A year without Chinese products

Source: Seven Questions: One Year. One Family. No Chinese Products. Interview of Sara Bongiorni, author of A Year Without "Made in China"

Key messages:

The downside of trading with China is lost of U.S. manufacturing jobs.

The benefit is the greater access to good-quality, low-cost goods.

For someone on a moderate or low income, to be able to buy your 4-year-old kid good and quality shoes for $15 (instead of $68) is a real economic benefit.

Ordinary consumers living without Chinese products would be exhausting and expensive.

Is it possible to go for a whole year without buying any products made in China? One woman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, wanted to find out. FP spoke with author Sara Bongiorni about her new book, the hidden role China plays in our everyday lives, and what it's like to be a mother of two without a coffee maker.

FOREIGN POLICY: So first, tell us about your book, A Year Without "Made in China". What motivated you to write it?

Sara Bongiorni: I used to be a business reporter, and I would see this trade data coming from the U.S. Commerce Department each month. You see billions and billions of dollars worth coming in, and you can't really make sense of it. It's just so huge, and I felt very disconnected from that information.

So then this impromptu idea just popped into my head. It was two days after Christmas at the end of 2004, and my husband and I were in the living room. There were still holiday presents and toys just strewn across the floor. I started going through them a little bit, and I realized that most of our Christmas gifts came from China. And as I looked around the house, I thought, "Well gosh, most of the other stuff's from China, too!"

I wanted to see if it was possible for us to avoid buying anything made in China for a year.

So, I turned to my husband and said, "Hey, do you want to try this?" And he was like, "Absolutely not. That's a terrible idea." I twisted his arm, tried to make it sound fun, and convinced him that we should try this as a kind of experiment. So, on January 1, 2005, we kicked off this year-long-I use the word-"boycott," but it's not a political book; it's not a China-bashing book or a protectionist book. It's very much a personal story, an attempt to understand our family's connections to the global economy.

FP: Was it difficult to find out what was made in China?

SB: It was very difficult! And what I found was that there's just really no way to live what would be considered an ordinary consumer life without a heavy reliance on merchandise from China. It really upended our lives.

FP: Why is that?

SB: Well, China's the main source of ordinary consumer goods-everything from consumer electronics to toys to household gadgets or appliances of every kind, tools, shoes, and increasingly, furniture and clothing. A lot of people think that China makes only shoddy and cheap things, but I found that not to be true. There are a lot of increasingly high-end products coming from there. I saw everything from Barbie-shaped chocolates to wedding dresses from China. It was an eye-popping view of just how much we rely on China for the daily products we use.

FP: Was there anything that you had to go without completely?

SB: Absolutely. Our coffee maker broke, and we didn't replace it because those are all from China. So we ended up boiling water in a pot and pouring it in filters over a coffee mug for the year. It was like camping every day! Our blender broke, and we couldn't repair it because the blade was made in China. My husband is a woodworker, and he couldn't buy a lot of tools because they were made in China. And most toys sold in the United States are made in China.

FP: So what did your kids think of all this?

SB: They didn't think much! They were little, so in some ways it was easier to do this. Our son was only 4, and our daughter turned 2 during the course of the year. We read I don't know how many thousands of labels on all sorts of products during the year and searched out the small number of toys not made in China at ordinary places like Toys 'R Us and Target and found a small number of toys from countries like Taiwan and Thailand. So we found those, and then we spent a lot of money on Legos, which are mostly made in Europe and some in the United States. Some are made in China, though, so you have to look at the individual box. Toward the end of the year, our son was complaining that he was so sick of our Lego purchases because that was one of the few ordinary toys that were still readily available to us.

FP: What surprised you the most about this project?

SB: People know about the downside of trade with China-they think about lost U.S. manufacturing jobs, and of course that's a painful issue for a lot of people-but one of the things I also got to understand in a personal way was the benefit of access to often good-quality, low-cost goods.

Our son outgrew his tennis shoes, and they were the only pair of shoes he had. So I set out to buy new tennis shoes, and essentially all tennis shoes are made in China at this point. It took me a couple of weeks, but I finally located these tennis shoes made in Italy that cost $68. Well, you can by tennis shoes made in China for $15 in a place like Payless shoe stores.

For someone on a moderate or low income, to be able to buy your 4-year-old kid perfectly good shoes for $15 is a real economic benefit. I didn't realize I was going to see that at the outset.

FP: What are you going to do next? Are you buying products from China now?

SB: There was no way to function as an "ordinary consumer" without being willing to buy some Chinese products.

For instance, if your phone broke, that would mean you'd have to live without a telephone. So at the end of the book, I talk about how we found a middle ground because the idea of living permanently like this would be exhausting and expensive. It was not a way that a lot of people would want to live permanently.