Substandard Foreign Goods in China
By LARRY
ROMANOFF – September 21, 2020
The Western media inform us on a regular
basis about cheap products sent to the world from China, and about the
substandard and even dangerous content of some of them. Lead in paint, melamine
in dog food, chemicals in drywall, glycol in toothpaste. We can be forgiven for
thinking this is a one-way street, but the story has another side which the
Western media cover with a blanket of silence. China is the victim of far more defective and toxic products, or
prohibited goods, from the West, particularly the US, than it sends outward.
Westerners may find this difficult to believe because this news is almost
always censored in the US.
Modern
Chinese consumers had initially developed trust in foreign goods from
sophisticated marketing that implied Western brands and products were well-made
and of high quality, and were expensive for a reason. That trust proved itself
startlingly unjustified. Sales in China of foreign
products had been growing at high rates until the revelations that many foreign
companies and brands had so many severe quality problems that foreign goods
were normally substandard. So many foreign firms have been repeatedly caught
and charged, and fined, for transgressions, but their profits had been high
enough to continue their illegal practices. It was an astonishingly
short-sighted policy since, for an increasing number of American firms, 50% or
more of their operating profits were originating in China. In several recent
years, 50% of the operating profits of US-based Yum Brands’ came from mainland
China, as opposed to 32% from the US, and I've noted elsewhere that General Motors and a number of other US
companies would be bankrupt if not for their China sales. Even many US
educational institutions are surviving only because of new money from Chinese
students. Yet they all approached China with what appeared to be a
fatally-short time horizon and stupidly decided to milk Chinese consumers as
hard and fast as possible, and in every way possible. It didn't seem to occur
to any of them that their short-sightedness, coupled with an uninhibited greed,
might one day be fatal.
Given the high profits originating in China,
one would assume these firms would treat their Chinese customers with some
consideration - if not respect - but the opposite is normally the case. Most foreign firms resident in China treat
the country as a third-rate market, reserving their substandard goods for
the China market and charging much higher prices in China than in the West for
the same goods - which are mostly manufactured in China and should cost much
less. Foreign firms had for years been
treated leniently and even gently by the Chinese government, given substantial
tax breaks and preferential treatment, yet they proceeded to break every manner
of domestic law and generally treated China and their Chinese consumers with
arrogance and open contempt. In China, many of these firms act with an
almost complete lawlessness. Some firms that were forced to remove toxic or
substandard consumer products from the US or Europe, would ship them to China
for sale here. Sony, Toshiba, P & G, Volkswagen, and other multinationals
have been accused of just such practices. The extent of substandard clothing
imported by foreign multinationals has become an epidemic with at least 20%,
and often 60%, of shipments failing to meet minimum standards. Chinese Customs
now inspect every shipment and destroy all substandard goods.
Clothing manufacturers, wholesalers and
retailers everywhere have problems with returned items or stock that is
unattractive, dated, perhaps soiled from customer try-ons, left-overs from last
year's fashions, and just items that nobody wanted to buy. All firms try to
take advantage of multiple locations to deal with these problems, and to escape
their mistakes. Stock that doesn't sell in one location might sell in another
district or another city. But now Western firms have a new option: send it all
to China - the world's new dumping ground.
In Shanghai we have a huge shopping center
known as an "Outlet Mall", a high-class center consisting of many
attractive low-rise buildings covering a large area, with shops carrying only
major foreign brands, virtually every foreign brand you've ever heard of, and
some you probably don't know. It is presented to the public as a "50% discount
mall", but disappointingly is no such thing. In almost every store, the stock consisted of items that were
dated, unattractive, out of fashion, or simply didn't sell in North America or
Europe, in large part goods that were several fashion years old. It was
only too apparent the executives of these brands had gathered their left-over
fashion trash from the US, Europe and Japan, and dumped it all into China. And
even at "50% off", the stock was still priced two or three times
higher than it would have been in the US or Europe. As one example I saw a pair
of blue jeans of an expensive 'luxury' brand that appeared to have been either
sold or tried on dozens of times and that I could document as a style from
three years prior, priced at more than 1,000 RMB, twice the original new price.
Following this trend, Nike advertised
plans to open up to 50 new "self-supporting factory stores" in China
to "dispose of inventory" and "clear stock", stores that
will most assuredly be used to dump Nike's left-over worldwide junk into China.
On a daily basis, products manufactured in
the US or other Western countries for sale in the West are discovered to have
major defects or to be substandard or even toxic. Often, when that discovery is
made and those products cannot be sold in the West due to government
regulations or excessive warranty claims, they are gathered up and shipped to
China for sale in the China market. Some years ago, Toshiba produced some lines
of new products that had major flaws, and in the end had to pay out more than
$1 billion in settlements to its US customers. Instead of repairing (or destroying) all those defective products, Toshiba
shipped them to China for sale there. Sony did the same; after discovering
manufacturing defects in millions of Japanese-made cameras on sale in the US
and Europe, Sony withdrew the goods and shipped them to China for sale in the
China market.
As well, many Western companies, including Apple, Sony, Panasonic, and many of the
so-called "luxury brands" like Louis Vuitton, have been frequently
accused of selling reconditioned or repaired items in China as new stock. An
employee of one luxury brand acknowledged it is a routine practice for their
stores in China to put repaired goods back on the shelves. "The
shopkeepers are told to deliberately change the serial code of a returned item
and make it look new." In 2012, a
lawsuit was filed in Beijing court on behalf of customers who bought
"new" iphones for RMB 5,000 ($780) each at the Apple retail store in
Beijing’s Xidan Street. On examination, the iphones proved to have been
refurbished used items. Often, foreign firms in China simply refuse to deal
with their defective products. Unlike their 'customer first' behavior in the
West, these same firms in China either flatly refuse to provide replacement or
compensation, or make the process impossibly difficult. They deny the existence
of a defect or their responsibility for it, often flatly refuse refunds or
replacements, and otherwise prolong warranty claims for months or even years until
the customers lose hope and abandon the process. In Beijing, Ricky Zhang was
furious when the locks broke on her LV
luggage, since she'd spent 20,000 yuan ($3,200) on the item only a month
before. Zhang wanted the bag replaced, but was told the shop was responsible
only for sales. After a month's wait, she was told the item could be repaired
in three months, and that insisting on a replacement would require a difficult
and time-consuming application to the Chinese government's Quality Supervision
Authorities for "an official review". Even with media exposure, the
brand defended its procedures and claimed it was providing "a standardized
service".
Shanghai's port receives more than 30,000
shipments of imported clothes every year, the value of which accounts for more
than 40 percent of the country's total clothing imports. During the past ten
years in Shanghai alone, at least 20% of all foreign clothing shipped to China,
or placed on sale in Chinese shops, has failed government testing and
discovered to be substandard or defective. In many cases, 60% of an entire
shipment was substandard and had to be returned or destroyed, or withdrawn from
sale, often repeatedly shipped by the same foreign brands. Clothes imported
from some of the world top luxury brands, such as Hermes and Versace, have
routinely proven to be substandard in quality control tests. The so-called 'luxury brands' are often the
worst at shipping their substandard goods, those contaminated or failing
quality control tests, to China. At one point, authorities collected
samples from department stores and boutiques in many cities, and found such a
high proportion of defective foreign "luxury products" that retailers
were fined, and ordered to withdraw all foreign goods from their shelves. Many
of these companies are such frequent offenders they are placed on the
government's 'black list', where no products will pass customs without a full
examination at their expense, a severe restriction to be sure, but one that
appears to produce no meaningful change. These companies are all recidivist;
they are no sooner removed from the black list than they revert to their former
practices and find themselves on the black list again.
The problem has become endemic of foreign
firms shipping their substandard clothing to China from the US or Europe, or
manufacturing in China and exporting the good products while reserving the
substandard goods for sale in China, that local authorities now examine every
shipment of so-called luxury goods entering the country. Market regulators in
China have consistently reported numerous quality problems with high-end
clothes of the more expensive brands including Burberry, Armani, Chanel and Dior, Hermes and Versace, Dolce &
Gabbana, Paul & Shark, Trussardi, Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Fendi, and
Lacoste Garments by all these well-known brand names have proven on
examination to be substandard. Brands including Louis Vuitton, Hugo Boss and Dolce & Gabbana have more than
once been caught selling substandard shoes in China, and authorities in
Zhejiang have destroyed thousands of pairs of expensive shoes because of
serious quality problems. Many Western
luxury products on sale in China are labeled by the companies as being made
overseas, while they are actually produced in China, then sent to an overseas
destination (or even just a Chinese export zone) for final adjustment or
packaging, a practice clearly intended only to deceive the consumer. With
these products then wearing foreign-made labels, Chinese consumers are unable
to discern the origin or real quality of the product.
The lower-cost popular brands are not better
in any respect, brands such as Zara,
Disney, Folli Follie, Anna Sui, The North Face, Nike, Puma, Adidas, Marks &
Spencer, Diesel, have all experienced quality recalls. And it isn't as if
these are low-cost or discounted goods. Even the most basic foreign-branded
items are expensive in China, with a simple $10 cotton T-shirt priced at $50,
leading one to expect a high-quality product which is almost never offered. One of the worst offenders is Nike,
who, in a long string of fraudulent activities, was recently fined almost US$1
million for fraudulent promotion and false advertising, selling an inferior
product as a premium one. Large numbers of other Nike products, including men's
and women's shoes, have been discovered to be substandard and were removed from
sale. Often the distributors and retailers are fined, but American companies
often subcontract their manufacturing and so cleverly craft their legal
entities as virtual shell corporations, that the actual corporation has no
legal existence in the country, and few or no assets.
The quality faults are substantial in number
and kind, including color fastness, dangerous and illegal dyes, excessive
formaldehyde, high pH index, improper labeling, and toxic coatings. The
chemical flaws are perhaps the most serious, much foreign clothing commonly
containing hormone-disrupting toxins which interfere with human sexual
development by simulating estrogen and which can be lethal. These man-made chemicals are so stable that
they are difficult to remove from the environment, and tend to concentrate in
drinking water and the higher levels of the food chain, and ultimately in human
blood and breast milk, making them exceedingly dangerous for pregnant women and
young mothers.
Flaws due to substandard manufacturing are a constant
headache, largely due to the firms' quality control scams, reserving goods with
defects for sale in China. The flaws are not always immediately obvious and
these products appear to present no danger, so are often overlooked by
government investigators and thus remain on the shelves for purchase by
trusting customers. As mentioned above, these can often be returned or repaired
items that are sold as new, but most often simply contain manufacturing
defects, goods that would normally be sold at high discounts in the West. But
the problems are greater than this, with at least some foreign luxury brands
manufacturing entirely different levels of goods. At a Coach store in Shanghai, a friend recently purchased an expensive
leather handbag that, on cursory examination, proved to be made of plastic. She
was of course horrified, but the shop persisted in its claim of leather.
Another friend purchased an expensive Cartier
watch, only to be later charged 600 yuan ($120) for a replacement battery on
the grounds that a non-Cartier battery would destroy her new watch. Having no
recourse, she paid, but both ladies, and many of their friends, are done with
Coach and Cartier forever.
On the subject of fake goods, Jack Ma of
Alibaba made an exceedingly important point in an interview in June of 2016
when he stated that often the so-called 'fake goods' are of equal or higher
quality than the originals. He was telling the truth, but the Western media did
their best to trash him and discredit his comments to protect their own
high-priced channels. It often occurs that a factory in China will fill an
order for 100,000 pairs of high-brand blue jeans or some such, but will
necessarily over-produce to provide for the flaws. But sometimes there are no
flaws and the brand will not pay for the excess production, so the factory will
resell these goods through their own channels rather than absorb the loss. I'm
not sure I can fault them. The factory often has no choice but to over-produce
since shortages can incur a penalty, but has no recourse on the other side.
Further, many of these factories are able to produce the highest level of goods
to satisfy even the most critical purchaser, and take advantage of those skills
to manufacture their own products, some of which will be very similar to the
OEM goods they make on contract. Typically, the quality of these items is equal
to, and sometimes even superior to, that of any luxury brand, a situation the
foreign brands find distressing and try to kill. This is the source of most of
the attacks on Alibaba by foreign brands, not that they are 'fakes' in any
sense of the meaning of that word, but are in fact genuine and often of higher
quality. The real issue is an intent to intimidate, if not terrify, all and
sundry to stay far away from the international brands so as to limit any
competition. It is true there are some firms who make copies of branded
products to sell as genuine, but this is a rapidly-disappearing trade and
should of course be stamped out.
Another consistent fault uncovered by local
authorities is deceptive labeling by most foreign brands, with innumerable
cases of false or misleading fiber content. Almost all of the well-known
international brands are regularly discovered to contain less fiber content
than claimed on their product labels in China, often claiming an 80% content of
cotton or wool when testing reveals the actual content to be perhaps half that.
There is no possibility these are errors; every company knows precisely the
fiber content of its fabrics.
In one case, Hermes executives stated, "It is undeniable that we have made
some mistakes in labeling ..." No. There are no labeling mistakes here.
Every company knows precisely what it produces and no famous brand has
quality-control managers who mistakenly affix a label stating '100% silk' on a
product that is 50% acetate. All such events are deliberate frauds.
This problem had become so widespread and
serious, the Chinese government passed a new series of laws stipulating
substantial fines, and providing for compensation to consumers, for any
retailers knowingly (and it's almost all knowingly) selling defective products.
These penalties are severe if the products cause health problems. The Chairman
of a commercial association in Wenzhou, a major manufacturing area, supported
the stiffer punishments, stating that, "Despite repeated bans [black
lists], safety incidents caused by intentional contamination ... did not stop.
An increased penalty will work as a warning sign and is essential." The
regulations will also place an onus on distributors to accept responsibility
for their products, forcing them to return substandard items to their suppliers,
and celebrities will also be held liable for endorsing substandard products or
participating in false advertising. This will also apply to firms like
advertising agencies who craft the many misleading promotions, since the law
stipulates that any "social group, organisation or individual" who
endorses substandard products will share the responsibility. Celebrity
endorsements are peculiarly American pathology that has been unfortunately
transferred to China, a powerful one, since many consumers will purchase a
product solely on the apparent testimony of a celebrity, creating a clear
causal relationship.
•Japanese
Electronics
For many years, Toshiba had held a prized first place in China's laptop computer
market, an enviable position the company managed to destroy in less than a
year. Toshiba had produced a laptop, primarily for the US market, one with
serious design flaws which the company persisted in denying, leading to massive
lawsuits and a settlement that totaled well over US$ 1 billion. Media reports
were that Toshiba apparently sent these
recalled defects for sale in China where the company refused any compensation
beyond software patches. Countless thousands of incensed Chinese customers
returned their defective computers, demanding full refunds, and the company's
sales collapsed nationwide, never to recover. Toshiba has virtually disappeared from the Chinese market.
Incredibly, the company then issued a statement claiming it considered China
"a crucial market" and remained committed to expanding in China.
In 2014, Nikon
issued a new camera model, the D600, which was defective in its fundamental
design and which the company was forced to scrap and replace with a new D610.
In the US and Japan, Nikon immediately offered all customers a refund or free
upgrade to the new model, but in China
Nikon denied its product had a problem, with one factory shop blaming customers
for carelessness in changing lenses. Chinese law stipulates a refund or
replacement after two unsuccessful repair attempts, but Nikon refused even
after five attempts, claiming its repairs did not really constitute 'repairs'. In China, Nikon refused both refunds and
upgrades, until CCTV got wind of the issue and featured Nikon in their
annual Consumer Rights program. It was then the quality authorities took note of
the matter, soon revealing that tens of thousands of customers shared the same
problem. After 'a few rounds of talks' with officials, Nikon was ordered to
remove the defective model from sale in China and to provide a free
replacement. Online users expressed gratitude for CCTV's intervention, stating
"If Nikon insists on double standards for China and the US, it will be
abandoned by Chinese users." My information indicates Nikon, like Toshiba,
has indeed been virtually abandoned by Chinese users. Nikon's public response:
"The company provides Chinese customers with high quality, standardized
global service".
A few years back, many digital camera and
camcorder manufacturers experienced a crisis involving most digital camera
models, camcorders and PDAs that suffered CCD (image sensor) failures, with
cameras capturing either badly distorted images or no image at all. Since Sony was the CCD manufacturer for all
other firms, it wasn't a surprise that Sony had by far the greatest number of
affected products. Commercial authorities in China discovered that 13 models of
Sony cameras were more or less massively defective in terms of imaging quality
and balance, white balance, automatic exposure and LCD screen brightness. In
Western countries, Sony published advisory information on the defective models,
with advice on how to obtain repairs or refunds, but media reports claimed that after the problems had been identified in
the US and Europe, Sony quietly recalled those defective products and shipped
them to China where they were on sale everywhere.
Many public complaints arose with Sony's
defective products in China, even more with the company's refusal to deal
properly with repair or replacement. For almost one year, Sony simply ignored
the increasing complaints, the problem only reaching the public media when a
Chinese news reporter finally put the pieces together in a story. At first Sony
simply denied the existence of product flaws, then claimed the flaws related to
only a few thousand out of millions sold in China, a claim quickly proved to be
a lie. After a full year, Sony finally agreed to repair or replace the cameras,
but they didn't. Back into the media for another blast, after which Sony still
defiantly refused to issue refunds but agreed to replace the defective cameras
with new ones. But they didn't. Customers
discovered Sony were replacing defective products with reconditioned units from
other countries. The Western media totally censored the matter, so no one
outside China was aware of it. Incredibly,
when news of the vast range of defects became public, and Chinese authorities
attempted to contact the company to discuss the problems, they were refused
admittance! A staff member said, "Before the announcement, we tried to
contact the Sony branch, but were refused". The government immediately
made a public announcement, requesting all these models be removed from public
sale.
Xinhua reported that following the
announcement, Sony conducted a
widespread campaign to squelch public awareness of its defective products, with
many media and reporters receiving anonymous calls asking them not to make
public the information. One editor reported, "We were asked not to report
and promised a huge subscription to our newspaper. He (the anonymous
caller) also said that all other newspapers had decided not to report it."
The callers also claimed the government's commerce department had "adopted
biased measures" in their investigation. After all this hit the media,
reports were that Sony agreed to repair only two of the defective models, and
at a substantial fee even though all products were covered by a full warranty.
In other cases, where Sony was unable to repair a product in the first attempt,
the company charged a substantial fee for a second attempt. Sony did pull its
defective cameras from the market but at first defiantly refused to issue a
recall. Chinese Customers also experienced problems with one of Sony's laptops,
with essentially the same service results.
Chinese consumers were naturally angry,
claiming they purchased Sony products because they trusted big brands, but
received only poor service and denials of problems. The immediate result was a
20% plunge in Sony's total revenue, a loss of 100 billion Yen that year and
more than 220 billion the following year, and a severe drop in its China sales.
Sony blamed its troubles on a worldwide economic downturn, apparently unable to
contemplate its own suicidal destruction of its brand and reputation partly by
incompetent manufacturing but primarily from the company's defiant contempt of
its customers. As I discuss below, Japanese
auto firms are sharing precisely these same experiences, including enormous
loss of market share, all of Japanese manufacturing apparently determined to
simultaneously commit hara-kiri.
Samsung,
a Korean company, did something similar with its exploding Series 7 mobile
phones, quickly recalling millions of them in the US, Canada and Europe, but
ignoring its products in China. At first, the
company claimed the batteries for the Chinese market were sourced from a
different manufacturer but, when phones began exploding in China as well, Samsung made the bizarre claim that the
Chinese phones had been incinerated 'externally', suggesting the owners torched
their own phones. It was due only to increasing problems and pressure from
regulatory authorities that Samsung finally made a recall in China. The double standard is absolutely alive and
well in China and, as you will read below, applies to most foreign consumer
products, including clothing, electronics, make-up, and even automobiles, which
are consistently recalled in Western countries for safety hazards, but seldom
in China without media exposure or government pressure.
•And
Worse
Many of the items listed above such as
substandard clothing, dated fashions, defective consumer goods, are of course a
nuisance and do constitute fraud. As well, many of these goods, including the
medical waste discussed above, present varying degrees of danger to human
health. Treating China as the world's
garbage bin has become almost an art form, but in some cases these product
shipments cross the line to the point where they seriously endanger human life,
are criminally reckless at best, and murderous at worst.
For background, the industrial facilities of
many countries, including most Western nations, purchase shipments of various
categories of waste materials for recycling, normally limited to items like
scrap iron and other metals, pop cans, PET bottles and other plastics, glass
and waste paper. This is a legitimate commercial business of considerable
scale, but some countries, notably the
US, engage in what Chinese authorities call the "widescale smuggling of
foreign garbage", concealing in their shipments of legitimate recyclable
materials large percentages of unusable and hazardous waste such as slag,
used tires, scrap batteries and electronic waste, and a wide range of hazardous
medical waste. In the first six months of one recent year, China discovered
almost 200 cases involving immense tonnage of such smuggled toxic garbage. My
information was that almost all of this originated in the US.
The Japanese attempt such practices as well,
though with more lethal materials. Soon
after Japan's 2011 Fukushima reactor meltdown, Chinese customs officials were
repeatedly intercepting "scrap metal" shipments from Japan, each of
which contained 10,000 tonnes or more of highly radioactive refuse from
Fukushima. The reactor meltdown contaminated large numbers of automobiles
and various categories of steel products totaling more than 4 million tons and,
rather than deal with this problem domestically, Japan slips portions of this
lethal material into waste shipments to other countries, especially to China,
though Italy has also intercepted containers of scrap from Japan that were
highly radioactive. It is not possible
to claim these firms were unaware of what they were shipping to China, and
of course metal recycling and re-melting plants are not equipped to test scrap
metal for radioactivity. Direct exposure to such highly radioactive material,
even if brief, can be almost immediately fatal or lead to life-threatening
illness later. There is no way to know whether, or how much, radioactive waste
slipped through customs channels undetected, but the mere fact of shipping them
is indicative of an inhuman callousness, to say nothing of abject racism.
Most readers will recall the flood of media
stories a few years ago of ocean pirates
in small boats venturing into the seas near Somalia to hijack commercial ships
for ransom. One part of that story that somehow escaped the Western media
is that those pirates were converted fishermen, and that the main reason they
were no longer fishermen was that the
seas bordering Somalia were heavily contaminated with nuclear radiation and
that fish were either non-existent or dangerously inedible. The reason, and the
reason for the vengeful piracy, was that the
US government, looking for a safe place to store tens of thousands of barrels
of highly toxic nuclear waste, discovered a convenient depository in the ocean
bordering Somalia where the Americans dumped all those barrels, many of
which were old and leaking and many of which broke open on reaching the ocean
floor, thereby contaminating everything including the fish. The piracy was
largely payback, and Somalia isn't the only place in the world's oceans where
the Americans have dumped toxic and lethal nuclear and chemical waste. One more reason countries like China,
Russia, Korea, don't want American ships anywhere near their ocean borders. It
doesn't help to know that the waste is dumped in "international
waters" when those waters are only 12 miles from your shore.
The Americans' usual method is to load an old
and useless ship right to the gunwales with nuclear (or chemical) waste, sail the
ship to a predetermined location, and scuttle it. Though this kind of
information never passes the media censors in the US, the American military
have done this so often they even have a name for it - Operation CHASE [1] - the
name being Pentagon shorthand for "Cut Holes and Sink 'Em." In many locations around the world, the US
has sunk ships, either by opening shuttlecocks to permit seawater to enter, or
by detonating explosives, these vessels containing everything from thousands of
tons of nerve gas or mustard gas, surplus or defective mines and bombs,
radioactive waste and, on occasion, biological pathogens. In most every
case, nobody knows, and those who do know would lose their lives if they spoke
of it. If America ever needed another public Congressional hearing, it would be
to reveal all the locations of these disposals and, in many cases, the payment
of immense compensation to other nations. Public records alone reveal the US
military sank at least 100,000 tons of munitions and chemical warfare weapons
in various sections of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; almost certainly
there were more that did not make the public record. As well, this program may
have been a cover for illegal underwater nuclear detonations that were banned
by treaty at the time. In one case, the USS Village [2], supposedly containing a
typical load of about 8,000 tons of munitions, was towed out into the Atlantic
and sunk. However, shortly after sinking, three massive detonations occurred
that registered on seismic equipment all over the world, explosions far too
large to have resulted from the stated content of conventional explosives.
*
Larry Romanoff is
a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive
positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international
import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan
University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA
classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of
ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted
at: 2186604556@qq.com.
Notes
[1]OPERATION CHASE- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHASE
[2]CHASE 2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHASE#CHASE_2
*
Larry Romanoff is
one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney's new COVID-19
anthology ''When China Sneezes''.
Copyright © Larry
Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai,
2020
