Our present fear of Chinese products masks our real fear of China a swelling Other
HUGO RIFKIND How on earth did they get them through customs? 'Oi! You there! Chinese-looking fellow! What we got here, then? Ah. Toy soldiers, is it? Chewable? No? Oh dear. Any lead paint? What's that? Not any more? Just naked terracotta? Deane dearie me. But presumably they do sport a CE Certificate of Europe mark, in compliance with SI/204 The Toys (Safety) Regulations 1995? You what? Older than that? Created by the Emperor Qin Shihuangdi 200 years before Christ? Never heard of him Not today, mate. Take them home.'
It could have happened, couldn't it? Everything that leaves China, it seems, is packed with poison, dripping with danger. Toys particularly. As that horde of terracotta soldiers was setting sail for the British Museum, a horde of two million Barbies, Batmans (Batmen?) and Polly Pocket dolls were doing the reverse, as part of a huge product recall by the toymakers Mattel. Eighteen million other toys were to follow. Then there were crayons. Last week, it was the turn of little models of Noah's Ark. Frequently, the complaint is about unsafe levels of lead, usually in paint. As I write, an excess of lead has just prompted Canada to recall 140,000 Chinese pencils. Yeah. Pencils. Bet that went down well in Beijing.
Other poisons, too, have been at play. We have had antifreeze in Chinese toothpaste, pesticide in Chinese pet food and formaldehyde in Chinese blankets. How scary does China seem? Can there really be more than a billion of them? It's a miracle. The poor buggers must be dropping like flies.
Yet a certain line is always in there, usually towards the bottom of every report. I've been collecting them. Call me a geek, but it has become a hobby. 'The watchdog has no evidence of UK consumers suffering adverse reactions to the toothpaste' (PA). 'No one has been reported ill because of the pencils, the Canadian Health Ministry said' (Bloomberg). True, three American children may have swallowed magnets which may have come from Chinese toys (AFP), but as far as lead paint goes 'there have been no reports of illness or injury anywhere in the world' (the Guardian). Mind you (adds the Daily Mail, by way of eager consolation), 'children may have become ill without the cause being identified'. See them all, rushing down to A&E with those lead-coated Barbies jutting from their foaming throats. 'Any idea of the cause?' asks a parent. `Nah,' says the doctor.
In the US, near hysteria greeted the news of poisoned pet food, with headlines warning of thousands of cats and dogs (and American cats and dogs, to boot) heading for early graves. In the end, decided the Food and Drug Administration, the death toll was a probable 16.
In essence, then, we have a worldwide, multibillion-dollar safety scandal in which virtually nobody, to date, appears to have been at much risk. Is that not a little odd? I mean, isn't it? Haven't we all been remarkably fortunate? Well, not all of us, obviously. There have been a couple of fatalities. There was Zheng Xiaoyu, former director of China's Food and Drug Administration, shot by a firing squad for accepting bribes to approve substandard drugs. And there was Zhang Shuhong, boss of a supplier to Mattel, who lost his export licence and hanged himself. Using, one would assume, a Chinesemade rope. It's a wonder he managed it.
There's an issue here, obviously, but wouldn't it be nice if we could be honest about which issue it was? At present, China is like the aspiring nouveau member of a snooty golf club, turning up in cheap clothes and with the wrong kit, and being suddenly sneered at and blackballed for reasons that everybody used to pretend they didn't care about.
I suppose health and safety is important, in its own way (although my friend Eddie, who used to chew lead figures in class, is now literally a rocket scientist) but this looks like something different. This looks like protectionism, dressed up. Chinese contractors have been complaining that Western companies were free to keep their own safety compliance people on site, but chose not to. The other week, Hamleys let it be known that they were looking to begin sourcing more of their toys from the UK. Buy safe, buy British. Keep the yellow man out.
Sometimes, governments don't have to protect local industries. Sometimes it is done by the mob Think of Japanese cars, smashed up with sledgehammers on the streets of 1980s Detroit. Perhaps our pretend fear of Chinese goods masks our real fear of China, a swelling Other, suddenly not behaving in nearly as subservient a fashion as we have grown to expect. There is schadenfreude in it. They are not quite like us, yet. They cannot quite do what we can do.
Either that, or it is a marvel we are not all dead.
Ies a nice idea, this wheeze of David Cameron's that schoolkids should be forced to resit their final primary year, until they do well enough to move on to secondary school. It has legs. It could work. Although it would be even better, I feel, if applied in other areas.
Never mind schoolchildren. What about government ministers? Could they not be held back until their work is done? Reshuffles could still happen, but those ministers with work unfinished — with pledges unfulfilled — would be shuffled into back rooms in their own departments, and told to get on with it. Think about it. David Blunkett would still be trapped at the Home Office, sorting out prisons. Actually, Michael Howard could still be trapped at the Home Office, sorting out prisons.
So, there would be a new defence secretary but also, in a series of grim under-furnished back rooms, a series of old ones. John Reid would still be there, grimly trying to figure out how we can get out of Afghanistan 'without a shot being fired'. And in another room, further back, Geoff Hoon, still trying to figure out where we went wrong in Iraq.
We'd have Johnson, Kelly, Clarke and Morris, all backed up at Education, Alexander, Darling, Byers and Prescott at Transport and Hewitt, Reid (again), Milburn and Dobson at Health. Tony Blair himself would be stuck in a back office at No. 10. And none of them would be allowed to graduate to lucrative directorships or publishing contracts until every last soundbite promise and manifesto pledge had been fulfilled. And if they sulked, they could be caned.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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