There's nothing reassuring about the 'Made in China' badge – Telegraph Blogs

Thursday 10 July 2014 | Blog Feed | All feeds

Malcolm Moore


There's nothing reassuring about the 'Made in China' badge

Almost everything we buy is "Made in China", but there's still something deeply worrying about the label.


We're used to the fact that companies have to manufacture in China in order to compete, but there are still those nagging headaches about the toxic paint in the toys, the environmental catastrophe being wrought by the factories, and of course the sweatshop conditions.

It's a guilty bargain: no one likes buying products made in China, but we can't resist the price.

After the dazzling Olympics, however, the Communist party was determined to move Chinese manufacturing up the value chain. It is subsidising hi-tech plants and innovation. It also wants the world to start trusting its brand a bit more.

To that end, it commissioned DDB, an advertising agency, to come up with a campaign glorifying the "Made in China" label. Disaster soon struck. The poisoned milk crisis, which killed six infants and made a further 300,000 ill, led to the ad being shelved.

Now it's back, and airing on CNN. You can watch it here.

Does it make you feel better about Chinese quality? Not really. The idea behind it seems to be that while things are made in China, they are designed elsewhere (a fact that Apple makes very clear on the back of its iPods).

So you shouldn't worry about your shoes, fridges and clothes. Just because they are made in China doesn't mean they are Chinese – they are still reassuringly foreign.

Doesn't that go against the message that China is trying to move up the value chain and produce products which it can be proud of? Perhaps it is too early for that after all. At the end of the clip we see a jet engine that is stamped with a made in China badge with "engineers from all over the world". This must be a reminder that the target for China to have made its own jet engine is a very distant 2016.

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