'MADE in China.' Suddenly, they are the three most alarming words in the English language.
Go to any big store, supermarket, toy shop: When you were not paying attention (but enjoying the bargains), everything became 'Made in China', or made with stuff that is made in China, or made with 'stuff-that's-made-with-stuff that's made in China'.
Richard Nixon shook hands with Mao Zedong; deals were cut; investments invested.
Beijing got the 2008 Olympics; Shanghai got hundreds of glittering skyscrapers. Now some of our American flags are made in China, and half of our garlic, and something like 40 per cent of our apple juice and 19 per cent of our honey and 70 per cent of our toys and 80 per cent of our vitamin C.
Also, diethylene glycol. That is the industrial antifreeze found in toothpaste imported from China.
And nitrofuran, malachite green, gentian violet - all three of which are known to be carcinogenic - and fluoroquinolone. These are antimicrobial agents used by the Chinese aquaculture industry, triggering a ban by the United States Food and Drug Administration late last month on five types of Chinese seafood.
And of course, melamine. That is C3H6N6 for those wanting the molecular makeup. It is an industrial plastic that found its way into canned pet food in the US earlier this year, triggering the recall of 60 million cans.
China has millions of small producers making food and chemicals for the global market. 'As a developing country, China's food and drug supervision work began late and its foundations are weak,' said China's food and drug agency spokesman Yan Jiangying. 'Therefore, the food and drug safety situation is not something we can be optimistic about.'
Beijing has vowed to crack down on shady operators. It has to salvage the image of the China brand. The public relations strategy includes both defence and offence: Just last fortnight, China banned meat imports from seven US companies, citing contamination by salmonella and chemical additives.
One might detect the pungent scent of a trade war brewing.
The former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, discovered it is an extremely bad time to get blamed for any of China's food and drug safety problems. He was executed after being convicted of taking bribes in exchange for helping drug companies evade regulation.
Now, pull way back for the panoramic shot: This is a complexifying world in which no single person can grasp more than a tiny scrap of the economic and social systems that sustain us. We do not know the origin of the thing we hold in our hand.
We have become end users of stuff we do not understand that comes from factories we have never seen, in cities we have never heard of, full of people whose language we do not speak and whose names we cannot pronounce.
Consider the pet food calamity. One of the US' biggest pet food companies, Menu Foods, decided it needed a new supplier of a single ingredient: wheat gluten. It turned to a Las Vegas company named ChemNutra that specialises in importing food and drug ingredients from China.
ChemNutra bought wheat gluten from something called Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co Ltd, in Jiangsu province. The gluten from Xuzhou Anying was contaminated with melamine, the industrial plastic that ChemNutra believes was intentionally put into the wheat gluten to make it appear to be higher in protein.
By the time US inspectors reached the manufacturing plant in China, it had been closed and scrubbed clean. The melamine played a role in sickening or killing an unknown number of pets across the US.
There is obviously the danger here of consumer jingoism: The demonisation of 'Orientals' has a long history.
In the post-World War II era, 'Made in Japan' meant, for a long time, cheap merchandise. It was a pejorative term, until the Japanese started cranking out cars and television sets and consumer gadgets that were flat-out better than ours.
Merchandise from mainland China did not start arriving until 1980. The country has recently seen an economic boom built on exports. But many of us do not know much about China other than that it is where our shirt came from, and that it has a Great Wall.
Historians will say that China invented paper and gunpowder and the compass and fireworks and a bunch of other cool stuff, but many Americans think of the Chinese inventing ways to counterfeit Hollywood movies.
The ultimate consequences of free trade, of open borders, of the ubiquity of the shipping container that goes right from boat to truck to train to all over the place, remain an unknown. If you are a big-picture guy, you see the world as a vast petri dish.
Professor Emeritus Robert Clark at George Mason University says: 'We've been moving around the planet for about 50, 75 thousand years. As we move, we carry with us large animals...cattle, horses, pigs, dogs...and they all bring their own little companions with them. The horse brought us the common cold. Cattle brought us smallpox.
'The big difference is the speed with which it all happens now. The speed has increased so fast, and to such a high degree, that it does become a genuinely novel condition on the planet.'
