Is China poisoning the children of America and Europe with toxic toys, dangerous dolls and cancerous bibs?
If you’ve been following the frenzied public debate about the recall of dodgy Chinese products from superstore shelves in the US and the UK, you might be forgiven for thinking so. The voluntary withdrawal of 19million ‘Made in China’ products by the toy giant Mattel, alongside claims that Chinese toxic toothpaste and poisonous pet food is on sale in the West, has given rise to headlines such as ‘Lethal toy story’, ‘The toxic threat’ and ‘China’s toxic shock’, as if Chinese factories are pumping out a dirty slick of consumer stuff that is spreading across the West. Is China making us sick? Look behind the headlines and it seems that, yes, some toys and various other products from China fall short of tough Western safety standards, but they are far from lethal. They’re not even particularly toxic. Instead, the ‘toxic toys’ drama has become a rather poisonous metaphor for contemporary Western fears of China, of its apparently rapacious economic growth and its strange, unknowable ways. Old
