Don’t expect Chinese counterfeiting to end soon, says Hong Kong expert

Don’t expect Chinese counterfeiting to end soon, says Hong Kong expert    Whether it's as serious to public health as tainted cat food or exploding laptop batteries, or whether it's limited to financial damages from ripped-off apparel, China's efforts to block the production and sale of counterfeit goods won't match the counterfeit industry's ability to produce and sell those goods anytime soon, according to a professor at the Hong Kong International School.
   In an editorial in the Asia Times Wednesday, Kent Ewing said that high profile executions of officials implicated in the regulatory acceptance of tainted goods, and China's retaliatory efforts to block seafood, mineral water, meat, poultry and other products from Western nations like Australia and the United States, are only methods to deflect attention away from the fact that producing fake products remains a highly lucrative and relatively unregulated industry in China.
   'In the future, expect more scandals involving tainted Chinese products followed by more rhetoric and selective retaliation from the Chinese government — and maybe another high-profile execution or two,' he wrote. 'But until Beijing puts its regulatory house in order and reduces the rampant cheating and corruption that are endemic to the system, there will be no substantial change in the sometimes frightening status quo. At present, the manufacture of fake and tainted products is a hugely profitable business in China, the world’s largest exporter of consumer goods. To stop it would require severing the unscrupulous government-business nexus that has become part and parcel of China’s stunning economic growth.'
   In particular, Ewing said, the blockage of exports from Western nations seems to be an effort to obscure statistics regarding safety of Chinese goods — statistics that typically differ depending on whether they come from Beijing or other sources.
   'The retaliation has been accompanied by an adamant insistence on the quality of Chinese exports, with an editorial in the state-run China Daily asserting that “more than 99 percent of food exports to the U.S. in the last three years met quality standards” — an interesting claim considering that Chinese regulators have admitted that nearly 20 percent of consumer products checked for national consumption are substandard or tainted,' Ewing wrote.