Banning Chinese Products

Yesterday my young niece from Chennai called me up and said that she wanted to buy a smartphone and asked me for suggestions. I gave her options like Nokia, Samsung and she said but her budget is Rs 12 to 15,000. I laughed and said then you can only get a Chinese phone. So be it she said.

She already has the phone Honor which her brother bought for her in 2018. Honor I asked, never heard of it. I googled and checked it was a Huawei brand. She said it works very well till date. She only wants another phone as this one was not accepting the Jio sim for some reason.

That got me thinking. Here we Indians are chest-thumping, saying we will ban all Chinese products. There is obvious anger on China for giving the world a virus that has killed so many people. But can we link the two?

I am imagining a daughter or son with a Chinese phone in hand in the hospital looking after a parent with COVID. Is he really going to have anger that he has a Chinese phone in hand? I don’t think so.

Here is when I think that the Chinese have worked hard to give us reasonable quality technological products at cheaper rates. One saw a smartphone boom in India thanks to their phones. Even the middle-class and lower middle-class could opt for a smartphone. And what has India done during this time? We don’t even have one Indian mobile brand as an option if we ban Chinese phones.

This perhaps is true for many other sectors including the medical field where a lot of the diagnostic systems come from China.

We talk of level-playing field, we crib that the government should support entrepreneurship, we talk that duties must be reduced. Honestly, is that the problem or we have not got something right that the Chinese have. Reasonable quality at reasonable price?

I used to get angry when I would see Chinese lanterns and lights flooding the Indian market during the Indian festival Deepawali. I was why the hell should I buy a Chinese lantern? (even before COVID). But then where is the option? The Chinese ones had unique designs, fairly good quality and a very good price and I don’t see any Indian seller giving me those designs at a good price.

This monsoon, I was searching for a good windcheater for myself. I looked through many at amazon and they were all the common designs, not very good colour and then I spotted one which was really stylish and a good price. I clicked buy. When it was delivered, it was really good but unfortunately, I had chosen a smaller size and so had to exchange it. I looked at the tag, it was Made in China. For a moment, I thought whether I should return or exchange. I did return it but didn’t find a good one post that.

I also recall how about 7 years back my colleagues were all shopping at Alibaba. They were delighted to buy fancy kids toys and other stuff at such cheap rates. Everyone was glued to alibaba.com. No wonder then today Alibaba is the world's largest retailer and e-commerce company, and on the list of largest Internet companies. In 2020, it was also rated as the fifth-largest artificial intelligence company.

Leave out technology and retail products, come to think of it when a student in India goes to buy his first violin, it is Chinese! Because they are the cheapest and good for a beginner to start with.

Let’s get our act together before we make those tall claims of banning Chinese products.