Toy manufacturing is the gift that keeps giving if you’re on the China beat during the holidays. After presidential candidate Barack Obama’s remarks about banning Chinese toy imports to the U.S., the Los Angeles Times’s Barbara Demick visited Beijing’s Hongqiao toy market:
Especially to an older generation of Chinese, who were raised without the privileges today’s children enjoy, the foreign obsession with toy quality is genuinely baffling, if not self-indulgent and arrogant.
“Americans are making a big fuss over nothing,” said Jin Jian, 46, who says that as a boy he made his own toys from walnut shells. As for Obama, he said, “That . . . . [here’s where the something unprintable comes in] won’t get elected if he tries to ban Chinese toys.” [Full text]
The day after Christmas, China Daily reminds readers that “Made-in-China products are popular around the world.” Take the case of Jennings Harry:
Jennings Harry, a US resident living in Washington, planned to buy a cute doll as a Christmas gift for her six-year-old daughter this year. She wanted this particular kind of dolls because the doll could lie down on the floor and laugh after being tickled. However, every time she went to the store, she was disappointed to find that the toys were out of stock, the People’s Daily Overseas Edition reported.
Same as the other toys sold in the United States, the tickling toys are made mainly in China and are often in short supply. [Full text]
According to one unnamed E.U. official: “Without Chinese toys, kids around the world would not have so much happiness.”
[Image via China Daily]
