A high school classmate of mine once started an international trade company in Guangzhou. She was constantly busy, but from time to time she would write down small episodes from work. One story she shared has stayed with me, not because it was dramatic, but because it was too plain and too revealing.
A foreign business owner came to her looking for a certain model of screw. He needed a large quantity immediately, preferably from existing stock. She checked and told him that the model was available, but there was one problem: the quality did not match exactly what he had specified.
The strange part was that the screws he wanted were not high-grade products. They were inferior ones. The screws she could supply were much better.
So she asked whether he would consider buying the better-quality version instead. His answer came at once: “No, no.” Then he explained, quite frankly and even rather politely, that good products could be used for many years, but that would not leave much room for profit. Poor products wore out quickly, and that meant more money could be made later.
The deal, of course, did not go through.
At first, I only found the story amusing. It seemed like another little example of a businessman’s clever calculation. But during the period when television reports were repeatedly discussing the Sichuan bus fire, and experts appeared on screen offering all kinds of explanations, that sentence suddenly came back to me: we do not want the good-quality ones.
It sounded almost like a footnote to the accident.
In many situations, many people are tempted by exactly that logic. Businesspeople may think this way because poor-quality goods cost less. A lower price makes them more competitive, makes them easier to sell, and often pleases consumers in the short term. If the product also has a shorter life, that may be even better for the seller, because replacement and repeat consumption bring more profit. For someone who sees commerce only as a way to squeeze out the largest possible gain, inferior quality is not a defect. It becomes part of the business model.
Consumers, too, often participate in this pattern, whether consciously or not. When buying something, many people look first at the price. A better product usually means a higher price, and a higher price is enough to make most people hesitate. A cheaper alternative, even when its quality cannot be guaranteed, easily becomes the first choice.
This is not hard to understand. In China, the wealthy are still a minority, while most people live on wages and salaries. The market ultimately follows the choices of consumers, and many consumers are forced by daily pressures—or guided by short-term calculations—to care more about the immediate saving than the long-term cost. That helps explain why so many “two-yuan shops” and “one-yuan shops” appear in small and medium-sized cities, and why night markets are crowded with street vendors. Much of what is sold in such places is crudely made and unreliable, yet low prices still draw large numbers of buyers.
Once merchants think this way and consumers respond in the same direction, the whole market begins to show a low-quality effect: the worse the goods are, the more easily they may be welcomed by price-sensitive buyers; the worse the goods are, the more attractive they may become to sellers looking for quick returns.
And what about the institutions that are supposed to supervise the market? They often fail to perform their role. In pursuit of rising consumption figures, visible achievements during a term of office, or even private benefit, those in charge may turn a blind eye as inferior goods spread through the market. Instead of effective regulation and broad guidance, there is often tolerance, neglect, and laissez-faire.
Twenty years ago, Chinese goods were associated in many places with reliable quality. Neighboring countries once took pride in buying Chinese-made products. Twenty years later, however, “Made in China” has too often been linked with labels such as knockoff, inferior product, or junk, and in some places people instinctively avoid it.
The same logic appears in many public incidents repeatedly reported on television: so-called tofu-dreg projects, broken bridges, collapsed buildings, the melamine scandal, and now the bus fire. Behind each of these, in one way or another, lies the shadow of inferior materials, inferior products, or inferior standards.
Consider the bus accident again. When the transport company purchased vehicles, if even basic safety equipment such as emergency hammers was not properly provided, what kind of thinking was behind that decision? It was the thinking of saving wherever possible. Looked at from another angle, it was also the thinking of not wanting the better-quality thing.
From that one sentence—“we do not want the good-quality ones”—one can see a shortage not only in the marketplace, but also in judgment and morality. In an age when almost everyone is pulled into commerce, a society that cares only about immediate gain and ignores long-term consequences will eventually be dragged toward disaster.
We speak constantly of pursuing a better life, yet we live surrounded by shoddy goods. That is a harsh irony. If tomorrow is really to be better, then this habit of saying “we do not want the good-quality ones” should come to an end.