It has “red scare” vibes to me, not that you intended as such. It was a decent point, but I think the contagion word especially so soon after Covid is perhaps a poor word choice. I don’t think caution is unwarranted when dealing with products made in China, like nearly every cell phone ever made, or this camera drone.
I’m also skeptical of other products made in other countries, but there are vastly more consumer electronics products sold in America made in China than any other country, along with open hostility to some Western companies who want to sell in China without undue government influence.
I’m skeptical of all my purchases independent of where they were manufactured, but threat assessment isn’t context blind. I’d be more suspicious of a Saudi-made iPhone than a Chinese one, but less suspicious of an Indian iPhone than either. I’m sure my own unconscious biases are feeding into these suspicions, but I honestly don’t have reasonable alternatives to most of my electronics made in any particular country. The news tells us to fear Huawei, which makes me wonder what other warnings we may not be hearing. Do other countries warn against using American products and services?
I’d be curious about reliability and quality control variance between countries of manufacture, but I suspect that timely data on this would be hard to gather.
I quite like the vast majority of my products, wherever they are made. I just want trustworthy products made safely by willing employees paid fair wages for reasonable working hours. In that regard, it’s hard to find anything I know to meet these criteria, even when it’s made in USA.
Buying better isn’t always buying less, but they can be complementary goals.
That’s just inflammatory. There are indeed reasons to be skeptical and careful about Chinese imports because of the actions and politics of the state among other reasons… but there you’re just name calling. Do you have actual reasons for your doubts or are they just “bad guys” to you?
I typed a reasonable reply to this but it got flagged. It shouldn’t have been flagged, it was reasonable and didn’t label anyone as “bad guys.” I don’t like that we can’t talk about DJI being bad, because they are a Chinese company, despite it being obviously true.
DJI also sends data to US GOVT agencies as required by law. To label any company "bad" simply because of their compliance to law is a rather self-limiting view.
Most tech stuff is made in China. Why does is matter so much if the capitalists harvesting the fruits of the Chinese workers are American rather than fellow Chinese?
