When you can't even trust that food is real, and when you have to bribe even low level provincial government employees (can you imagine needing to bribe DMW workers or even police?) - what else is an average person to do except to treat it as the norm in order to survive? Unless you're an elite, the only other option is to leave, and not everyone has that choice. Very little is considered wrong over there, aside from criticizing the powers that be; as long as it helps your clan. It doesn't help when Western companies and governments look the other way, as we see in past news stories and even the comments here.
I'm not condoning the behavior; just explaining.
From a naive Finnish perspective you could see American business culture as dishonest. People lie all the time and promise things that are false and you need massive amount of legalese or they fuck you over. When they say something, you can't trust it as much as you can trust a Finn (or Swede). American way is to lie to your face in pre-negotiation but then be truthful to the legally binding agreement. Germans or Belgians are more truthful beforehand and they stick to deals better without legal enforcement looming over them, but require more detailed written deals than Finns. Who is right? Should we punish Americans for their behavior or adopt their culture?
Of course not. You must understand that that the level of acceptable exaggeration, overpromise and bullshit and trickery is strictly culture dependent and relative. Someone is dishonest if they "lie this amount above average" in their cultural context. After you make an adjustment, you know how to get the truth.
Chinese manufacturers have the capability to stick to standards, take responsibility and deliver high quality stuff. It's just more dependent on personal relationship. Just placing an order has less trust as default. Either you develop "quanxi" with your suppliers or work trough some third party that understands both worlds. Third party understands what you need and knows how to get it from the Chinese suppliers because they have a relationship.
Chinese pay the cost that comes with their business culture. They can't network as fast as you can in open western cultures with more default trust between strangers.
Contrary to the impression your post gives, the EU has much more "sanctions" against food (esp. imports) than the US does, and is generally taxing much heavier and restricting many more things. Importing essentially any milk product into the EU is only possible on an exception basis. Trump has a LOT more work before extra sanctions in the US will become comparable to the EU ones.
What is often not said is that the EU not only has sanctions on its borders against food products, it actually has internal sanctions and regulations that are purely political in nature.
For example "champagne" in the EU can only be made within a particular region in France. Which leads to funny, in a sad way, consequences:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/feb/15/eu-fears-in...
This applies to many products. Wines, cheeses, cakes, fruit, meat, potatoes, candy ... and is generally absolutely ridiculous:
https://www.foodmanufacture.co.uk/Article/2014/11/13/Interac...
For your other part of your comment, I am unwilling to give a real answer. Obviously the US checks it's food quality. It's made different choices than the EU, famously the US allows hormone "enhanced" meat, but it does check food quality and safety. There are heavy penalties for breaking them.
Did you look at the map? It's nearly all things with a place name in the product name. For example, "Welsh Beef". Why is it reasonable for a consumer to buy Welsh Beef and for it to possibly have come from somewhere other than Wales?
It seems to me, more like generalising the concept of trademarks to place names rather than just company names and brand name.
Not all cultures are great. If you are claiming “all cultures are great”, then perhaps “great” has lost any useful meaning.
Discrimination, as the ability to discriminate features to identify useful pattens, is not *-ist; it’s a critical skill that is being sullied by some neo-intellectual BS that passes for “equality” or something.
The ability to identify patterns of behaviour prevalent to a class of suppliers and avoid them, rewarding other supplies — even from the same area of the world — who are better; even “great” perhaps, is a valuable skill...
But perhaps I’m wrong. They’re all great. Carry on.
It's the norm in the west to not conflate culture with race. But to think that this is the norm in the rest of the world is to project your value system on others.
If we define "a culture" as set of sociological customs, value systems, expected behaviours and stimuli/response criteria; and if we define "culture greatness" as such sociological customs, value systems, and behaviours that lead to specified and asserted goals;
than one can reasonably compare and contrast cultures in meeting (or even striving) to these goals, and thus discuss their greatness.
If forced at gunpoint to trust one person in my supply chain, I would instantly choose the Taiwanese-American in San Jose over the mainland-Chinese in Shenzhen, every time. Likewise, I think exactly the same Indian employee will be more productive if physically transplanted to Silicon Valley and surrounded by assimilated Indian-Americans than if set up in an office in Bangalore surrounded at all times by other Indians and Indian businesses. And equally likewise, I have noted a large difference in my own work productivity doing similar tasks under different employers, or even in different work groups under the same employer.
So it isn't even national culture, racial culture, or regional culture, but also corporate culture. Breaking news on the Obvious Channel: social apes found to be heavily influenced by their peers.
Ancestor post was obliquely referring to the oft-reported tendency of mainland-Chinese manufacturers to try to cheat their customers. They have been caught copying protected or trade-secret IP, counterfeiting, substituting cheaper out-of-spec parts, and inserting hidden hardware backdoors. Outside of China, engineering/construction companies tend to import Chinese subcontractors rather than use any local labor. That's all just PRC-Chinese business culture. If you pluck individual employees out of a Chinese firm, and hire them into a multinational based out of another country, they will be perfectly fine, aside from the slightly elevated possibility that PRC intelligence will aggressively recruit them as an asset to steal exploitable business secrets. If you can manage to pull everyone they care about out of the reach of the PRC, they will likely be a great investment for you.
Clearly, the national-political-business culture of mainland PRC China is hostile to businesses that have significant interests outside of China. The government there is racist, controlling, and mercantilist-protectionist, and the businesses with a physical presence have to fit in to that culture in order to exist, along with the traditional system of guanxi social capital. It makes them difficult to work with, but as long as the price is right, it's still worth it to try. You just don't give them access to any secrets, and make sure your QA department is full of no-nonsense hardasses. And as mentioned elsewhere in this topic, that means you may have to measure total mass and moment of inertia around multiple rotational axes in order to find any unauthorized modifications that might expose you to company-bankrupting liability in your business culture. You can't "trust, but verify"; you might just have to check every unit of every shipment.
As for culture culture--wushu martial arts, the action movies including it, silk, noodles, jadeite carvings, fine porcelain, traditional architecture, religions, herbalism, the woo-woo pseudo-religion attached to the medicine traditions, etc.--Chinese culture is indisputably great, especially considering that it's what's left after the PRC government tried to annihilate most of it as part of their revolution.
What measures a culture's greatness? How can this value be empirically deduced?
That's not to say that there is a such thing as single-dimension "greatness" metric. However, outlawing value judgments is going too far in the other direction. Of course, such things can be quite sensitive, and should be done thoughtfully.
the value of civic participation and honesty
trust
Whether you like what your supplier does or does not is of no concern. If couple of units can be detected and written off it is treated as cost and you move on to decide if it is still profitable and whether you can get better deal somewhere else.
You let you emotions rule and it just means you are not fit for the job.
Two thoughts:
> they typically will not be thinking they are doing anything wrong. They are just testing if you notice and if you do not they will say it makes no difference for you but saves them costs.
This is how children behave. Still feels like you’re rewarding bad behavior. You’re enabling them.
I think it’s more that you’ve valued the low per unit price over having a healthy contract. Your vendor is incentivized to make all of their money off of externalities and your company think it’s cheaper to outwit them than to demand QC on their end. Whose brand will be sullied if you miss some of these units and a customer finds the spyware? Not theirs.
And second thought, shouldn’t serial numbers be coming off the line in ascending order? The kind of work they are doing would require taking parts off the line and putting them back later so odd lots of SNs are the ones you need to verify.
You could also be mandating how many boards are allowed or that the SNs go on early in the build process.