The oft-quoted adage, “Quantity has a quality of its own!”, has been attributed to Lenin, Stalin, the US Defence community, Clausewitz and many others – depending on who you ask. While the search for the origin of the statement continues, no other country has taken this statement as a fundamental operating philosophy more seriously than China.
Flashback momentarily to your recent shopping trip for any appliance, gizmo or general product, and you will distinctly remember being offered at least two ‘Chinese-made’ for the price of one ‘original’. That sums up the Chinese quality control ethos and intent. Lest the author is accused of hyperbole, a closer look at quality issues that afflict Chinese products is warranted. From COVID masks and infrastructure to defence equipment, nothing has escaped Chinese ‘quality control’ – or rather, the lack of it.
As the world geared up to take the COVID challenge head-on, Chinese manufacturing geared up to meet global demand to tackle the virus from Wuhan. The result was not pretty. Lack of quality and reliability seriously affected the ability of many countries to deal with the pandemic, possibly leading to avoidable loss of life. The Dutch Health Ministry was forced to recall 600,000 face masks on quality concerns; 60,000 test kits used in Spain were declared unreliable; almost 30% of PPE kits delivered to India were substandard; the European Commission was forced to halt the delivery of 10 million face masks; and viral memes on social media showed face masks supplied by China to Pakistan at ‘friendship price’ had striking similarities to hastily repurposed innerwear.
The issue of quality control when it comes to Chinese products stems from fundamental flaws in their philosophy of design, manufacture and supply. At every step, it would seem, keeping pricing competitive overrides quality control. This has been well documented by many analysts who have often written about how the focus on quantity and quick turnaround makes quality consciousness unviable in the Chinese industrial environment. Factory quality managers explaining how the product is “just a little off’ from specifications, or a paper trail of quality-control procedures that still fail to yield a quality product, have been reported as being par for the course. The direct relation between product quality and product cost in the Chinese context has been well established. The malaise extends to infrastructure and hi-end equipment, too, as has been the experience of many countries. Many manufacturing companies across the world have expressed their concern on quality control on raw materials, especially steel supplied by Chinese companies.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which was launched with great fanfare in 2013 as the panacea for the ills of trade connectivity, is yet another project synonymous with not just impractical cost and rising debts but it has become a stark symbol of half-finished, hastily made, poor-quality infrastructure – an unequivocal statement of the inability of China to deliver quality. The BRI eminently showcases the Chinese propensity to choose quantity over quality and obfuscation over transparency.
Recently some articles have generated alarm over the growth of the Chinese defence equipment and manufacturing, a more sobering assessment however, brings out the serious gaps in terms of quality of manpower, training and equipment. World over, reliability and quality of defence equipment are known as the true mark of a nation’s technology, manufacturing ability and maintenance practices, however here too, China seems to have missed the mark entirely – opting for quantity and quick delivery over quality.
If open-sources information and assessment are to be believed, the rush to obtain China’s low-cost, ‘high-tech’ defence equipment has resulted in serious financial loss to many countries, with large defensive capabilities gaps persisting. Cases of supply of poor-quality drones, armoured personnel carriers, missiles and even warships are well documented. In some cases, loss of lives due to malfunctioning equipment have also been reported. Countries with security concerns compounded with budget challenges, who have turned to China for defence equipment, have not fared well.
To be fair, management and production philosophies tell us that the trade-off between quality and quantity is as old as the industrial revolution. Chinese industries would, therefore, be no exception to this conundrum. But it is this author’s opinion that in the foreseeable future, the prefix ‘Chinese’ to any product is unlikely to evoke the same sense of reliability and faith in quality as Swiss for timepieces, Germans for automobiles and Danes for confectionary.
Caveat Emptor!
