An alarming number of Chinese imports are turning up defective, dangerous—and even deadly!

The way things are going, imports bearing the “Made in China” tag soon may require warning labels like the ones found on many prescription drugs: “adverse effects may include severe burns, broken legs, cancer and even death.” And that’s just to name a few.
A s the U.S.’s appetite for Chinese products soars, an increasing number of the goods showing up in American grocery stores and shopping malls are turning out to be tainted, contaminated, damaged or otherwise defective. Over the past year, Americans have been seriously hurt or killed by Chinese-produced goods as diverse as heparin (a blood thinner that was made with deadly ingredients), tires that fall apart on the road and toys coated with toxic lead paint.
“Because of the lack of regulation, there really is no way to tell where the next problem is going to come from,” said William Hubber, former associate commissioner for policy and planning at the Food and Drug Administration, the government agency that is supposed to protect consumers. “Basically, there’s no regulatory oversight, so manufacturers and producers in China are operating with a fair amount of impunity.”
That’s bad news for consumers, and it gets worse. China has now moved well beyond cheap goods, like T-shirts, toys and low-end electronics. Today, American companies are outsourcing everything they can—from raw commodities and components to pharmaceuticals and sophisticated manufactured goods—to low-cost Chinese makers.
Read our supplementary story on the dangerous importation of heparin, a drug that proved deadly.While most of the products imported from China are OK, a disturbing number are not: last year, two-thirds of all the manufactured goods identified as defective by the Consumer Product Safety Commission came from China.
All told, the CPSC recalled 447 items in 2007, of which 269 were manufactured in China, including things like faulty baby carriers, exploding air pumps, melting laptop batteries and collapsing swimming pool ladders.
Food products are also a cause for concern. Even though the FDA is only able to inspect a little over 1 percent of all imported food, it regularly bans what it inspects. Last year’s banned imports from China included dried apples covered in cancer-causing chemicals, sardines infested with bacteria, mushrooms grown using illegal pesticides and catfish tainted with antibiotics. It has long-since reached the point that American consumers are taking notice.
In February, the grocery store chain Trader Joe’s, which operates 285 stores in 23 states, began phasing out single-ingredient products from China, even though the goods in their stores had always proved to be safe. According to company spokeswoman Alison Mochizuki, “our customers have voiced their concerns about products from this region, and we have listened.”
The problem also caught the attention of the Palm Bay, Fla. city council, which last October proposed an outright ban on using city funds to purchase any goods made in China.
The issue also was addressed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who last after December’s toy scare said he would support both a ban on all toys from China as well as tougher inspections of Chinese imports by U.S. regulators.
However, the combination of America’s appetite for cheap imports, China’s unwillingness or inability to police their own manufacturers and the U.S. government’s failure to protect consumers means the question is when—not if—the next deadly Chinese imports will show up on American shelves.

China, We Have a Problem
The heart of the problem lies in the explosion in the volume and variety of Chinese imports pouring into American ports over the last decade, as regulators simply can’t keep up. In 2007, the U.S. spent $321.5 billion on Chinese imports, which accounted for over 16 percent of all goods brought into the country and 20 percent of everything China exports.
In the process, China became the U.S.’s top trading partner, surpassing Canada and capping a six-year period—from 2001 to 2007—during which the amount of Chinese imports nearly tripled.
As more companies scramble to claim their piece of this lucrative pie, competition has become increasingly intense. The result is that many Chinese manufacturers sign deals that leave them with razor-thin profit margins—often as low as 2 percent.
These deals require producers to keep production costs as low as possible. One of the easiest ways to do this is to substitute cheaper or counterfeit ingredients for the real thing.
“There’s an element of truth to the idea that Chinese sellers are putting inferior or substitute ingredients into their goods as a way to lower costs,” said Eric Johnson, professor of operations at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and an expert on toys made in China. “Using ingredients that cost less than the ones they had originally agreed to use when they signed a contract with the buyers is one way for them to make more of a profit.”
As a result, American companies have ended up with products like toothpaste containing a poisonous chemical used in antifreeze, fire alarms that don’t alarm when there’s a fire, candles that burn much more than the wick and hundreds of other suspicious goods.
Listen to statements by Joe Ridout, a Consumer Action spokesman, and Erik Autour of the National Retail Federation on what consumers can do to protect themselves.The import boom has also complicated the process of sourcing products from China. “As the amount of goods that is being produced has expanded, U.S. companies have not kept up by managing their supply chains,” said Johnson. “Many have even lost track of where the supplies are coming from, because the companies they are using for production are now getting their ingredients from suppliers inside of China that they haven’t worked with before.”
So far, the Chinese government has done little to raise quality standards or increase regulation.
By most reports, the Chinese State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) has become increasingly ineffective at monitoring the diverse exports streaming out of the country.
Corruption has also played a role. In 2006, the SFDA’s chief, Zheng Xiaoyu, was sentenced to death for taking what the courts described as “huge bribes” to approve faulty medicines.
But the execution did little to improve regulatory performance. Last year, the General Administration of Quality Supervision tested 114 products, including bottled water, canned fruit, dried fish and linens. One in five failed to meet China’s domestic safety standards.
“The Chinese have an FDA that is small and weak,” said Hubber. “And the [Chinese] government isn’t making much of an effort to regulate products.”

Toxic Trade
Since the start of the year, over a hundred dangerous food and manufactured products from China already have been taken off the shelves.

Our interactive graphic provides the most complete and up-to-date information on the hundreds of banned products—ranging from cod to baby carriers—that have been recalled or banned on American soil.Trouble at Home
Of course, some of the blame for the Chinese import problem lies on this side of the Pacific.
In congressional hearings held in late April, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) charged the FDA with failing to protect U.S. consumers.
“Last year, the nation’s regulatory failures resulted in dead dogs and cats. This year, it has tragically led to the deaths of people,” Rep. Stupak said. “If we don’t make some rapid progress in fixing the foreign drug inspection program, the next [food] or heparin tragedy will soon be upon us.”
But the FDA can’t be expected to solve the problems all by itself. In 1992, the U.S. received about one and a half million shipments from China. Last year, that number had exploded to over 11 million. The simple fact is that the FDA doesn’t have the authority or resources to deal with the international scope of their regulatory responsibilities.
According to Hubber, the FDA, which was originally designed to handle domestic inspection, is simply not capable of dealing with the dramatic increase in imports and outsourcing that now defines American supply chains.
If the government can’t do it, then it’s up to the American companies that are relying on Chinese producers to pick up the slack. Some, of course, already do: companies like Nike, IBM and Bambu have developed their own methods of making sure the products they’re making in China meet their company’s quality control standards.
“The reality is that the U.S. government and the FDA are not going to be able to fix this problem,” said Mike Doyle, director of Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “The retailers and producers better know what they’re getting into, and they need to make sure there are people doing oversight on everything on a daily basis—not on a spot-check basis.”
Until they do, buyer beware.
Our interactive graphic outlines four companies that have figured out how to make sure that their China-made goods are up to snuff.Wal-Mart’s Way
To keep prices low, the nation’s number one retailer has become increasingly reliant on Chinese-made goods.
With annual imports of over $20 billion, Wal-Mart ranks as China’s sixth largest trading partner, surpassing even Britain and Germany.
However, the company’s importance to the Chinese economy hasn’t prevented it from receiving products like toxic pet food, carcinogenic fish, dangerous toy trains and lead-laced baby bibs, all of which have been pulled from its stores in the past year.
Wal-Mart—far and away the largest U.S. retailer with over 3,000 stores and 1.3 million associates nationwide—rose to the top by offering a wide selection of low-cost merchandise. But keeping prices down has meant relying heavily on China, which now supplies over 70 percent of the goods that Wal-Mart sells. This has exposed its customers to many of the same hazards that plague other importers who rely on distant, unrelated producers.
The company has a history of working to reduce the regulation of the products it buys. Some of Wal-Mart’s critics have accused the company of lobbying (through the Food Marketing Institute) against legislation that would increase inspection of imported foods, actively resisting the passing of laws that would make it mandatory to train workers in product safety and opposing origin-labeling regulations for all imported goods.
And while the company has announced that it now is independently testing the products it sells, they didn’t answer FLYP’s repeated requests for information about specific policies and practices.

Bad Medicine
When a counterfeit ingredient was used to make heparin, it caused widespread panic…and death.
In February, pharmaceutical giant Baxter International issued a nationwide recall of injectable heparin, a widely used blood thinner that has become the latest item on the long and growing list of banned imports from China.
So far, the toxic batches of the drug have been linked to 81 deaths and 785 adverse reactions in the U.S.; contaminated samples also have turned up in ten other countries.
The FDA recently reported that the heparin doses included a counterfeit ingredient, chondroitin sulfate, which was chemically altered to mimic heparin’s blood-clotting properties and was undetectable during routine testing. And though it probably can’t be proved, the FDA is operating under the assumption that the Chinese manufacturer intentionally added the ingredient, which can be purchased at a fraction of the cost of the correct chemical, as a cost-cutting measure.
Testing revealed that one-third of all of the materials in some samples were contaminants. Dr. Janet Woodcock, the director of the FDA’s drug center, testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations that “it does strain one’s credibility to suggest that [the contamination] might have been done accidentally.”
William Hubber, former associate commissioner for policy and planning at the FDA, concurred. “To suggest the contaminants in heparin got there accidentally is far fetched. A lot of work went into making that stuff. The sulfate that was found in the bad batches was chemically altered. And to think that it was somehow inadvertently exported is hard to believe.”