Total recall.(Critical essay)

CHINA ONCE languished, a closed economy with several hundred million people living in abject poverty. Today, it is a major engine for world economic growth. It boasts a rising middle class and the world's largest foreign-exchange reserves. There can no longer be talk about global trade without mentioning the dragon, and the American consumer would be hard-pressed to live without goods bearing the "Made in China" label.

For the past year, though, that very label has suffered from some serious image problems. Reports of toxic Chinese-made products have mushroomed: toys covered in lead paint, melamine-tainted pet food, defective tires, toothpaste containing diethylene glycol, contaminated fish and more. There is also talk of unlicensed Chinese chemical companies eager to manufacture and supply fake, subpotent or adulterated drug products. To be sure, the bulk of Chinese exports to the United States are made or assembled to American specifications. Nonetheless, the lengthening list of unsafe goods from China also points to the simple fact that, in their quest for lower costs and higher profits, far too many China-based manufacturers are willing to cut corners at the expense of consumer safety.

At their heart, China's real and exaggerated brand-image problems stem from a unique intersection of the American need for instant gratification and China's poisonous witches' brew of a "post-communist personality" with few moral moorings and an unfailing enthusiasm for getting rich. Too often now, the acquisitiveness so palpable in Chinese society knows no scruples, shifts the costs to others, and is married to opportunism and cunning. Of course, there are many businessmen who have made it big by working hard and honestly, but it's the anything-goes mind-set that rests at the root of many undesirable practices in China: from decadence to all manners of fake certificates, fake products, adulterated food and drinks, rampant official corruption and sheer disregard for the rights of workers in sweatshops. For many, socialism with Chinese characteristics has a lot in common with the early stage of capitalism Karl Marx described as primitive accumulation.

This phenomenon finds its roots in the Chinese brand of communism from which it was borne and the reforms from which it was shaped. Begun in the 1970s, the proliferation of unruly manufacturers and exporters in China sprang from an environment where the potential for entrepreneurship among peasants and tradesmen was stifled. Technicians were jailed for moonlighting as consultants, and collective farms were enthralled to the party-state. Private business activities were severely punished or suppressed.

But after years of oppression, the government began to allow market-oriented reforms to modernize China's economy. Within a decade, the forces of enterprise were unleashed, but hand in hand with growth came rampant corruption. Reform making and profit making have often meant getting ahead of official policies and bending and breaking existing laws and regulations.

Along with these market reforms came preferential treatment for those of "the Party." China's leaders (and especially Deng Xiaoping) opened the floodgates, allowing government and party agencies, the armed police and even the People's Liberation Army to supplement their budgets with profits that they generated on their own. Here we see the strange melding of the strong party-state that desired a profit with the willingness to bend the rules: government control and unruly capitalism. By the 1990s, the Chinese mentality was then fully transformed. Though the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989 closed the route to political reforms, the raw energy unleashed in China was instead channeled to the pursuit of material wealth. Mammon became the new religion. Business fever took over.

The amazingly quick turn from the asceticism of the Mao era to the cult of Mammon under the leadership of the same Communist Party has landed China in what author Xiaoying Wang termed "a moral wasteland." Indeed, this is the world of doublespeak, with everybody mouthing the rhetoric of the moment as dictated by the party and yet often doing exactly the opposite of what's prescribed. Wang asserts that the Chinese have acquired what she calls "the post-communist personality":