Marc Jacobs' 'faux fur' garments actually use the coats of Chinese canines

[Hekate]

33. You mean like avoiding racist tags like Yellow Peril? Here's my method:

What you want to do is criticize -- even excoriate and abominate -- behavior and the results of that behavior. That is what I focus on. That it originates in the context and confluence of both American culture and Chinese culture is important, and it means that there is plenty of blame to go around, but in order for criticism to lead to change it has to be talked about in a useful and meaningful way.

American culture is divided into different parts by class, though we don't like to think of it that way. We were at one time accustomed to consumer protection laws that actually meant something, i.e., safe food, non-flammable pajamas, and the like. That is past, but most people have not yet absorbed that. But that expectation remains and that ignorance spreads out globally, causing people to imagine that all countries that we do business with surely must have, for instance, food safety laws that are actually enforced. (Imagine our surprise when our pets started dropping dead because of poisoned pet food ingredients from China.)

The consumer class wants a good bargain, and the lower down the scale they are, the more they need it. Consumers, by and large, no matter their income, just imagine all is well until it manifestly is not. And they get distracted by the next shiny thing on tv.

We also imagine that US companies that do business abroad are careful. Imagine our surprise when that turns out not to be the case.

Which brings me to the corporate class in the US. Their rapacity and greed know no bounds. The only boundaries they accept are strictly enforced legal ones, and since Reagan came to office those have become fewer and fewer. We have significant problems with that here at home, as any DUer knows.

Now China. People in the US (in their blissful ignorance) are accustomed to thinking of China as a Communist country with a collective mentality. Americans don't know exactly what that means but no matter. What people fail to grasp is that people in different cultures think differently. China is very, very old, and they rightfully look on us as upstart pups, if I may be so colloquial. They don't crave to be like us in any significant degree. In all their long history there have been only a few really great changes in the way they do things, and the Revolution was one of them.

But it's interesting about that -- the Revolutionaries tried, in their idealism, to make the basic unit of society the State. But the basic unit of Chinese society has always been, and remains, the family, the people you are directly related to. Westerners make much of the individual, but not so the Chinese. Americans make much of loyalty to Country, and in theory so do Chinese, but the real loyalty, as far as I can tell, remains family. The Communist Party replaced the Emperor and wields great power; they still have a civil service system just as for centuries before; there are still plenty of peasants and others of low degree; and there is still the merchant class, suppressed by the Communists, but never ever eradicated.

And I think their merchant class has a lot in common with ours, except that so much of it takes place at much lower levels, where every penny saved is a multiplier benefitting someone's family. Damn -- that was the thing about the poisoned pet food (and inside China, poisoned baby formula). All along the way someone was squeezing pennies out of the cost of manufacturing.

I hope you can see where I am coming from. The situation outrages me, too. But because I am not a racist and do not want to become one, I really do try to parse out how this came to be and go from there in looking for ways to fix it. From my point of view, the place we have to start is HERE. Oh, we can get our diplomats to lean on their diplomats, and our president can toast theirs with Maotai at tough trade negotiations. But the real problem, as I see it, is our very own rapacious and unregulated "merchant class" and our very own blindingly ignorant American people.

Thanks for asking.