New York TImes. 11 April 2001. Standoff Over Plane Brings Calls to Boycott Chinese-Made Goods. Excerpts. [Analysis at bottom.]
WASHINGTON, April 10 — Kmart has received thousands of calls and e-mail messages from customers urging the discount retailer to stop buying so many of its shoes, fishing rods, T-shirts and stereos from China, prompting the company to warn Chinese diplomats that it will seek new suppliers unless the crew of an American surveillance aircraft is released promptly, company executives said today.
The complaints that have streamed into Kmart's customer service line in Troy, Mich., in recent days were an unprecedented and apparently spontaneous response to the overseas crisis, the executives said. Store managers have also telephoned headquarters to relay concerns that customers were annoyed that the stores stocked so many "made in China" goods when American military personnel were being held in that country against their will, they said.
"Our customers are telling us to quit doing business in China — that they're not going to buy things made there anymore," said Dale Apley, vice president for public policy. "These are just the people taking time out of their schedule to contact us. How many other people out there are thinking the same thing?"
The outpouring of anger may indicate that the continuing standoff may have started to shake one of the foundations of the United States-China relationship: the partnership of trade and investment that has grown rapidly despite regular disruptions in bilateral ties during the last decade and a half.
... Like Wal-Mart, Target and other discount leaders, Kmart sells billions of dollars of Chinese-manufactured consumer goods each year. Total trade volumes have soared, and often, from month to month, the United States trade deficit with China tops the one with Japan.
The most recent Commerce Department statistics showed that the United States trade deficit with China increased 19.3 percent in January, rising to $7.2 billion, while the deficit with Japan narrowed slightly, to $5.9 billion, the lowest in 13 months.
Mr. Apley said Kmart had no plans to pull Chinese goods off its shelves and would like to continue to do business with factories there. But he said the customer response had prompted executives to put Chinese business contacts on notice that Kmart would have no choice but to "diversify its suppliers" unless the matter was resolved quickly.
At Target Stores, based in Minneapolis, Patty Morris, a spokeswoman, said the company had decided not to answer media questions about customer complaints or product sourcing policies.
... [S]ome business leaders in Washington share Kmart's alarm. Lobbyists here say they worry that the detention of the crew will make it hard to hold back a tide of anti-China sentiment. "We have been the most vocal advocates of open and expanded trade with China," said Thomas Donohue, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce. "But we are going to support these young men and women being held over there. If this goes on much longer, the economic advances are going to be hard to sustain."
... Recent polls have found that a majority of people consider the military detainees to be hostages, though the Bush administration has not used that term. The polls also show that a majority do not want the administration to apologize for the incident.
... The United Association of Union Plumbers, Pipefitters and Sprinkler Fitters has devoted $500,000 to buy radio advertisements during baseball games around the country urging a boycott. "The crew of an American plane, forced to make an emergency landing in China, is held hostage by the Chinese government," the commercial says. "Think about that. And vow to buy no Chinese products until the servicemen and women are released."
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I suspect that the above is a fabricated piece of bourgeois agit-prop intended to shape, not reflect, public opinion. Nevertheless, it is interesting in that it perpetuates the MTU myth of the omnipotent consumer---a myth that serves both the 'left' as they try to buy, through boycotts, a green capitalism as well as the right as they try to buy, through boycotts, a protectionist nationalism.
Both attempts fail every time, as Marxists well know---for the simple reason that, the myth of the MTU aside,'production produces consumption: (1) by providing the material of consumption; (2) by determining the mode of consumption; [and] (3) by creating in the consumer a need for the objects which it first presents as products' (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress 1970, p. 197).
Perhaps those who are calling for American workers to boycott Chinese goods would like to first call on American employers to increase American worker's wages until the 'hostage crisis' is resolved. After all, workers can only 'vote' (purchase) their conscience when the dollars in their pockets meet or exceed the PRICE of the conscience in question. As Marx and Engels famously said, '[t]he cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls' (Communist Manifesto, International 1948, p. 13)---only now those 'Chinese walls' belong to America.
Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/downwithcapitalism Protelarian news & Leninist debate