'Trust but verify' needed

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President Ronald Reagan, asked if he trusted his main communist adversary, Soviet leader Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, said: "Trust, but verify."

That may be the best way to describe how everyone who does business with China should operate. A long series of product safety scandals rocked both China the producer and almost all other nations, China's customers, since last December. The lesson for the West certainly is, "Trust, But Verify."

We consulted with a manufacturing process and quality specialist with experience in China who told us: "I found it impossible to get companies in China to acknowledge that foreign customers needed to exert some control over the process and thus the product. The Chinese just would not listen. Now they are reaping the result."

The process engineer finished with this: "It is quite impossible for any Chinese official to guarantee anything in China because of the lack of control that the government has and the lack of standards we take for granted in the West."

Even so, on Aug. 18, China's director of product safety, Li Changjiang, said on China's state TV network, "More than 99 percent of our goods meet standards. Demonizing Chinese products, or talking of the Chinese product threat, I think is simply a new kind of trade protectionism."

He went on to say this last nine months of scandal and bad news about China's products was all "politically motivated, unfair, biased and poisoned by jealousy."

Maybe so Most Honorable Li Changjiang, but since your TV appearance:

c The government of New Zealand began to investigate clothing imports from China after some were found to contain dangerously high levels of the chemical formaldehyde. Concentrations up to 900 times the normal safe level of formaldehyde were found in woolen and cotton clothes from China. A physician told us, on the condition of anonymity, "This level of formaldehyde is toxic, even cancer causing."

c A Beijing factory was found to have recycled used chopsticks and sold up to 100,000 pairs a day without any form of disinfection. This is so blatantly wrong and dangerous that no further comment is necessary.

c The U.S. corporation that imports SpongBob SquarePants journals made in China announced that the products contain toxic lead paint. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered a recall.