The Elephant In The Room

motomech

motomech

10 MW
Joined
Sep 10, 2010
Messages
3,713
Location
Yuma and Punta Cana Baja Mexico
Recently, I posted that I am not going to buy anymore Ebike stuff from China. I didn't imply that folks here need to follow suit, I was just stating what felt right for me.
I was excoriated by the China apologists and they attacked me as being "stupid" and having "wet undies".
Whether or not it originated in a lab and how it "escaped" is not exactly clear, but that they covered up the risk and then lied to the World is well established. They shut down domestic flights, but allowed 100,000's of people from Wuhan to fly around the World. So if we evaluate using the "low bar", it is negligent homicide instead of murder. Is that so hard to believe about a totalitarian regime that harvests the organs from many 1000's of political prisoners while they are still alive? Or forcibly sterilizes women because they are Christians? The list goes on, including the recent ostracizing of Africans in their country, blaming them for the virus.
Human rights aside, there is the issue of China poisoning of the planet, something we, as E-vehicle users profess to care about. It is difficult to get accurate data on emissions by country, but it has been estimated that up to 65% of the smog in California comes from China! For those of us who live or travel regularly in the Golden State it's hard to deny this (compare the LA basin to the Phoenix metropolis in the same time period for example).
Now it's not hard for me to say I will not knowingly buy products made in China. I am retired, live in a sm. beach town in Mexico, buy little and have a lg. stock of ebike parts. But once again, I'm not advocating that people immediately cease buying stuff from China, but isn't it time to have the conversation about how we can influence the availability of products from other countries. No doubt, countries like Vietnam, Thailand, India and Mexico have pollution issues of their own, but at least they are not trying to dominate the World.
Stating that "90% of the stuff in Walmart comes from China, so what can we do" is a cop-out and should not assuage one's conscience. Likewise for E-vehicle products.
In closing, I would ask; "Do you really want your kids (or grand kids) to live in a world where China calls the shots??
 
motomech said:
Recently, I posted that I am not going to buy anymore Ebike stuff from China. I didn't imply that folks here need to follow suit, I was just stating what felt right for me.
I was excoriated by the China apologists and they attacked me as being "stupid" and having "wet undies".
Whether or not it originated in a lab and how it "escaped" is not exactly clear, but that they covered up the risk and then lied to the World is well established. They shut down domestic flights, but allowed 100,000's of people from Wuhan to fly around the World. So if we evaluate using the "low bar", it is negligent homicide instead of murder. Is that so hard to believe about a totalitarian regime that harvests the organs from many 1000's of political prisoners while they are still alive? Or forcibly sterilizes women because they are Christians? The list goes on, including the recent ostracizing of Africans in their country, blaming them for the virus.
Human rights aside, there is the issue of China poisoning of the planet, something we, as E-vehicle users profess to care about. It is difficult to get accurate data on emissions by country, but it has been estimated that up to 65% of the smog in California comes from China! For those of us who live or travel regularly in the Golden State it's hard to deny this (compare the LA basin to the Phoenix metropolis in the same time period for example).
Now it's not hard for me to say I will not knowingly buy products made in China. I am retired, live in a sm. beach town in Mexico, buy little and have a lg. stock of ebike parts. But once again, I'm not advocating that people immediately cease buying stuff from China, but isn't it time to have the conversation about how we can influence the availability of products from other countries. No doubt, countries like Vietnam, Thailand, India and Mexico have pollution issues of their own, but at least they are not trying to dominate the World.
Stating that "90% of the stuff in Walmart comes from China, so what can we do" is a cop-out and should not assuage one's conscience. Likewise for E-vehicle products.
In closing, I would ask; "Do you really want your kids (or grand kids) to live in a world where China calls the shots??
Click to expand...
I AGREE!

It's gonna be really hard to not buy CHINA's shit.
Main reason most STUFF is from CHINA is, that the RICH aren't happy being in the top 10% they want to be in the 1%. The more they make the more they want.

If Trump's idea of tariffs on imports and the Corporations tax cuts, you would think that might help. But it hasn't. Corporations are making more money but the employees aren't. Sure gonna be hard to buy US made products with a lousy maybe 2% raise over years in some cases.

Dan
 
It the stuff we are getting from China really a bargain?
If I buy a $100 motor, it costs me up to $150 to get it shipped.
Couldn't, say Mexico, make a motor that might cost $50 in parts and get it to the States for less than $250?
I certainly wouldn't want any pressure put on the vendors here in the States, it's not their doing where the stuff is made, but if we made it known that we be willing to pay a fair "World" price, could they not approach the Co.s in Taiwan and Thailand where there are already producers? I guess Grin already gets a lot of things from Taiwan.
Maybe I'm being unrealistic.
 
The other thing is, a Pew Research Poll (hardly a right-wing entity) show that 66% of Americans have a negative view of China and that was 5 days ago.
Walmart and others may be forced to rethink their sourcing.
I can't put myself in others position, as I said, I'm retired and the economy crash doesn't effect me much. And I'm somewhat insulated from the coming inflation here in Mexico.
But I know one thing, even in a country where half the people say the hole is square and the other half say it's round, Americans have always had a strong sense of morality and I think they still do.
I'm watching the China gestapo attacking students in a Hong Kong university as I write this.
 
motomech said:
Americans have always had a strong sense of morality and I think they still do.
Click to expand...
Sadly I have seen that Americans have a strong sense of morality - as long as it doesn't cost them a penny.

If foreign and domestic products cost the same, you'll see everyone dropping Chinese goods. But since they are generally cheaper - "well, be serious here. I don't have a lot of money and my buying a few things isn't going to make a difference. I can't really afford it."
 
Well then instead of China, it will be Indonesia, Pakistan, India and other 3rd world locales where child slavery is accepted, no worker safeguards, no worker rights, corrupt governments and the list goes on.
 
False equivalence argument.
Those countries are not in China's league when it comes to malevolence.
 
markz said:
Well then instead of China, it will be Indonesia, Pakistan, India and other 3rd world locales where child slavery is accepted, no worker safeguards, no worker rights, corrupt governments and the list goes on.
Click to expand...
And Americans will gobble up their products and pat themselves on the back for being such intelligent and frugal shoppers.
 
I doubt any country on the planet will be able to create the supply chain efficiency and infrastructure of knowledge & skills on how to use it that China has over the past few decades, until that happens organically at some point in the future.

Nor do 99.9% of its customers care about the kind of ethical issues raised.

Obviously TPTB, business leaders and their politicians seeking scapegoats and distractions are happy to use China for those purposes, and to the extent their paid "social media" trolls are successful

little attention is paid to all the ongoing war crimes and exploitative injustices inherent in our own societies.
 
Whilst i completely agree with your basis for your decision, i fear it will make realistic project Ebike component procurement extremely difficult and at the least compromised.
Many of the components we use are either manufactured Mainland China or close supporting countries.
It would be useful to draw up a spreadsheet of the components most commonly sourced from China , with equivalent , non Chinese components, suppliers, with costings etc.. or at least to identify “black spots” where no equivalent is available, ?
 
Speaking of elephants, I already live in a country that has a former reality TV host/Realtor calling the shots. There's something worse than this?
 
2020's far from over fellas, let's not give whoever's playing this timeline any more great ideas
 
motomech said:
Whether or not it originated in a lab and how it "escaped" is not exactly clear, but that they covered up the risk and then lied to the World is well established. They shut down domestic flights, but allowed 100,000's of people from Wuhan to fly around the World. So if we evaluate using the "low bar", it is negligent homicide instead of murder.
Click to expand...
Hanlon's Razor, as always, applies.
(You could ask the same question of US leadership - did they have a plan for killing 120,000 Americans, or was the problem just negligent homicide?)
In closing, I would ask; "Do you really want your kids (or grand kids) to live in a world where China calls the shots??
Click to expand...
Personally no. Their record on human rights is abysmal. They are starting to show some awareness of the environment, but are decades behind us, and will likely need to go through the same process we did (i.e. a long period of denial before they decide it really is a problem.)

The issue is that we are our own worst enemy here. People can have all the high minded values they want - but when there's a sale at Wal-Mart they are going to go there and buy the $9 beach chairs and the $19 beer coolers. We could try to stop that with tariffs but they have a long history of having fairly negative effects on both consumers and the economy of the country implementing them. We could try to stop that with some sort of 'appeal to your values' or something - but we've all seen how well that worked with coronavirus, a disease which is actively killing tens of thousands of Americans. If you can't get people to work together to save fellow Americans, not much chance in getting people to work together to mildly punish a faraway country.

On the ebike side of things, again, you're not going to see people pay much more for their stuff. It's axiomatic that if, tomorrow, everyone refused to buy Chinese products, then the US (and Canadian, and Mexican, and Argentinian etc) ebike industries would soar and replace all that material within a year or so, while Luna (and companies like that) went out of business. But if you read the threads here, the refrain "well that's too expensive" comes up again and again. So for those people, the choice is cheap Chinese stuff or no ebiking.

In the interest of making positive suggestions - might someone start a list here of non-Chinese manufacturers for ebike parts? Perhaps if we emphasize the next EMS enough here it could have a minor but noticeable impact on purchase decisions.
 
I would most likely not spend my hard-earned money on e-bike parts manufactured by an American public corporation. We know from experience that means they would be overpriced, over-IP'ed, hostile to user service, manufactured as cheaply as possible, and obsolescent by design.

I'll take underengineered, actually cheap, public domain, and crude Chinese parts every time over the corporate American way.

I know that American small business can offer very good value (or not), but I also know they are exceedingly unlikely to get a break in the system we have. If they succeed handsomely, they go public, and then the above stipulated rules apply.
 
JackFlorey said:
In the interest of making positive suggestions - might someone start a list here of non-Chinese manufacturers for ebike parts? Perhaps if we emphasize the next EMS enough here it could have a minor but noticeable impact on purchase decisions.
Click to expand...

I'd like to see that too, especially with stipulations like with Hong Kong companies or threads displaying general quality or common issues.

Balmorhea said:
I'll take underengineered, actually cheap, public domain, and crude Chinese parts every time over the corporate American way.
Click to expand...

Ugh, what great choices we have.
 
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