Clothing items from world-renowned fashion brands such as Versace, Hermés, Dolce&Gabbana, Hugo Boss, and Trussardi were recently found substandard during a quality check performed by the government of China’s Zhejiang province, a wealthy part of the country on the eastern coast, near Shanghai.

The Chinese authorities performed a test on 85 batches of imported name-brand clothing items that are currently being sold in many shopping malls in the region, according to a statement issued by the People’s Government of Zhejiang Province. The results showed that 37 batches complied with the country’s standard, while 48 batches did not, a failure rate of almost 60 percent. According to China Daily, the items had unacceptable amounts of acid and high levels of formaldehyde, a harsh substance that can cause skin rashes, eye irritations, allergies, respiratory problems, and even cancer.

Westerners might be surprised at the high-profile announcements and perhaps even more surprised that China and its people do care about quality. There is a tendency to associate the rash of bad products that have come into the United States from China to an uncaring attitude on the part of the Chinese government on issues related to quality.

The quality report on the luxury brands was released on March 15, during the 2010World Consumer Rights Day, a global consumer movement set to raise awareness by promoting basic rights for all consumers. Not coincidently, on that same day, China Central Television, the biggest TV network operator in the country, brought back Hewlett-Packard’s faulty laptop-related issue involving graphics chips in laptop PCs that had emerged more than two years ago. Days earlier, a March 10 article in TheWall Street Journal reported that a group of Chinese consumers had filed a complaint to China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine saying that HP discriminated against them because the company failed to offer them the same extended warranty that it gave to U.S. customers in response to the graphics chips problem. The Chinese consumers request compensation, a public apology, and a recall of the affected computers, the newspaper reported.

All of the above could be a move on China's part to demonstrate that it does care about the quality of products, at least those going into the country. In the past year, China has been in the headlines of newspapers worldwide in stories about high levels of toxic materials in Chinese-made children’s jewelry and dry wall, food quality inspection problems, and even counterfeit condoms. Inevitably, in many people's minds, China became synonymous with poor quality, a perception the country is trying to change.  

So, it's easy to take the news of quality crackdowns as just a public relations move. But there is another side to this story. None of the companies found to have sent substandard products have denied China's claims. And thinking back on these latest events, you begin to wonder if people outside of China are failing to account for Chinese quality regulations. Dan Harris writing in the China Law Blog (http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/03/pssst_china_has_import_laws.html)  provides four examples that illustrate this.

So as the high-profile quality gaffes (and associated fines) continue to come to light in China, a few questions come to mind. First, are the quality problems in these high-end products common and it just happened that the Chinese authorities caught and reported them; have the United States or Europe spotted the same issues? Or the bigger question, were substandard, possibly rejected, products deliberately sent to China under the misconception that they wouldn't be noticed or that China wouldn't care?