I think it’s useful to remember that the stigma is around goods made for export, often at the direction of Western companies who were seeking to lower production costs by offshoring production.
I’m a hobby ceramicist and Jingdezhen, Yixing, Qinzhou and Rongchang are world famous for being centres of excellence, and have been for centuries. Residencies (where you go live and work in a place to learn local techniques) are in high demand. The local clay in each region is an important part of what makes them so special. There are not that many regions in the west that are still associated with all aspects of the pottery process the ways these places are - at least not ones that are still active and not mostly preserved as heritage sites. I’d love to get my hands on some of that beautiful Yixing purple clay lol.
There are some damn fine manufacturers that know that and are working to change the perception. Zen-Wu toolworks makes some of the best chisels available.
It will change. China is now more and more synonymous with huge R&D budgets for innovations.
It must suck for legitimate high quality Chinese artisans to live in a totalitarian regime which frequently outlaws art forms and spiritually with threat of imprisonment, slavery, death, and fiery destruction of everything they’ve built.
You say Chinese, but you mean Republican.
China is already there. Republicans are working to get us there.
Is China there? I know that Conservatives like to say that it is, but Republicans always lie.
Ive got friends who came from China, they disagree.
They have to. If China hears them talking shit, they’ll hunt them down.
If China hears them talking shit…in my house…
Do you think Chinese spies are listening at the windows?
So on one hand, I have propagandists who I know have been lying to me for years.
On the other hand I have friends over to my house who occasionally talk about China, and say that while its not particularly amazing, its really not much worse than growing up poor and black in America (and we live in areas of America that aren’t batshit).
I don’t think China is some bastion of democracy, but I am increasingly skeptical when Capitalists tell me how awful China is supposed to be…and by “Awful” they mean that China might do the same shit that America does, except they actually arrest government officials who are too corrupt.
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I don’t have to imagine you, you’re right here.
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China literally helped reelect that fucking pedophile, so clearly there is something they have done to be more evil.
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100% agree, lemmy in general really has bought the “china bad” propaganda
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It’s just not as bad as your Western propaganda makes you believe it is. If I spoke fluent Chinese I’d rather live in China than the fascist oligarch run removed that is the USA.
Luckily I live in Australia which is pretty great.
Everything that is wrong with the USA is worse with China.
I speak fluent Chinese and I rather live in US (or Taiwan).
The US has improved and also worsened in different ways the last 40 years that I’m here. (And I’m talking about being a Asian American.)
I’ve met many people that say the same as you, but so far no one has actually moved (back) to China.
I think that stigma is dated
But only partially. Nowadays, you can find expensive and luxurious high-quality products, complete e-waste, and everything in between. Somehow, Westerners still keep buying the e-waste, so that’s why Chinese companies keep supplying it.
Basic capitalism. As long as some idiot wants to buy trash, someone else will respond to that demand and profit while doing so. For many people price still matters way more than durability, quality and functions.
The whole ‘made in China = shit’ stereotype ended long ago, as even Tim Cook himself publicly stated in an interview.
Ignoring the fact that almost everything is made in China, meaning both high and poor quality products come from there, China still produces vastly more high quality products than any other country.
The relevant fragment of the interview with Tim Cook:
Honestly… Yeah this is it.
Honestly I now associate Chinese product with interesting designs that offer a variety of not well thought out innovation and incredible high quality items alike.
Made in china just feels like it means experimental and with all the joys and pitfalls that includes.
Every country that moves up the value ladder goes through that phase. First the British looked down on the Germans and the US, then the three of them on Japan, then on Korea and Taiwan, then China. Now I guess it’s mostly Malaysia and Thailand; the ‘Chinese = low tech’ stigma is mostly a boomer thing.
Chinese manufacturers probably have it slightly easier because China itself is such a huge market, so most of their sales would be domestic. But I wonder if people from Shenzhen or Shanghai will look down at products made in, say, Hebei.
Isn’t the stereotype more about selling intentionally inferior products, not that it’s low tech?
Like using cheaper materials and then adding a weight to make it seem less cheap
The stereotype used to be that Chinese products were of lower quality than Korean / Japanese / German equivalents. I don’t think most people cared why, although one explanation I’ve heard is that China enforced a stricter QC than my country, so ones that fail inspection would be sent here. (Also many Chinese products were brought here through legally grey means, so there might simply have been no QC from our side.)
I mean, “made in Japan” used to mean that something was cheap and may not last. That’s generally not something that’s heard these days. Then Korea, Taiwan, etc.
I’d say it’s the opposite about Japan now. Especially about cars and electronics.
It’s funny how I’m both offended and agree with this 😂
The things that are made in Japan that are made well, are made to a standard that very few can touch. I’m thinking about a lot of vintage stereo equipment where the word “Japan” on it means instant purchase
Same as made in Germany, the image will change.
It’s already changing.
Meanwhile “made in England” brings to mind only Richard Ayoade’s fire extinguisher!
I don’t think the “made in china” stigma exists anymore.
Depends on where I go shopping. For Temu and so on it definitely exists but for cars solar and other industrial output it’s just good value for low price.
BYD’s slave labor really helps them lower costs for the consumer.
The slave labor saves at most like 20-30% of the price. China’s cornered the world on lithium. Nowhere else can you get batteries made that cheap. Tons of vertical integration and I believe more than half of the world’s lithium goes through China.
As long as we need lithium batteries for our EVs, China’s going to beat everyone else in pricing.
And of course there’s the insidious subsidies which are applied to all manufactured NEVs, not just the ones sold in China. Most countries can’t afford to do this for their industries and in general it’s considered to be kind of a dick move (enabling your manufacturers to sell for under manufacturing cost globally to drive out competitors)
It definitely does. Think of all the battery fires.
I hear more of Tesla battery fires than anything out of China these days
Scooters, ebikes, battery packs is all I hear of.
I just had a cheap, Chinese generic battery pack blow itself up the other day. Managed to move it outside before it caught fire.
Much of Tesla’s manufacturing is LG (Korean), Panasonic (Japanese) and CATL (Chinese). So a Tesla battery fire could still be out of China (not sure where the other two manufacture theirs though, could also be China)
For me it’s stronger than ever. China has never been more of an existential threat to democracy around the world and continued human existence on this planet.
You say China, you mean Republicans
Republicans have less grip worldwide. Trump’s overextended the military and can’t do much more besides putting tariffs on allies soon. China’s grip on the world is only growing.
Trump’s overextended the military and can’t do much more besides putting tariffs on allies soon.
Trump is in the process of destroying the military sure, but America still has the 1st second and 3rd largest Air forces in the world, we have more supercarriers than the rest of the world combined.
And the Nazis managed to do a lot of damage before they got stopped.
China is content to simply watch America destroy itself (and democracy around the world), China has always been good at the long game.
I guess it depends in which bubble of the world you live in. My own perception is that China is my only plausible hope for a world leader able to replace bad industries (AI, Coal, Petrol), capitalism and have foreign policies that are not dead-centered on pushing everyone else down for profit and undermining democracy.
I guess it explains the other comment you got about Republicans. For me the USA (and their Israeli friend) are by far the biggest threat to world progress and sustainability. (The USA basically never having been on the “good” side of history except when they eventually joined in on WW2).
China increases Coal and Petrol use every year and are second only to the USA in AI, and they helped put the Trump admin and the AfD into power.
Everything you just said was bullshit. China is the source of the things you called evil.
China still burns the most coal and permitted record new capacity last year, but in that same year it added ~300 GW of solar and ~100 GW of wind, oh and the world needs their production chains to deploy renewables. Just in case you were not arguing in bad faith.
Which is “second” in AI is debatable, but I salute the open-weights releases from their top models and their general efficiency compared to the brute force approach seen elsewhere.
I’m not saying China is perfect, but they basically can’t be a worse world leader than the US was, and in these years we are having, I’m glad to at least witness the fall of the US empire and see how the world might heal from it…
I’m glad to at least witness the fall of the US empire
Classic example of you Tankie fucks promoting the Trump admin.
What a dumb comment. You have never had democracy in your life. You are NOT a Mega Donor. You don’t have the money to pay for any TV ad or campaign of the politician you want to see win. All your life, for the majority of all the countries in the world, people have been forced to elect either politician A who appeals to empathetic people, or politician B who appeals to sympathetic people, both with a touch of apathy for the other. Both ready to answer for the top 1%'s needs FIRST before ours.
If you’re someone who still thinks “America is all about freedom and democracy” you are just a mouthbreathing moron. You never had freedom, you never had democracy, and it was all thanks to capitalism convincing you of giving all your hard work, money and sweat to a government and bunch of rich people that don’t care about you. “Trickle Down Economics: decrease the taxes of the rich so they can create more jobs”. They didn’t create shit, only layoffs.
Yet, here you are, still trying to convince people to blindly hate Chinese people and whatnot. You bring up articles written by MAGAs, but since nobody reads the name of the author, and also the content, you get away with “looking confident enough” to sway away challenges. What a fucking waste of time. Your only purpose in this website is to try and spread American Exceptionalism just because you openly and proudly support the Jeffrey Epstein Class.
I don’t think that’s the stigma in question. It’s “China makes bad quality products” not " china is an existential threat."
So yeah, this kind of proves my point, the “made in china = crappy products” stigma doesn’t really exist any more, to the point people don’t know what it was.
China being a malicious enemy with most of their products being knock offs of western tech definitely implies selling bad products, but if people had forgotten before then Temu, Ebay, and Alibaba have all been quick reminders.
Having experience with small parts in both China and US, the Chinese were more consistent.
The main difference is communication. Chinese machinists will go straight to standard, but they always hit the callouts on my parts. They demonstrated my errors. Once i improved and communicated better i never had a problem with them.
US machinists can ‘fill in the blanks’ and compensate for bad/incomplete communication. That led to my poor habits. But going back to them for some parts that required US manufacture I’ve had them miss direct callouts and require remanufacture or touch ups.
Time and money. I’d rather pay less and spend 2 more hours checking and rechecking rather than days or weeks and $$$ on reman.
those high quality artisans you see in promotional videos produced by the ccp aren’t really exporting goods though, and if they are, it’s not for the likes of us
Maybe that was true once upon a time, but these days there’s so much cheap crap on the market. Maybe it came from China or Southeast Asia or the United States itself, nobody knows, nobody cares. The people who talk about cheap Chinese stuff are just being xenophobic racist assholes.
It sucks for American liberals to be associated with MAGA. Life’s tough all over.
Don’t worry, the world hates American liberals as well. You’re all imperialist genocidal selfish assholes who only care about you and yours.
Thank you for your service
I just puked a little.
What happened
American liberals arent the problem. American liberal politicians are. Aka rich people.
No war but class war
American liberals are the problem, because they support liberal policies…
They either understand what liberalism is and does, and they are proudly evil, or they think liberalism means what liberals have been trying to convince everyone it means (equal and human rights for all), and they’re misinformed.
Still the problem.
Meeting and getting to know each and every American personally is an astounding achievement. Congrats!
China produces some high quality products, but they also seem to overlook sone really sleazy business practices. If you run into these it will taint your view of China.
