Reddit Reddit reviews Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game

We found 19 Reddit comments about Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Business & Money
Books
International Business & Investing
Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game
John Wiley Sons
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19 Reddit comments about Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game:

u/klepperx · 26 pointsr/Libertarian

I may be downvoted to hell for this, but in my opinion, they really need it.


The ironic fruits of communism, designed to eliminate all "deviant" behaviour, had the law of unintended consequences applied to it: You have a country full of people who lie, cheat, and steal as a normal way of life. They have no moral compass, no sense of right and wrong, and if manifests itself in countless ways:

  • They unanimously voted the "worst tourists in the world". They leave trash everywhere, they won't line up for cues, their kids' urinate and defecate on the subways, buses and sidewalks, they are loud, they are rude, with no respect for anyone but themselves.

  • They all cheat on every test they can. And you think I’m talking about school kids, no. In a licenced, professional industry in which I used to work, we’d go all around the world doing education, continuing education, and PRESIDENTS of companies with hundreds of employees under them are openly, widely cheating on our tests. We tried to stop it but they just said, “this is how they do things here”. In contrast, the Koreans in Korea were studious, curious, listened well and studied very hard and did excellent on all tests.

  • Go look, here Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating students here were protesting that it “wasn’t fair” they weren’t allowed to cheat on tests. They actually have a point: if everyone else gets to cheat, they are at a severe disadvantage.

  • Go do business with any of them. I suggest you read “Poorly made in China” It’s a nightmare. You can't sue them for breach of contract, they know it, and they abuse the hell out of it.

  • Ask any Chinese you like, “Who do you dislike doing business with the most?”, and their answer is best translated as “My own countrymen”

  • Not to mention the thousands of fake companies

  • Go to China, guess what every single retailer has? A counterfeit bill-checker machine. You want to buy something with the lowest denomination worth $0.80 or so? Yeah, they run EVERY single bill through.

  • Even at Wal-Mart in China they will have 2 "lost prevention specalizsts" in many of the "highly stolen items", isle at the store. (walmart is high end there)

  • Subscribe to the China Uncensored to learn more. I think he does a really great job.

    So, in order to “play nice” with the rest of the civilized world, the Chinese government HAS to start doing something. They can’t teach morals, so they just have to financial penalize them into compliance.

    If you have a better solution, I’m all ears. (Really, I’d to discuss this, it’s a very interesting topic). What else could be done? What do you think?
u/myevillaugh · 16 pointsr/cscareerquestions

Offshoring is not as simple as it seems.

  1. You have to specify everything in the spec. While something may seem obvious to you, it is not to them, and they will create to the letter of the spec.

  2. Quality is a problem. You will have to look through all the code to make sure everything is done right. An anecdotal case was a website that looked great and was designed to spec, but the sql statements were created by concatenating strings. Uncaught, this would have left the site open to sql injection attacks. My friend had to go in and fix those himself. If you want to read on what you'll have to deal with, read Poorly Made in China. You will be dealing with the software equivalent of these problems.

  3. They will probably not follow your processes, even if it's in the contract. You'll have to chase after them to ensure this, and even then, they may still ignore this part. This can be as simple as requesting regular check-ins to git.

  4. The most popular outsourcing sites do a lot of work for a variety of companies, leading to large demand and a lot of poaching. I've heard of times where developers switched jobs as often as three months.

  5. They won't accept stock as compensation. They will expect cold, hard cash.

  6. This follows from #5, but they won't believe in the product like you or your employees would.

  7. Good luck enforcing any contracts on a start-up budget. The court systems in all of the outsourcing countries are a mess.

  8. All of the above lead to this: It's a full time job managing offshore vendors.
u/lurelurington · 5 pointsr/Entrepreneur

Do you think Apple products have bad quality? They are manufactured in China.. The problem is you can't just say you want high quality to a chinese manufacturer and expect to be handed an iPhone. You have to specify EVERYTHING . Don't leave anything to chance with Chinese manufacturer or they will cut corner and you will get something that you didn't expect.



I suggest you read Poorly Made In China By Author Paul Midler for a deeper understanding of how things work when manufacturing in China.

u/KPexEA · 5 pointsr/BuyItForLife

If you enjoyed this, I would recommend reading the book "Poorly Made In China" which exposes a lot of secrets about Chinese factories making substandard products.

https://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production/dp/0470928077

u/Underwood2016 · 4 pointsr/China

Read this:
https://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production/dp/0470928077

Chinese manufacturers are really good at negotiating and they take “nice guys” to town all the time.

u/sturle · 4 pointsr/worldnews

They are no longer cheap. 12 years of 15-20% annual wage increases have left Chinese products surprisingly expensive.

The quality, on the other hand, is as shitty as ever.

They don't even know what quality is. They will do it poorly, when they might just as well make it good.

https://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production/dp/0470928077

u/rezerox · 2 pointsr/HomeImprovement

I wouldn't feel too bad. It appears to have been a chinese factory and this sadly is the norm for them.

I'd give this a read if you are interested. Very entertaining book about what goes on behind the scenes in the chinese manufacturing world.

u/hwillis · 2 pointsr/BuyItForLife

ctrl-v from their FAQ

> also mattels chinese factories 'responsibly' put lead into kids toys.

That isn't really how Chinese manufacturing works- American companies don't build or administrate Chinese companies. They contract out completely and really don't have much control over what the manufacturers actually do. Poorly made in China is pretty outdated now but it's a fun read on what it's like.

Nowadays it's more normal to have a closer involvement with Chinese contractors but if the product isn't carefully monitored it's still not unusual for things like that to happen. Foreign companies still can't actually run the factories without a Chinese sponsor, and that only happened recently.

u/gabegundy · 2 pointsr/manufacturing

if you're looking for a little reading, I really enjoyed, Poorly Made in China.

u/LookAtThatMonkey · 2 pointsr/news
u/rmangaha · 2 pointsr/NavyBlazer

One of the big "gimmes" in this type of discussion is that things made in China are crap. This is not true simply because things are made in China, it is true because manufacturing companies make things according to specifications. If the specifications allow for a large margin of error (usually to keep up production demands), you will inevitably end up with crap. The big X Factor in any manufacturing, is quality control. If there is little to none, there will be quality issues.

At this time, I would like to admit there are definitely a world of other issues in Chinese manufacturing, but for the sake of this discussion, I don't really want to get into it right now. For those interested in further reading, take a look at (Poorly Made in China)[http://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production/dp/0470928077]

Now, to bring it back to America, how many of you have purchased Allen Edmonds Seconds? Odds are you took a look at the shoe and thought "Damn, I don't see a single thing wrong with it!". And yet, it still failed a particular standard of quality control that it was not sent out for normal sales.

Three of my favorite examples of quality control are Budweiser, McDonald's and Levi's. This is not intended to say they're examples of awesome products, but they know what they're doing when it comes to production.

Budweiser is the third most popular beer brand in the country. Yet you can buy a Bud anywhere and it will taste exactly the same. They produced 16 million barrels of beer and you don't have to worry that what's about to enter your mouth was going to taste like Budweiser.

McDonald's has restaurants all over the US and the world, and I have eaten at various locations (US, Asia, Europe, Mexico) and the exact same food items taste the same everywhere you go. McDonald's has food scientists to ensure every local area has access to the ingredients that will make sure the food tastes the same. I believe I read that for Moscow, they had to find a particular type of cow and genetically bred a particular type of potato.

Levi's I am specifically including because much of their manufacturing is outside the US. Although there can be a bit of a swing in consistency between sizes, for the most part, I can safely walk into ANY store selling Levi's, pick up my size and cut and buy it without trying it on (depending on how picky I am feeling about fit that day).

I have no doubt there will be naysayers to these examples, and that's fine. I believe they're examples of excellent quality control. And ultimately, I think that's where the fault lies. In certain Made in America products, the level of quality control is just higher.

And just for the sake of making a list here is a generic wardrobe one could make using things made in the USA.

Shoes

  • Oak Street Boot Company
  • Alden
  • Allen Edmonds (most of my collection)
  • Rancourt
  • Quoddy
  • Walk-Over


    Socks

  • Darn Tough (personal favorite)

  • Thorlo

  • Zkano

    Underwear

  • Duluth Trading

  • American Apparel

  • Union House

  • Body Aware

    Chinos

  • Bill's

  • Alex Maine

  • Jack Donnelly


    Jeans

  • Gustin

  • Round-House

  • The Stronghold

  • Left Field

  • a billion others

    Shirts

  • Gitman Vintage

  • New England Shirt Company

  • Hamilton Shirt Co

  • Mercer

  • Many others

    T-shirts

  • American Giant

  • Good Wear

  • TS Designs (completely vertically integrated, as the company says "from dirt to shirt")

    Blazer

  • Anderson Little

  • Brooks Brothers (not all of them)

    Suit

  • Hardwick

  • Hickey Freeman

  • Hart Schaffner Marx

    Accessories

  • Gitman Brothers

  • Robert Graham

  • Collared Greens

  • Jetset threads

    Knitwear

  • Columbiaknit

    Anyone else can feel free to add on to this list
u/beowulfpt · 2 pointsr/Entrepreneur
u/CapitalistMarxist · 2 pointsr/China

not exactly the same, but this is a good, and rather critical story of a guy who acts as an intermediary for American companies looking to source their products in China.

http://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production/dp/0470928077/ref=pd_sim_b_10?ie=UTF8&refRID=0S9FG1D4SEAXDG1NYV7R

u/pug_grama2 · 1 pointr/worldnews

Read "Poorly Made in China"
https://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production/dp/0470928077/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493677702&sr=8-1&keywords=poorly+made+in+china

But it is a fair point that it is not just China--I think China is just the biggest player.

u/machinerer · 0 pointsr/Tools

The Chicoms are well known to steal intellectual property, and make knockoff items.

They made their own molds and dies from reverse engineering foreign designs, most likely.

There is no such thing as patent law protection in China. They steal and cheat anyway and however they can.

Read the book "Poorly Made In China", by Paul Midler.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470928077/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_jgnYDbCKCFEKY

u/TheoreticalFunk · 0 pointsr/beer

https://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production/dp/0470928077/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496257208&sr=8-1&keywords=poorly+made+in+china

Read this book a few years back. Sure, it might be cheaper and you might be getting a good deal, but especially on food grade equipment, that's still a risk.

u/Jim-Jones · 0 pointsr/electronics