On September 5, the US's Mattel Inc., the world's biggest toy
manufacturer, announced a recall of 848,000 Chinese-made toys which
were said to probably contain excessive amounts of lead. This was
the third time that Mattel had recalled Chinese-made toys since
this August. Frequent recalls have provoked crises over China's toy
exports and even "made-in-China" products as a whole.
Reportedly Mattel has 65 percent of its toys produced in China.
As matter of fact, Chinese producers make these products solely
based on the designs provided by foreign companies. Previously the
foreign companies even provided raw materials to the Chinese toy
makers. Currently they allow the latter to use Chinese-made
materials in order to cut costs. Consequently this makes quality
monitoring more difficult.
In addition, a market analyst pointed out that Mattel should
assume the bulk of responsibility for the recall. Constant charges
against Chinese manufacturers on the part of Mattel may arouse
suspicion that Mattel wants to duck its reliability, the analyst
warned.
For more details, please read the full story in Chinese. (
http://paper.people.com.cn/gjjrb/html/2007-09/06/content_19014476.htm)
(China.org.cn September 6, 2007)
