An Indian home made in China!
Look around, right from the mobile phone to the hair
dryer, you will find almost everything has a Chinese connection. So just saying
boycott Made-in-China products is easier said than done
Kakoli Thakur | Delhi | June 22, 2020
Ever since the India-China violent stand-off in
Ladakh, social media in India is going hammer and tongs with anti-China
sentiment — calling for banning Made-in-China products and going local by
embracing Made-in-India stuff. But, thinking practically, given the way Chinese
have made inroads in India, is it really possible, I wondered? I thought of
starting off with my own house and looked around if I could junk some Chinese
products.
To start with, I thought of the most important thing in
our lives today — the mobile phone. And found myself facing the Shakespearean
dialogue, ‘Et Tu Brutus?’ For, I possessed a Redmi (read Chinese phone), using
it for the last six months. To be honest, I would think twice before dumping it
as I had to dig deep into my pocket to get one. In fact, India’s mobile phone
market is dominated by China. Xiaomi, Lenovo, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus to name a few
— these are all Chinese mobile companies, assembling and manufacturing
smartphones in India as a part of the Make-in-India initiative.
I work from home and my son has to attend online
classes. Luckily we have two computers at home. I have an HP all-in-one, an American
company. So far, so good! I dug a little deeper into their website to find that
Hewlett-Packard sources a lot of its components from China. But I can’t dump
my comp for that one reason.
Then our
old computer, which our son uses, had become very slow and so we took it to a
computer shop to see if it can be salvaged. The technician convinced us that he
would reassemble it with the price less than a new computer by changing just a
few parts. No prizes for guessing where the parts came from—all Made in China
of course!
I looked down and noticed that the two UPS inverters attached
to the two computers were made in China. Now if we have to go with the flow and
ban China-made products, we need to dump them and buy that of Indian brands. Not
a cost-effective proposition at all!
Visit any toy shop
and the shopkeeper would always try to convince you to buy China-made toys as you
will get exact replicas of branded toys and at a much lesser price (he would
never mention the huge margin he gets, of course). When all the hue and cry
began about boycotting China-made products, out of curiosity, we checked a few
old toys, including a Holi phichkari, of our son, and to our surprise, we found
that most of them had a tag written in tiny alphabets — Made in China.
In the lockdown, we started ordering grocery online. The
payment would be through Paytm, as it was convenient. An Indian e-commerce
payment company at last! But no, Paytm also has Chinese investors investing big
in the company. In the meantime, my help called and asked me to send her salary
through Paytm as she is in a containment zone now, and so am I, due to Covid
positive cases in the areas. Now if I tell her, no I can’t do that as the
company has a China connection and it will be ‘unpatriotic’ to do so, will she even
understand it? But I am sure she must have heard that ‘China ko ban karna
chahiye’, as everywhere people are talking about it in every strata of society.
Surfing news websites, I found quite a lot of
information about where Chinese firms had invested big in India.
In 2018, Alibaba invested huge in online grocer
BigBasket (from where we order stuff). It had also invested in food delivery
app Zomato (so, no online ordering of food). Tencent has a huge investment on
ride-hailing app Ola, and e-commerce platform Flipkart too. Alibaba is a large
investor also in Paytm, while Tencent has invested in BYJU’s, the education
start-up.
Seeing the medicine box I remembered coming across an
article that had this para: “Your medicine, prescription or otherwise, may not
come from China (although many do), but there’s a high likelihood it contains
ingredients that originated in China and other countries affected by the
coronavirus.” And it is true — China is a major producer of drug ingredients,
known as ‘active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs)’. In fact, two-thirds of the
total imports of bulk drugs come from China, Union Minister for Chemicals and
Fertilizers DV Sadananda Gowda had told the Lok Sabha earlier this year. So
does that mean, we will stop taking medicines? Absolutely not!
You all must have LED bulbs at home, emitting that
brilliant white light. Well, even these have a China link with manufacturing
hubs located in China or the use of China technology.
Love your silk sarees? Well, then don’t forget that
silk fabric was invented in ancient China and played an important role in their
culture and economy for thousands of years. We got it much later when the
famous Silk Road opened.
How to forget the popular app TikTok, which is an
American video-sharing social networking service but owned by ByteDance, a
Beijing-based internet technology company? But how many people will uninstall
TikTok, which is a craze among youngsters, from their phones? The irony is that
a lot of anti-China memes and videos are being made on TikTok and shared. Even
otherwise, people are enjoying funny videos made on the platform and sharing it
freely — forgetting at that moment the ‘ban China’ sentiment.
If asked what is your favourite food many of us would
promptly reply Chinese — until now, maybe. Now we have to think of a second
best option. Being a Bengali, I would prefer Bengali cuisine. For many, may be,
Punjabi would be the best reply. But is it really possible to say no to noodles
if it is made in India as the concept after all is Chinese? Though the Indian
version of Chinese food is different from that of original Chinese cuisine,
after all it has a China connection.
Felt like laughing when I read on a website that a political
figure said that the best option is to shut down Chinese restaurants. But is it
really possible? Or will it really help to counter the Chinese by banning some
eateries, which, obviously, would be owned by Indians.
Even that morning cuppa you have to begin your day afresh
has a Chinese connection as tea is said to have originated in north Burma and
southwestern China as a medicated drink.
Such is the craze of people to ban China that some
political party worker in Bengal’s Asansol burnt the effigy of North Korea’s
Kim Jong-un confusing him with China’s Xi Jinping.
There is no dearth of memes on social media. A video
was doing the rounds where a group bought a Chinese TV just to throw it and
break it into pieces. Who will tell those people that you have wasted your
money, not China’s.
I read that while India exports mostly a basket of
primary goods to China, including cotton, yarn, organic chemicals, ores, natural
pearls, precious stones and fabrics. Chinese imports into India include
electric machinery, electronic equipment, nuclear reactors, boilers, solar
energy components, etc. The list of China’s footprint is long.
In our childhood, having a Wing Sung pen was a prized
possession, which again was manufactured in China from The Shanghai Hero Pen
Company. China is everywhere and we have been using Made-in-China products for
the longest time. And banning Made-in-China products, at least in the present
times when there are no sufficient valid Indian alternatives, is easier said
than done.
When I as an ordinary citizen am finding it difficult
to ban China from my small home, I wonder how India as a country with billions
of dollars at stake, will ban China.
