China's Toxic Email Problem

Everyone's picking on China these days and for understandable reasons.

China is on nearly every spam email stopper's blacklist of countries to reject email from. It will take a lot of work to change this.

The scare started with melamine in the pet food and has progressed on to children's toys coated in lead paint.

And have you seen the crash test video of the Chinese car? Ouch!

For comparison, Consumer Reports has videos of similar tests on other vehicles (be warned - it's easy to spend all day on this site).

But for a moment, I'll profess a little sympathy for the devil. How would American or Japanese cars have faired in such tests 35 years ago? Were pet food companies doing regular enough testing to have caught the poisoned food? And who doesn't have fond childhood memories of eating sweet, delicious lead paint?

China is still a developing country with lower standards and a higher tolerance for consumer risk. We're consuming a lot of goods initially designed by and for people making a lot less money.

Often the risk is reasonable. How much more would an iPhone cost if it was made in America or even Japan? Apple has a reputation for quality - it will hold Chinese manufacturers to their standards.

I was recently grocery shopping and came across some king crab legs for $7.99 a pound. I almost bought them. Then I noticed they were caught in Russia and processed in China, and decided to pass.

To maintain its presence in certain safety-sensitive markets like food and toys, China will need to improve the quality of its products.

China's ability to make further progress providing internet services is also at risk due to quality and safety concerns.

Wait, how can internet services be unsafe? One word - spam.

While they provide a relatively small fraction of internet services such as website hosting and design, China is the source of a large amount of spam.

Email from China rarely has any content the recipient wanted to get. As a result, most antispam tools delete messages sent from there.

This poses a serious problem going forward. The developing world stands to benefit greatly from the information services market. If China can't clean up it's email, it may find itself locked out.

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