20100726 Chinese goods flooding to Taiwan under local labels

Chinese goods flooding to Taiwan under local labels

By Vincent Y. Chao
STAFF REPORTER
Monday, Jul 26, 2010, Page 1

Chinese imports paraded as “Made in Taiwan” are rampant throughout Taiwanese marketplaces, retail stores and high-end department stores, industry representatives said.

As of Saturday, a total of 26,894 items that were either falsely labeled or not labeled at all had been seized by law enforcement agents nationwide, the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection said yesterday. The products ranged from clothes, towels and bedding to shoes, socks and bags, it said.

The lucrative trade — Made in Taiwan (MIT) products often sell for higher prices than ­Chinese-made merchandise — is seldom policed, it is hard to spot fake MIT products and business appears to be booming.

WORRIES

It has compounded worries in Taiwanese traditional industries that the MIT brand, which has taken years and billions of dollars to build, could become associated with “Made in China,” decreasing the value of local products.

“MIT products everywhere are feeling the impact,” said Huang Kuang-yi (黃光藝), head of the Taiwan Bedding Industry Alliance, which represents more than 140 industry professionals.

“The government promises that it will step up its monitoring, but nothing ever happens,” Huang said.

Statistics complied by his organization through spot checks and consumer reports are shocking: Up to 30 percent of all MIT bedding supplies sold in department stores could in fact be made hundreds of kilometers away in Chinese factories.

SHODDY WORK

Most false labeling is done by removing the “Made in China” mark and then sewing on or attaching new “Made in Taiwan” tags. The work is often crudely done, with either the older tag left on or words on the new tag spelled incorrectly, Huang said. Others, however, are highly sophisticated.

A recent occurrence was the introduction of “multi-country tags,” a label that includes a checkbox beside the names of multiple countries that importers can pick and choose at their discretion.

There are apparently huge financial payoffs for the “multi-country tags.”

Huang said a Chinese bedding product that normally sells for NT$1,000 could easily sell for five or six times that price if it is labeled as made in Taiwan, and between 10 and 20 times if it is listed as from Italy.

He blamed the flood of mis-­labeled products on the government’s lax regulations, adding that it has failed to crack down on the illicit trade. Based on his understanding, less than one in 350 bedding products imported from China are subject to spot checks.

However, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tsai Huang-lang (蔡煌瑯) said the information was hardly surprising given the government’s continued market liberalization with China and the country’s deepening economic reliance on its neighbor over the last two years.

“It’s hard to expect relevant authorities to crack down when the entire [President] Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration is intent on opening Taiwan up to China,” Tsai said.

He said government regulations over country-of-origin labels “were a mess” and that it was almost common practice for Chinese imports to be labeled from Taiwan or other countries.

The bureau acknowledged that it faces difficulties in policing Chinese imports, but said that it was holding educational campaigns for consumers and retailers, while stepping up spot checks.

Difficulties include a lack of compliance by retailers for investigators to check and test their products for potential mislabeling, the bureau said.

Tsai said the government should impose more stringent checks on all Chinese imports and increase persecution of those found mislabeling or selling fake goods. To do otherwise would place Taiwanese manufacturers at a huge disadvantage, he said.

However, Huang also said things will continue to get worse before they become better because passage of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China will dramatically increase the amount of goods, legal and otherwise, coming across the Taiwan Strait.

“Every day we wait for the government to handle and stop this practice, but so far nothing has come of it,” he said. “The government just doesn’t care about traditional Taiwanese industries.”