Chinese Products in America: “Rip-off” or Blessing?

Steve Leveen
2025-04-28T10:37:04-04:00

President Trump has explained that punitive tariffs on Chinese goods are necessary because China has been “ripping us off.” I am no expert on global trade. Whether the current trade war will turn out to be a good thing for America, I can’t say. But in my view of having sourced products all over the world, including in China, for almost 40 years, it’s been the opposite of a rip-off. Americans buying Chinese products have helped citizens of both countries financially. Even more important, they have helped nudge the world toward peace.

China moves up, America moves on

In the late 1980s, when my wife, Lori, and I cofounded Levenger, we bought furniture and other wooden products from US and Danish manufacturers, and leather products from the few remaining American manufacturers still making them. But throughout the 1990s, we saw almost all of these factories close. It was our trusted Danish manufacturer who introduced us to a factory in China they had begun to buy from. The Danes told us the Chinese were now making comparable quality at a substantially lower price.

In the US we witnessed the final days of what had once been American furniture manufacturing centers in North Carolina, Indiana and Upstate New York. When we visited the Library Bureau in Herkimer, New York, a company that Melvil Dewey (creator of the Dewey Decimal System for libraries) founded in 1876, what remained of its operations were housed in a weathered, four-story brick building. We were there to see if they might possibly make something for Levenger. On the top floor we saw hundreds of wooden parts for card catalog drawers. Hand tools and sawdust were scattered around as if the workers had left for lunch and never returned. The company closed shortly after our visit. The brick building was torn down. Where it had been, today stands a Walmart.

We saw woodware suppliers of ours go out of business in Long Island, Atlanta and Springfield, Missouri. These factories faced not only cheaper products coming out of China, but a shrinking American labor force of young people willing to work in factories. Personal computers were by this time on the desks in American businesses. Young people saw a brighter future in learning software programs in air conditioned offices rather than working assembly lines in factories.

The few American leather-goods makers that still existed in the 1990s faced an additional challenge: almost all the tanneries had already left the country. How could they make leather goods competitively if they had to import the leather? America, as it happens, is a giant producer of leather hides since they are a byproduct of the meat industry, yet today these hides are shipped overseas as semi-tanned “wet blues” (a reference to the chromium salts that impart a blue color). They are then dyed and finished in tanneries in such countries as Brazil, Italy and China, where they are fashioned into car upholstery, shoes, belts, bags and wallets.

When we started visiting Chinese factories in the early 90s, conditions were primitive for workers and visiting buyers like us. There were no hotels, so we stayed in factory dormitories built for visitors, which were spartan by Western standards, but luxurious in comparison with the dormitories for workers.

The thousands of Chinese working quietly on the factory floor were trim young men and women from the countryside. They ate in wide dining halls and had factory recreational facilities and libraries. The parking lots outside were filled with bicycles.

Over the years, hotels began sprouting up, and eventually we stayed in luxurious Western-style hotels every bit as nice as those in Europe and America. The hotel parking lots had new Porsche SUVs and black Audi sedans belonging to the factory owners. The factory dormitories were vacant because workers now lived in their own apartments, riding scooters and even driving cars to work.

A Hong Kong friend of mine once told me, “I’ve never met a communist in China.” He meant that they were businesspeople, like him and me, who happened to live in a communist country. In my experience sourcing Levenger-designed products in China, he was right, and having dealt with businesspeople from all over the world, I can report that the Chinese we’ve partnered with for over 20 years have been just the kind of professionals anyone would want to work with: hardworking, straightforward, accommodating and honest. In my estimation, their success was due partly to low wages, but mostly to their work ethic, smarts and honorable practices.

As the Chinese people moved up the economic ladder, they began spending money. They became tourists. They sent their children to American colleges and visited them in those college towns and met their American friends. They saw what actual Americans are like. This meeting of other individuals is exactly what tends towards peace. In Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Stanford professor Robert Sopolsky calls getting to know actual people “individuating” rather than “essentializing.” It’s the difference between, “Yes, I know Bob Smith from Iowa and he’s a great guy,” versus Americans are all this or all that.

Meanwhile, in America, shoppers were buying all manner of Chinese goods. While Chinese products are generally associated in the US with low prices and low quality, this is because in many instances, that’s what Americans wanted to buy. The Chinese also manufacture products of the highest quality because Americans want to buy those, too, like the smartphones in our pockets. We sourced Levenger furniture and leather goods in China because no other country made the same quality at scale. And these high quality products also happened to be affordable. No wonder the Chinese did so well.

Can you imagine if the impoverished China that President Nixon visited in 1972 had not become the manufacturer to the world, but rather had continued to be destitute? Would the world now have a second North Korea, but with a population 50 times larger?

Military might, gentle commerce

I’m no apologist for the Chinese government’s policies. And I have an American friend who had a horrible experience dealing with Chinese business people. I just feel honor bound to report our own experiences in China and the benefits that have ensued from commerce between our countries.

I’m also no pacifist. I believe America needs a strong military to protect our citizens against evil in the world. As it turns out, an important part of our nation’s strong military is manufactured just a half hour north of our summer home in Maine: at the Bath Iron Works, which makes destroyers for the Navy.

We took a public tour of BIW, which begins at the Maine Maritime Museum. Guided by a retired BIW employee, we boarded a boat that took us up the Kennebec River to the museum and shipyard.

The first thing we saw at the shipyard was a gigantic blue dry dock. When new destroyers are finished, our guide explained, they are ever-so-slowly towed across the shipyard and into the dry dock, where they are christened with Champagne and ceremony. Then the dry dock is submerged and the new destroyer floats off to begin its maiden voyage down the Kennebec and into the Atlantic. The massive dry dock, our guide said, was made in China.

Christening ceremony for an American destroyer being launched via the Navy’s Chinese-made dry dock. Photo credit: Bath Iron Works and Mainebiz

As our tour continued, I wondered which had been more conducive to peace. Was it our destroyers showing the world American might, or was it the massive Chinese dry dock, showing how nations cooperate economically?

Some people think the only way they can win is if someone else loses. But in the case of commerce between China and America, from what I’ve seen in my career, people in both countries have been winners.

Steve Leveen
Co-Founder