temperatures by reflecting sunlight, the soot they contain absorbs solar heat, thus warming the planet.

Asia is the world's largest source of aerosols, man-made and natural. Every spring and summer, storms whip up silt from the Gobi desert of Mongolia and the hardpan of the Taklamakan desert of western China, where, for centuries, dust has shaped a way of life. From the dunes of Dunhuang, where vendors hawk gauze face masks alongside braided leather camel whips, to the oasis of Kashgar at the feet of the Tian Shan Mountains 1,500 miles to the west, there is no escaping it.
[science journal]
Courtesy SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE.
A satellite image from 2005 shows a plume of dust flowing from China to the north of the Korean Peninsula and over the Sea of Japan. Such plumes can cross the Pacific and scatter dust across the Western U.S.

The Taklamakan is a natural engine of evaporation and erosion. Rare among the world's continental basins, no river that enters the Taklamakan ever reaches the sea. Fed by melting highland glaciers and gorged with silt, these freshwater torrents all vanish in the arid desert heat, like so many Silk Road caravans.

Only the dust escapes.

In an instant, billows of grit can envelope the landscape in a mist so fine that it never completely settles. Moving east, the dust sweeps up pollutants from heavily industrialized regions that turn the yellow plumes a bruised brown. In Beijing, where authorities estimate a million tons of this dust settles every year, the level of microscopic aerosols is seven times the public-health standard set by the World Health Organization.

Once aloft, the plumes can circle the world in three weeks. "In a very real and immediate sense, you can look at a dust event you are breathing in China and look at this same dust as it tracks across the Pacific and reaches the United States," said climate analyst Jeff Stith at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. "It is a remarkable mix of natural and man-made particles."
[science journal]
Carlye Calvin, UCAR
Jeff Stith of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a principal investigator on the Pacific Dust Experiment.

This spring, Dr. Ramanathan and Dr. Stith led an international research team in a $1 million National Science Foundation project to track systematically the plumes across the Pacific. NASA satellites have monitored the clouds from orbit for several years, but this was the first effort to analyze them in detail.

For six weeks, the researchers cruised the Pacific aboard a specially instrumented Gulfstream V jet to sample these exotic airstreams. Their findings, to be released this year, involved NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and nine U.S. universities, as well as the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan, Seoul National University in Korea, and Lanzhou University and Peking University in China.

The team detected a new high-altitude plume every three or four days. Each one was up to 300 miles wide and six miles deep, a vaporous layer cake of pollutants. The higher the plumes, the longer they lasted, the faster they traveled and the more pronounced their effect, the researchers said.

Until now, the pollution choking so many communities in Asia may have tempered the pace of global warming. As China and other countries eliminate their sulfate emissions, however, world temperatures may heat up even faster than predicted.
â¢ Email sciencejournal@wsj.com.

Posted by nanheyangrouchuan | July 23, 2007 3:15 AM

ALCATRAZ:

China Tsunami, It appears that the only flooding we have here is nanheyangrouchuan
and John Smith's mindless pastings.

Time to head for higher ground - away from these morons.

Posted by ALCATRAZ | July 23, 2007 6:54 AM

China Tsunami:

It is the Overseas Chinese, who had taken all the sh_ts of slavery, racism, lost of civil rights, segregation, communist suspicions during McCarthy era, lost opportunities,..... in North America. However, situations had improved greatly, after the lift of Chinese Exclusion Act in 1947, and the launching of civil rights movement in the 60s. Although equality is nowhere near perfect yet, but no one can deny that âChinkâ and âNiggerâ have practically vanished in daily colloquial verbiage. Whereas Overseas Chinese in SE Asia, except for Singapore and most of the time / part of Thailand, suffered greatly and, ironically after the retreat of White colonial masters in the late 40s and 50s. The unthinkable injustice imposed on et

July 20, 2007 6:05

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