Is it woke to worry about where we buy stuff from?

It's a shame we were not so fast to point out the contaminated blood in the UK. 

They may well sound like damning facts, but when I run my spot checks on these anti-China reports they nearly always turn out to be deceptive in some way. I can't even be bothered to check when the allegation is merely someone thinking it. If you have proof then there is no harm in naming the company known to be responsible. If you have not got the backup a judge would accept then you need these prefixes to keep you out of trouble. This is why 99% of press reports are a pile of useless crap.

The truth is China has good firms and it has bad ones, like any other country. I got horrendous food poisoning from as restaurant in Malta but it did not make international headlines. In China you have some old factories with old production methods and then you have a lot larger more modern ones which are run very well. The market is less regulated than the UK but like we used to do it was a case of buyer beware. An experienced importer should know his way around producers in his trade and of course if he just selects the cheapest in order to make max profit then he is the one doing his customers a disservice. There are always people in China willing to punt crap out, but they will punt crap out at rock bottom prices. Risk is in anything . You are less likely to have a problem buying from Harrods than a UK market trader. It's just the same in China.

By the way, I got an invite over to Shanghai today. I hope to get a guided tour at some point next year.