A year without “Made in China”

A columnist for the Boston Globe tried an experiment for personal reasons that many of us have done as a political statement:

For all of 2005, my family swore off Chinese imports. People figured we were standing up for Tibet or protesting lost American jobs, but our reason was personal, not political. It was an experiment. We wanted to test our connections to China’s vast economy in a meaningful way. More to the point, we wanted to know if it could be done, and what it would be like to try.

There is definitely an increasing trend in awareness of “Made in China” as an issue related to health and the U.S. economy, which is promising. However, it is also disappointing that issues of human rights and cultural genocide are not enough for most Americans to make changes in their consumer habits.

In the end, she came up with a sobering conclusion: “we are so deeply tied to China that I can’t envision how we could step back now.”

You can read the full article at http://www.boston.com



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