Do you think the tidal wave of China product (food/toy) warnings is a "subtle" warning to China?

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

As in, hey, our military may be tied up in a disastrous imperialistic adventure, but don't you forget where the dollars that built all those shiny buildings in Shanghai are coming from and get all uppity on us!

It's some big cornfed SUV driving guy in Indiana buying your $35 dollar DVD player from Wal-Mart that is the cornerstone of your empire, and even though it'll hurt us, we can take him out of the picture if you give us trouble!

[northzax]

1. what?

we are in no position to go threatening China with this, sorry. when you owe money to a guy named "crazy vinnie" you don't start making demands on him.

[NYC]

3. A saying:

When you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank owns you.
When you owe the bank a billion dollars, you own the bank.

[havocmom]

4. They can sink us

we can't sink them

[PADemD]

7. The American consumer can sink them. Polls are already showing

that mothers will not buy toys from China for their children. The results of the Christmas shopping season should be interesting. What are the retailers going to do with all the Chinese toys that haven't sold?

[madrchsod]

9. we owe the chinese 450 billion dollars

we owe the japanese 900 billion dollars. china is`t going to do anything to us unless they can find another country with 250million consumers with a shit load of money and zero common sense

[northzax]

6. ha. when the bank has a trillion

your billion becomes another million. Yes, China would suffer a bit if the US went into a depression, but not as much as the US would.

[leeroysphitz]

2. Or... A subtle warning FROM China.

"We are in every room of your family's house so back off of Iran (whom we recently made a critical oil deal with) and we wont have to poison your children."

Or it could just be the result of unregulated capitalism. Who knows.

[havocmom]

5. Makes more sense.

A bit of both: unregulated capitalism and a reminder that America is pretty damned vulnerable to problems we haven't even thought of.

[Canuckistanian]

8. Why is it happening all of a sudden?

Relatively suddenly, anyways.

A year ago, we weren't talking about this at all. Then, the dog food scandal began.

Now there's a torrent of horror stories about lead in toys, drugs in seafood and toxic toothpaste.

Did all this really start only 6 months ago? Or has it been going on for years?

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

11. This is my point. Either 1: the products only just now got shitty/unsafe, or 2: the shittiness of

the products just now got detected or 3: the threshold of shittiness has been moved.

Or some combination of the above.

[The Inquisitive]

10. For a while I suspected

It was an attempt by the US gov to rally citizens to eagerly support legislation to "punish" China by exposing potentially dangerous Chinese goods that hit particularly close to home with the average US consumer, pet food, children's cloths, toys, mattresses etc, bit of a pattern there. Hopefully this would allow Congress to easily pass legislation putting tariffs on various Chinese goods all the while being able to justify themselves to the WTO for violating terms of trade. These Tariffs would then hopefully give the US some bargaining power in pressuring China to revaluate the Yuan or such. Just a little theory of mine though, I guess we'll see how it pans out, my guess is that the US consumer has moved on for the most part and time is running out to follow up.