The Chinese Town Where Old Christmas Lights Go 117
retroworks writes "Shanghai based reporter Adam Minter visits where recycled Christmas Tree lighting goes in China. Visiting Shijao, the town known as the Mecca for Christmas tree light recycling, he finds good news. The recycling practices in China have really cleaned up. Plastic casings, which were once burned, are now recycled into shoe soles in a wet process. Minter concludes that even if you try to recycle your wire in the U.S., the special equipment and processes for Christmas light recycling have been perfected in China 'to the benefit of the environment, and pocketbooks, in both countries.'"
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They do the same with executions.
How so? Turn them into shoe soles in a wet process?
Re:First (Score:5, Funny)
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Execution vans. Clean, quiet, and could probably print out the bill for the family.
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Re:From copying to innovation. (Score:4, Interesting)
I trade the market and this was always a question for me, can the Chinese be innovative. And here we have it, they can be innovative. Not that I thought they couldn't. I was just wondering WHEN.
Here is the problem that the US faces, less so in Europe. WTF does America do anymore? I mean really?
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Oh, of course they can be innovative.
I recall seeing a news story about bootleg cell phones, and the Chinese factories that made them actually added features to the designs after they reverse-engineered them.
Re:From copying to innovation. (Score:5, Informative)
Could you have come up with the idea of watering down milk and then adding a poisonous chemical that shows up as protein in some tests to cover it up?
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WTF does America do anymore? I mean really?
It's a common rhetorical, but it doesn't really work, does it?
We're near the largest in:
Auto manufacturing, aviation manufacturing, nautical manufacturing, space manufacturing, and high tech manufacturing. Grain production, dairy production, meat production, fruit production, and vegetable production. Software, movies, books, websites, music, and television. That's off the top of my head.
Or, to put it slightly differently, we are ninth in the world in GDP per capit
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The main thing we are failing at right now is getting jobs for people with no useful skill. Or rather, people whose useful skill can be done more economically by someone making $100 /month in a poorer country. Talk about GDP and all is fine, and frankly very few in my circle here in the Northeast are affected by the "bad" economy, but we really do need something for the millions of unemployed to do.
Re:From copying to innovation. (Score:4, Insightful)
Auto manufacturing, aviation manufacturing, nautical manufacturing, space manufacturing, and high tech manufacturing. Grain production, dairy production, meat production, fruit production, and vegetable production. Software, movies, books, websites, music, and television.
And it all sucks. Yes, I generalize... but my point is valid:
Our automobiles are a total and outright embarrassment.
We're making evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) advances in aviation (if you call over-complicating them an advance - fly by wire, anyone?) but who's going to buy them, who wouldn't already be manufacturing their own?
Nautical manufacturing? For, pleasure boats? No; that chapter is clearly coming to a close as there'll soon be no middle class left to sustain that. Commercial fishing? Right! Cargo freighters and oil tankers? Perhaps for a little longer, but it's hardly a growth industry; the days of cheap goods and affordable oil (subsidized by the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency) are coming to an end and anyone with a brain cell can see that.
Our food production? Sure... if you call that pesticide-ridden, nutritionally-devoid, utterly-without-flavor sludge "food," then you're absolutely right.
Books, movies, software? Pfft. How much do you think those "industries" are actually contributing to this country (as opposed to the corporate coffers conveniently located in tax shelters?)
No, we're fucked... and anyone who says otherwise is either a total moron or has an agenda.
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Germany may have better feature sets, but don't have the same reliability as even an American automobile.
Greetings, Slashdot user from a parallel universe!
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http://www.jdpower.com/news/pressrelease.aspx?ID=2011089
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The big problem with all those things the the US makes/does is that most of it is consumed internally, rather than exported to the world. The US balance of trade showed the biggest deficit ever in 2006; that is, the US imported more goods/services and exported more money than ever before.
Take automobiles. The US is home to two of the biggest auto manufacturers in the world- Ford and GM (plus also Chrysler). However, I've never seen or heard of a non-luxury US export car in Europe. We have plenty of Fords an
Bull (Score:1)
The practices for this specific thing may have been cleaned up but China is still buried in a toxic wasteland. I have zero reason to believe they care one whit about the environment...
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Consumption resumption. (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, if there's a weak environmental link in the chain, it's the American consumers who start it by buying tens of millions of pounds of Christmas tree lights every year, only to throw them into the recycle bin, guilt free, when a bulb breaks. But Li, for one, doesn't mind: that waste is the raw material for his green business.
The real story is that Americans are so wasteful that they'll throw away a string of lights for the sake of one bulb.
BTW wonder how their process will deal with LED lights?
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Do people really do this? Is it some sort of laziness, or are people actually unaware that you can change the bulbs? And that it's not even hard to change them?
Re:Consumption resumption. (Score:4, Insightful)
Try explaining to your average consumer just how you find exactly which bulb has failed. Many of these things use globes in series, for those who do not know.
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I thought it was equally much a simple/cheap way to use low-voltage bulbs without a transformer?
Sturdiness means wasted resources (Score:5, Informative)
They are connected in series in ORDER to fail. THAT'S THE POINT.
I wonder why should two different people waste mod points on an AC who spews bullshit like this.
They are in series because it saves a lot of copper. In series you use one thin wire and no transformer is needed. You add enough low-voltage bulbs in series to get the line voltage and the current is that of one single bulb.
If they were in parallel you'd need two wires thick enough to transmit the total current of all the bulbs added together, plus a transformer to lower the voltage. Those tiny bulbs cannot have too much voltage because the filament must fit inside them, the higher the voltage the longer the filament must be. There's a limit on how thin you can draw a tungsten filament, so ultimately it must be made longer to have the needed impedance.
Re:Consumption resumption. (Score:4, Informative)
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If a bulb comes loose or gets twisted, that can still take out the whole strand. I bought a strand recently that wouldn't turn on. I had to pull out each bulb until I found the one with the bent leads. If the strand wasn't attached to a Christmas tree that I bought on clearance, I probably would have returned it to the store and it would have ended at the recycling plant in China.
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Um... all the strings I've seen, they are replacable. They are made just like regular strands with the removable socket, and the 3mm led sets in there with bent legs. It's trivial to pull the diodes for other uses, or replace them.
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Most the ones I've seen for sale do have replaceable lamps, and even come with a couple of spares in the box. And the LEDs are standard (except for the lens shape) 5mm LEDs which simply have their leads bent into the socket adaptor. I've also seen some with soldered 3mm LEDs that have a plastic "Christmas light" shape hot-glued onto them.
This means that even a dead strand is still desirable for picking out the LEDs for making cool projects with. And since they already have matching sockets, even the socket
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They're standard 5mm LEDs with the legs bent into a molded plastic socket adapter. How much simpler can you get? "Replacement bulbs" (though not necessarily the same color or lens shape) can be found at any decent electronics parts store. And there's no "flasher" involved, though they do flicker because half of the LEDs operate off of one phase of AC and the other half from the other phase.
And that's not even considering that LEDs are a lot more durable than a fragile piece of tungsten wire suspended betwe
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Yes, but if you have two bulbs that go bad it can take a considerable amount of time and effort to locate the bad bulbs. Even at minimum wage it makes more sense to just work a half hour than it does to spend the time fixing a $2 string of lights.
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If they were made by someone being paid minimum wage rather than slave labour then they'd cost more and it would be worthwhile to fix them. In fact, lots of things used to be like that.
But it's not as if finding the faulty bulb is particularly taxing. You can do it while watching TV or chatting.
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I spent a half hour unsuccessfully trying to find the broken bulb in a string of lights. Ultimately, I ended up finding a dozen or so ones that wouldn't light before I gave up. With the amount of time I spent on it, I could have worked an extra half hour or so and just bought another string. It's hard to say how much more time it would have taken me to find out what the issue, for all I know it could have been a wire and not a bulb.
Last tester I tried was really hit or miss and not much better than manually
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The quickest way to find the problem is to use an ohm meter.
Connect one lead of the meter to BOTH of the string plug's prongs. Please be sure it's not plugged in for safety :)
Starting with a light near the middle, remove it and use the other lead of the meter to test both contacts within the socket. The contact that does not conduct electricity will indicate which side of the string has the break. You have just eliminated half of the lights as the potential problem.
Place the bulb back into the socket, and d
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The BEST way to test it is something like this:
http://www.fluke.com/fluke/usen/electrical-test-tools/electrical-testers/fluke-1ac-ii.htm?PID=56048&trck=1acii [fluke.com]
That's the deluxe "Amplified electronic testers (informally called electrical tester pens, test pens, or voltage detectors)", and I've actually seen functional versions at the dollar store.
Anyways, plug in the lights, and trace the wires from the live wire on the plug through the set till it doesn't light or just go side to side of all the sockets.
Re:Consumption resumption. (Score:5, Interesting)
The real story is that Americans are so wasteful that they'll throw away a string of lights for the sake of one bulb.
The real story is that the EU made China clean up. Okay, Japan deserves some of the credit too.
The EU has introduced various rules aimed at cleaning up the pollution created why products are manufactured and disposed of, as well as protecting people's health. ROHS and WEEE are the most well known, and although technically the only apply to countries in the EU the reality is that China has to abide by them as well in order to sell to us and then recycle our waste.
It is just as shame that two other important initiatives, namely forcing manufacturers to standardise on USB micro/mini for charging and allow batteries to be replaced and removed for disposal, seem to have stalled. None the less it is a triumph for our left-wing socialist nanny-state anti-business anti-competitive anti-trade anti-consumer ecomentalist tree-hugging undemocratic bureaucratic United States of Europe. We made a real difference to our own lives and those of people in China, and even to people in the US since they get a lot of the same stuff from China that we do.
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The thing is it hasn't been a sacrifice for us, it has been a massive benefit. All the dire warnings about prices going through the roof and companies abandoning the biggest market in the world turned out to be scaremongering.
I don't know why bureaucracy has become automatically bad in many people's eyes. Well, I do know why, it is because certain parts of the media love to harp on about how much money is wasted on it in the EU and government and how all the red tape prevents companies and bankers making qu
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It is just as shame that two other important initiatives, namely forcing manufacturers to standardise on USB micro/mini for charging and allow batteries to be replaced and removed for disposal, seem to have stalled.
Stalled where? From my own observation, every non Apple manufactured gadget(*) released within the last 2 years uses USB for charging, and you can freely interchange chargers and USB cables.
* - Apple uses a non standard way [ladyada.net] to charge the iPhone, so it won't work with anything but an Apple blessed charger.
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The real story is that Americans are so wasteful that they'll throw away a string of lights for the sake of one bulb.
BTW wonder how their process will deal with LED lights?
But it never really is one bulb is it? It's one bulb that takes out a potentially long string. On top of that the smaller the bulbs the less likely they are the replaceable types. Different manufacturers also make slightly different bulbs which makes fixing a string potentially impossible. The REAL story is that people manufacture disposable crap. With the cost of a new set of lights less than 10minutes of my hourly rate it gets hard to justify crapping around with a set of lights for an hour.
I got the shit
"the Mecca for Christmas tree light recycling" (Score:4, Funny)
Surely in this case "the Jerusalem for Christmas tree light recycling" would be more fitting?
Don't know much Islam, don't know much biology.... (Score:5, Informative)
Surely in this case "the Jerusalem for Christmas tree light recycling" would be more fitting?
No, Mecca is the better word - there's a reason we use it. We say something is the 'mecca' for an activity or industry because of the Hajj [wikipedia.org]. Almost two million foreigners a year visiting one city for one specific ritual makes a pretty good metaphor for colossal, single-minded undertakings - the kind of single-mindedness you see in one town recycling billions of pounds of electrical waste, for example.
Evoking Jerusalem would be a confusing and less accurate metaphor for the sake of being cute.
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And needlessly demeaning Mecca is better? Seriously, Mecca is more than just the end point of a massive annual pilgrimage.
Re:Don't know much Islam, don't know much biology. (Score:5, Informative)
From the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:
"Mecca (as n. a Mecca) a place which attracts people of a particular group or with a particular interest: Holland is a Mecca for jazz enthusiasts."
Mecca in the dictionary has two meanings, as A noun and as a proper noun. We're using one form here, the other form being completely irrelevant. But I wish you all the best of luck in getting a correct and common use of an English word changed.
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Right, because we still refer to black people as Negroes and the Chinese as Orientals. The point wasn't that people don't do it, the point was that it shows a distinct lack of cultural awareness which leads the failure in communication between the US and its allies and the Arab world.
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No they don't. It says so right in the Oxford English Dictionary. The term "Negros" has fallen out of favour in the US and the UK and is often consider widely offensive. Similar words are used to describe "Oriental" which goes on to say that the word "Asian" is a more socially accepted alternative.
It's all written right there. You see the Dictionary is not as dumb a book you think it is, and you know what, if I offend some incredible minority out there by using a proper noun as a noun, then fuck it. I can't
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And needlessly demeaning Mecca is better?
I'm not worried. Sounds like you'll let us know, if it ever happens.
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Bwahahahaha.
APK is always a good target around here.
wow (Score:1)
Christmas lights... lol, what a waste religion is.
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Cue whiny fighting... (Score:5, Funny)
They're both probably right, and both answers make me equally depressed. Exporting work and materials that American liberals won't allow here because of well-meaning but often moronic regulations, but which American conservatives probably wouldn't do here anyway because they're cheap fucks.
I need a drink.
The market is collective planning (Score:4, Funny)
well-meaning but often moronic regulations
There are people who don't realize how immensely detailed regulations must be to work. When regulations don't let recyclers release some toxic waste the result is that everything becomes toxic waste.
Unfortunately those people didn't learn from history. The theory was that a well planned and regulated economy would be more efficient than capitalism, and too many people cannot see that things don't work that way.
Countries with planned economies could never make detailed enough plans for it to work efficiently. If you do not produce enough six-millimeter bolts with hex heads you will not be able to make enough 1/4 HP electric motors so you will not have enough refrigerators.
When you consider all the different products an industrial economy needs you would need the whole population of the country working in the plans to make sure all the items needed will be available.
That's what's called "capitalism". A feedback system where the production of the economy is dynamically adjusted as needed. There's a control variable to allow one to compare the relative urgency in producing each item, this variable is called "price".
Government regulation should be limited to overall guiding principles, not detailed specifications.
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Government regulation should be limited to overall guiding principles, not detailed specifications.
I would agree if pollution had a direct cost associated with it.
There are many things which have a large value to society (clean air) which have a near zero cost to the people impacting it (air pollution costs $0).
For capitalism without government regulation to work, someone needs to own the air and be able to charge for modifying its contents. Same for water sources such as large bodies of lakes and oceans; e
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Computers have imporved a lot since the old USSR. How does your computer with billions of transistors know how to move information around inside itself to meet your needs without using money inside it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count [wikipedia.org]
How does Debian know what software to make and maintain? Can emails and chat messages act as currency?
Soon we will have print-on-demand with 3D printers. Does that not also change things? We may also have recycle-on-demand with nanotech devices.
An alternative idea f
The success of central planning (Score:3)
Countries with planned economies could never make detailed enough plans for it to work efficiently. If you do not produce enough six-millimeter bolts with hex heads you will not be able to make enough 1/4 HP electric motors so you will not have enough refrigerators.
That's a classic "free market" claim. Then look at how Wal-Mart works.
Wal-Mart is a centrally planned economy, run from a headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Store managers have almost no autonomy in the Wal-Mart system. Even the store thermostats are controlled from Bentonville. Purchasing is centralized in Bentonville, where vendors go to the famous Corridor of Doom to present their products to Wal-Mart buyers. ("What can you do for Wal-Mart today?" is how each buyer starts the conversation.)
Everyth
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Wal-Mart is a centrally planned economy, run from a headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Sure, but Target is not run from Bentonville. Neither is Sears or Amazon, or JCPenney. If you cannot find something you need on WalMart there are alternatives.
The only alternative supplier they had in the Soviet Union was the black market, the Russian Mafia. WalMart is not a closed system like the Soviet Union was and Cuba still is.
WalMart is just one of many suppliers of common household items, it's nowhere close to the complexity of a modern industrial economy.
Efficient as modern data processing systems m
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'
Then why is Wal-Mart's distribution so bone-headed stupid?
If you're into Transformers toys, there are a few Wal-Mart exclusives that are only available from Wal-mart.
Inevitably, distribution inequities exist. It can easily be sold out in the West, but shelfwarming (and clearanced) on the East coast.
It's a
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Actually, an answer to that would be, tack on a domestic recycling surcharge to the price - basically, pay for the wages of the domestic recycling workers when you buy the lights.
What that would do is nearly guarantee that the lights are recycled properly and domestically, while also reducing unnecessary purchase of lights.
USA'sians (Score:2)
American consumers who start it by buying tens of millions of pounds of Christmas tree lights every year, only to throw them into the recycle bin, guilt free, when a bulb breaks.
And that is why the rest of the world hates you or thinks that you are fucking nuts.
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Re:nice piece of ... (Score:4, Interesting)
"CHICOM propaganda ... unfortunately, the CHICOMs still use a single 9mm in the back of the head for dissidents"
Too bad we don't do that for financial crimes. Ever see pics of Chinese executions?
Our smug Wall Streeters who just blew up our economy would look less smug facing shame and shooting. THAT would be an edifying spectacle.
What I didn't see (Score:3)
I didn't see any masks on the workers.
It is hard to believe that process didn't produce any airborne toxins.
It is also hard to believe that the water added to the crushed lights to make a sludge for processing isn't polluting something somewhere.
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Read the TFA
The contaminated water, meanwhile, flows into a recovery system, where it's re-circulated, over and over, through the recycling system.
The masks? No mention. So I don't know why. But probably the process does not make too much dusk? Or maybe the workers just don't like to wear one. (I don't like to wear a mask for more than 10 minutes.) Masks are cheap in China and one can get reusable ones.
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Totally! I cringed as I watched that video. My sensitive body went crazy! :(
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That means that every toy you buy has a planned obsolescence, and that it will be less harmful for Chinese villagers to wade through your garbage.
Everybody wins! Corporations get to sell you the same thing every 2 years, Chinese peasants get cancer later in age, and, well, that's it. But keep buying that crap - you are the pillar of the American economy.
Re:BAh humbug (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever hear of RoHS?
While I'm sure there's a US equivalent, this is an EU directive. And while I've made the occasionally entreaty for Europeans to pay for our (US's) boondoggles, they aren't putting out. For some reason, it isn't going the other way either.
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We do it because it helps our economy.
And if the people saying that sort of thing actually would check if it were helping the economy, then it'd be a good thing.
Re:BAh humbug (Score:4, Informative)
I can't remember the last time I was offered an electronic device that doesn't purport to be RoHS-compliant. Even electronic components are almost always RoHS now.
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That means that every toy you buy has a planned obsolescence
I think everybody has missed your point ... good try though.
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If anything, the Chinese (and like-minded Third World countries) make a point to detect inspections early enough to clean up things.
How do they hide the clouds of black smoke that used to be visible from the fields around town as stated in the article. If they have perfected a system to remove the plumes of smoke then I think we can consider that to be good enough.
(Awaiting modbombing and overwhelming "you don't understand"'s from the 50 Cent Party)
So you expect the flames? You do realise that there is a legitimate moderation of flamebait that suits your message perfectly. You can hardly complain if people mod you down when you tell them the reason that they should do so.
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How do they hide the clouds of black smoke that used to be visible from the fields around town as stated in the article.
Probably in a different village that reporters don't have access to. That's the usual way of things.
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How do they hide the clouds of black smoke that used to be visible from the fields around town as stated in the article. If they have perfected a system to remove the plumes of smoke then I think we can consider that to be good enough.
They don't. The process is just harmful in a different way(read: chemical burns & exposure).
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Sex. [youtube.com]
Money. [youtube.com]
Competition. [youtube.com]
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So you're saying to expect to be modded down for your dinner party racism?
You called it, I guess.
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I remember you, you called me a racist for daring to suggest that the Chinese have a habit of cutting corners here and there.
If the lead in toys and melamine in milk aren't proof enough, that was the day before that train fell off the rails and they tried to bury it to hide the evidence - while there were people still in it.
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There's a subtle difference, though, between claiming it's *only* the Chinese and "other Third World countries" that do such things though while implicitly holding up the USA as some sort of yardstick to aspire to, as suggested by the OP.
It's casual racism.
I'm not disputing the fact that there are Chinese companies cutting corners or otherwise doing things cheaply to save a buck, but it's not the exclusive domain of "anyone who's not us" (we'll leave aside the outdated 'third' world country comment).
So, by
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So you expect the flames? You do realise that there is a legitimate moderation of flamebait that suits your message perfectly. You can hardly complain if people mod you down when you tell them the reason that they should do so.
With any article concerning China, there seems to be an even greater consistency of criticism being attacked with high volume. I only wish to pre-empt such activity.
China's "50 Cent Party" [wikipedia.org] - paid commentators to guide opinion.