A Great Wall or Opportunity?
It’s time to start participating in the global economy.

by Scott Paton

The results are in. The feedback from last month’s First Word about Quality Digest’s new partnership with the Shanghai Association for Quality Management is decidedly mixed. I received a lot of e-mail from readers about our new partnership. Some were thrilled, and others thought that I ought to be put in front of a firing squad for collaborating with the enemy. One zealous letter-writer compared me to a member of the Vichy regime, which collaborated with Nazis during Germany’s occupation of France in World War II. Ouch!

It’s true that the United States is losing thousands of manufacturing jobs to China. It’s also true that we’ve lost thousands of jobs to Mexico, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, India and other nations. The complaints I hear about China are no different than complaints I’ve heard about Japan and other countries.

Complaining about China and other nations won’t help. I heard Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry tell a crowd of supporters recently that if elected, he couldn’t guarantee U.S. jobs because the Constitution doesn’t give him or any other politician the right to bar U.S. companies from moving facilities or jobs to any nation they choose. He’s right.

We have to come to terms with the reality that we live in a global marketplace. There’s no denying that the transition to this marketplace has been and will continue to be a difficult one for U.S. manufacturers. However, the stark reality is that we cannot legislate job protection. We can use the tools of the quality profession to design, build, deliver and maintain better products and services that will help stem job losses.

A prime example is Harley-Davidson’s journey from building low-quality motorcycles to building world-class products that were in such high demand that the company actually asked the U.S. government to drop restrictions against Japanese imports.

As China’s economy matures, U.S. companies will benefit. China’s rapidly urbanizing population of 1.3 billion requires the country to essentially build the equivalent of a metropolis the size of Houston each month just to keep up, claims Lisa Gibbs in “Three Ways of Looking at China,” an article in the March 2004 issue of Money magazine. Of course, this is good news for U.S. companies that supply building equipment, telecommunications equipment and the other materials necessary to build the equivalent of a large city every month.

Also, China’s rapidly rising standard of living is great news for U.S. companies that cater to consumer needs. In fact, when I was in Shanghai in January, I was amazed at the presence of so many U.S. brands, including Nike, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Ford, General Motors, IBM, Starbucks, Boeing, Marriott, Motorola and many more.

To think that we have nothing to learn from the Chinese is both ethnocentric and ignorant. China is full of highly intelligent, creative people who are redefining capitalism both at home and abroad. China also leads the world in the number of ISO 9001-registered companies and, I suspect, the number of organizations utilizing Six Sigma. We can hide in our homes and hope China will go away, or we can adapt and participate in the global economy.