Made in China

Our MacBook Air and its CE external drive are made in China. So is our iPad and its Logitech speaker stand, our outsourced Sony camera, a waterpik water flosser safely tucked in our China-made Samsonite that originated either in Shenzhen or Suzhou. The irony is that I bought them all in the United States at a cheaper price than what I would have to pay in any of the Shenyang department stores!

A memory stick, affordable at my university store, is still more expensive than Best Buy Pearl City when used as a “come on” in our last store visit. I browsed at Target (pronounced tar shay among pretentious Francophiles) in NY where I wanted to get a flash drive but deferred thinking that I could get it cheaper in China. Not. Don’ work that way! China products are cheaper in the West than at source!

Thus all these bashing of jobs having all flown to China is a one-sided inaccurate story. Chinese workers getting employment break in the commercialization of its industry means that the agrarian population has crowded into the industrial centers in search of jobs they were not qualified to hold. Now we have China’s populace finally heavier on the urban rather than the rural side.

The HR rush into the construction and manufacturing industries also exposed the fact that many high school graduates joining the labor pool found accommodations rather limited. A Chinese-Canadian colleague claims that only 20 percent of HS graduates went to college 10 years ago; in 2011, universities accommodated 62 percent. The focus on higher education is there, but the more practical reason has to do with a bloated labor force available but cannot be absorbed by the industrial sector. This, like the situation when we created the Land Grant Colleges, is not a temporary situation.

The challenge among graduating university students remains the same as when they entered the institution: access to jobs to start securing existence and fulfilling filial obligations.  As elsewhere, a university certificate does not guarantee a job, and for persons who manage to get certificates but not education, the challenge is double. With the global recession and the cutback on commercial orders for manufactured goods, we now have a crisis in our hands of “certificated” people joining labor’s ranks but not finding any financially fulfilling roles.

Heretofore, China’s populace was high on personal savings. That has dramatically changed. Western economies set on getting out of the global recession aim to open up the Chinese wallet and imbue consumption into Sino body, heart, mind, and soul, less on needs and heavy on wants. To have an idea of the size of the market, there are more millionaires in China as there are citizens in Australia!

One of my students last year fingered his iPhone’s off-button at the start of class, a good six months before I foolishly yearned for an iPad. Exotic sports cars with names like Porsche, BMW, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Mercedes, Aston Martin are driving the bottom lines of many Shanghai showrooms, with some already guzzling gas on the new circumferential and elevated highways of Shenyang.

It is a mistake to begrudge China its ascendant economic status. By its sheer numbers and the length of the existence of its civilization, we are milk dripping babes. China has been trading domestically and internationally since the Silk Road began making many European houses of finance drool over investment and profit.

China bashing is shortsighted, a narrow resentment against the perceived socialist nature of its economy and communist management of its politics. We would be better off finding ways to milk its potential and promise. We mine the oil-advantage, enduring dictators and oligarchs in the process. Why would we not be smart enough to do the same as China opens its wallet to the world?

Here’s what we have so far. China’s industrial capacity and capability is still inexpensive but reliable. Apple’s story of needing a scratch-resistant cover for its iPhone requiring nine months to line up a production capability in the U.S. but only taking 18 days to do so in China means that resource, labor, and production is more efficiently and cost effectively handled in Chairman Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao’s domain.

Our iPad is made in China but less than 2 percent of the retail cost stays. This means that Apple’s chain of vendors from end of production on to the distribution-to-sales line are outside the ¥uan and already in dollar$. The Chinese are not making the big money on our wants and wishes. We are!

“We” is a complex network of finance, promotion, and sales web. Countries financing Chinese enterprises other than internal China (plus HK, Taiwan, and Chinatowns) include Japan, Korea, Singapore, with marketing outlets in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

Saipan is an R&R destination of folks from the abovementioned countries. If we gain self-sufficiency in our basic foods needs (as Pellegrino keeps harping), we also earn self-reliance in deciding our own destiny (with due consideration of our mortgaged soul for the privilege of an island PX). That’s doable, isn’t it?