Cha Bu Duo: The expression that fills western manufacturers in China with dread

https://www.sourcingallies.com/blog/cha-bu-duo

by libpcap • 4 years ago

84 80 4 years ago

If only we could practice cha bu duo when paying as well :)

I guess you sort of can... there’s a specific market serving the most Cha Bu Duo watch replicas in the world (far as I can tell) and you do pay far, far less for a product that is so close to the original, even at a mechanical level, that takes an expert to differentiate

ggm2• 4 years ago

Welcome to modern day housing construction. There is a reason your contract for a new build stipulates the amount of dimensional accuracy they can allow through, before its out of contract.

I don't for a minute dispute this is an issue in low-cost manufacturing. There is a very well written blog piece from 5+ years ago about how to spec building your gizmo in china which points out there is no part of the build, down to the spec of the cardboard they ship it back to you, somebody cannot substitute on for a cheaper outcome and more profit. ROHS is just the beginning.

Any discrete component device from the 70s had substitutes within spec, almost. I think this is why Hi Fi golden ears exist: you could buy a commodity which worked to spec, +/- 2% or you could pay more to get one somebody actually cared about in terms of 0.001% tolerances across the board. It costs money to care.

Been buying china (as in pottery) from a reputable, 2nd rank source for a decade. The same coffee cup comes in two slightly different shades of almost white, and has either thick or thin china at the mouth lip. Why? Because Cha Bu Duo. It has nothing to do with made in china. Its generic.

What the article says is that its culturally endemic in China. Well, that may well be true. I suspect its actually appropriate for their economy, and in times past for ours too.

here's a hint: look up the shift in meaning of the word "sophisticated"

jgtrosh• 4 years ago

To explicit your final recommendation:

1. Having obtained worldly experience, and lacking naiveté; cosmopolitan. 2. Elegant, refined. 3. Complicated, especially of complex technology. 4. Appealing to the tastes of an intellectual; cerebral. 5. (obsolete, UK) Dishonest or misleading. 6. (obsolete, UK) Impure; adulterated.

The word comes from the Greek sophists, who are defined as being remunerated, by opposition from philosophers. The association seems to be that they use fallacious arguments to defend their thesis; and by extension is used derogatorily for anything deemed too fancy.

So I think what you're saying is that a collective appreciation for precision improves as society evolves in the same way that the word “sophisticated” has mostly become meliorative.

ggm2• 4 years ago

Points 5,6 were key. It's most recent obsolete meaning was to describe adulterated goods.

peyton• 4 years ago

Bad advice. You need to “get the factory pregnant”—force them into debt to take a promised order. Complaining isn’t leverage enough.

est5• 4 years ago

It's an economical issue rather than a culture one. Chabuduo factories are making more profits because price wars and demands for chabuduo tier products. Once the Chabuduo demands dries out, those factories will be forced to make higher quality parts.

One example is how Xiaomi nearly wiped clean "Shanzhai" phones in China.

refurb6• 4 years ago

I would disagree it's an economic issue.

I've come across multiple examples of chabuduo resulting in lower quality at zero cost savings. A good example is the construction of a shower. It doesn't cost anything more to make sure the floor is sloped towards the drain. But it often isn't.

It's just the opposite "pride of craftmanship" that you see in Germany or Japan. In those countries, many people wouldn't want their name associated with a shoddy product, it reflects poorly on them.

In China, it doesn't matter, most likely because they get paid the same either way.

est5• 4 years ago

It doesn't cost anything
make sure the floor is sloped towards the drain. But it often isn't.

It costs a (or several) higher paid worker, better tools, patience and more inspection time. Often these Chabuduo workers are young people with a "Dagong" mindset, little education and got scammed into construction business and quit very soon.

opposite "pride of craftmanship" that you see in Germany or Japan

Time period matters

gambiting2• 4 years ago

>It's just the opposite "pride of craftmanship" that you see in Germany or Japan. In those countries, many people wouldn't want their name associated with a shoddy product, it reflects poorly on them.

I know this is just a personal anecdote, but I had(recently) a Mercedes-AMG which was built first in Koln, then transfered over to Affalterbach for hand assembly and inspection, it was as German as any car could ever be, and it was the worst built car I have ever had. And I've had a 1995 Fiat Cinquecento in the past.

Creaking plastics, gaps in the interior, missing pieces of insulation that the dealer would swear "should have been there", panoramic roof that had to be taken out, re-lubricated and reinstalled because it was creaking so bad......"German engineering" at its finest, really.

In contrast, I now have a Volvo XC60 which was built in China, and it's the best car I have ever owned - nearly 3 years of ownership, not a single issue, no squeaks, no rattles, interior and panels fit perfectly......

Maybe I was just very unlucky with the Mercedes, and very lucky with the Volvo - but I don't trust that "German people take pride in their work".

lelanthran3• 4 years ago

I've come across multiple examples of chabuduo resulting in lower quality at zero cost savings. A good example is the construction of a shower. It doesn't cost anything more to make sure the floor is sloped towards the drain. But it often isn't.

It actually does cost more, because it takes slightly more time.

Making the floor level means you can simply use a 2m long aluminium square tube[1] or similar makeshift tool when floating/finishing the bare floor (before tiles are put on) and simply sweep it across, and depending on the resin/concrete you are using, it might even self-level[2]. To make level-ish floors there's plenty of tools and plenty of quick methods.

To make a floor with a particular lowest-point takes more work because now you have a large curve to create in the floor and no simple tool that you can sweep across in a few attempts.

[1] I use the tube because it's light and easy to manhandle over the entire floor.

[2] When I needed a level floor in a room (pulled out the carpeting and the floor was too uneven for laminated wood), it took only 15m to pour the self-leveling resin in, sweep it over, and leave it overnight. When I built a shower floor, it took me about five hours from start to finish with a concrete mix to get an acceptable curve in the floor. Of course, it was the only time that I attempt to put a floor in a shower, so I may have spent more time getting it right than was necessary.

em500• 4 years ago

It's an economic issue associated with stage of development. Remember the joke from Back to the Future.

Doc Brown (1955): "No wonder this circuit failed, it says made in Japan."

pabs3• 4 years ago

A post on Shanzhai for those not familiar:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

acyou• 4 years ago

Cha: Difference Bu: No Duo: Much

There is a big difference in value judgement between "Close Enough" and "Difference Not Much". "Close Enough" is a value judgement on the customer's behalf, meaning that a factory representative is presuming to know what the exact customer (and the customer's customer, etc) requirements are, maybe even suggesting that th factory knows better than to follow the written specifications!

"Difference Not Much" just means that it's hard to tell the difference, without any inherent value judgement on whether the product is acceptable or not. It's not a fundamentally offensive statement in the way that "Close Enough" would be.

I think that the correct and polite response to "Cha Bu Duo" would probably be "Cha Bu Duo, but the small amount of Cha that is there is very important to our customers, etc..."

I also think this article is a little out of date, some factories in China have definitely been churning out some pretty good stuff for awhile now...

abudabi1232• 4 years ago

I couldn't understand the thinking behind the design and logistics for putting into existence a tiny very hot lamp I bought from IKEA with a rubix cube size piece of magnetic metal wrapped a few times by wire, it was heavy too and potentially a fire causing hazard. And, on the day of purchase IKEA had a lot of unattractive cuddly toy rats in the bargain bin. Perhaps, it is all an inside joke among the supply chain accountants. Sad for the workers in their daily factory grind.

gambiting2• 4 years ago

> for putting into existence a tiny very hot lamp I bought from IKEA with a rubix cube size piece of magnetic metal wrapped a few times by wire

I'm not sure I can imagine what you mean exactly - care to explain a bit more?

kurthr2• 4 years ago

Hah, I bought one of those rats!

kurthr2• 4 years ago

Yep if the customer can't tell, it's ChaBuDuo!

That's part of the reason there's so many damn tests in production and it's so damn hard to ever get rid of one.

One of the first and trickiest I had to deal with was a black paint. You can get the black in paint from a lot of different sources, but some of them are (slightly) conductive. The paint had been specified, but when margins are tight the way a CM makes extra money is sourcing on the down low. Well, that conductive paint made things not work!

The solution was to measure the conductivity, but there were millions of panels already made up and so a non-contact jig had to be made and a new test added to (near the beginning of) the assembly line to detect and separate the bad parts. It turned out that even after the initial paint substitution, the paint supplier changed their own process and this jig became useful again. It a significant piece of IP that made out product more reliable than others! It was made in the US and shipped to Asia (where I'm sure the reverse engineered it).

illuminati19112• 4 years ago

"I also think this article is a little out of date, some factories in China have definitely been churning out some pretty good stuff for awhile now... "

It is still how 96-98% of China and Chinese manufacturing works, but you are right. Before it was much more and there has been a lot of development during the last 10 years.

Also what most western people don't always realize is that the stuff from China that is shipped to western countries is usually higher quality than the stuff they sell domestically. This also applies to western brands. Chinese people have much higher tolerance for low quality and things getting broken so those factories producing the lower tier products are focusing on the domestic market while higher quality manufacturing is more focused in export.

user_named2• 4 years ago

The direct translation of the three characters doesn't matter. Saying chabuduo in reply to a question is like just answering Yeah in English. It means you don't care and it is a non reply.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

Mianzi is far from being Chinese. I suffer from it, and I'm sure a vast majority of people do too. It's probably a core issue in adult relationships where you exchange responsibilities for survival, thus often want to appear on top of whatever from the start to avoid looking dumb and stay relevant. Which means if you can't solve the issue .. you have to crack that false image. Social backpedaling is costly.

dirtyid4• 4 years ago

As far back as 1924, the Chinese philosopher, essayist and diplomat Hu Shih wrote a piece on “Cha Bu Duo” as a way of protesting against the attitude, which he felt was hurting China as a nation.

Fast, cheap, good. Pick two.

Deng wanted poor China to develop fast. So ChaBuDuo.

The Life of Mr. Cha Buduo was an essay on the inability to adapt to modernization. Modern Chinese ChaBuDuo culture is the maximal embrace of it for specific development goals. ChaBuDuo culture can be reigned in if the government really wanted to i.e. Chinese aviation safety used to be dismal, now it's one of the safest in the world. Same with high speed rail safety after the very public Wenzhou train crash (2022 bad year for both though).

People need to understand: good enough + Chinese population means = enough occasional, actually good outcomes to reach global competitiveness in ways that matter, fast. Central government wants to incentivize innovation and research -> so huge Chinese population starts spamming garbage to ChaBuDuo tier patents and research papers. Occasionally the system produces 1 good patent or paper out of 100. But volume is so high that 1/100 is good enough to be near competitive. Refine quality to 2/100 to reach parity. Refine to 3/100 and China becomes industrial leader. It's not hard to go from 1-3/100 in a short span of time when you have a massive labour force spamming its way into maturity. This is how China went from having poor academic research capacity into leading research many key fields in the last few years. Chabuduo manufacturing with Chinese population means plastic hangers to iPhones in 10 years. Chabuduo construction means enviable transportation systems, tier1 cities from fishing villages, and ghost cities that eventually gets filled by the hundreds of millions still waiting to be urbanized. Perfect is the enemy of fast developement. So China ChaBuDuos until there's enough base to focus on "quality development".

On the matter of PRC chabuduo manufacturing - as others have stated, there are now plenty of fast + good options in China, it just won't be cheap. Ultimately it's a testament of Chinese supply chain and industrial prowess to have so much fast + cheap options, a lever most countries don't even have. One assumes there's some sort of competitive / quality advantage for western firms that survived outsourcing. Though sometimes it's market distortions like guaranteed government contracts in which case it's not even pick two categories, but pick one - usually good, but slow and expensive. One category I follow is gun optics, how fast Chinese companies like Holosun are closing in on the field while EOTECH fat on gov contracts have been stagnating for years, with drama of delivering defective sights. A few Chinese iterations and they might be neither good, nor cheap, nor fast. Incidentally, the source of geopolitical anxiety over Made in China 2025 / PRC establishing indigenous high tech industries.

Finally, consider how much chabuduo shit there are in western domestic service economy, one sector where there's options at every price point and generally, you get what you pay for. Everyone chabudos, China just has a massive industrial and manufacturing base that can chabuduo with making widgets as well.

Vespasian2• 4 years ago

I sometimes wonder what kind of cultural difficulties Chinese companies face when they start operating in "The west"

Perhaps not getting the results they want because they don't phrase issues bluntly enough (pure speculation on my part)?

bobthepanda5• 4 years ago

Most problems for conglomerates begin and end with product market fit. China has this issue much worse than other countries, because the protectionism in its home market means that there has been a lot of companies that offer totally different types of services, which aren't attractive to non-Chinese consumers.

(This isn't just a Chinese thing, Western companies often fail to enter China for much the same reason, Walmart China has struggled for years since Chinese consumers are not fundamentally interested in a big-box supermarket.)

Vespasian2• 4 years ago

Interesting.

Do you know of any examples of such services that would only be attractive for Chinese customers?

I'd guess these would mostly not relate to physical products but services that somehow interact with Chinese bureaucracy?

em-bee2• 4 years ago

Chinese consumers are not fundamentally interested in a big-box supermarket

are they really not interested, or are they just not used to it, and it takes time to become familiar?

china has a very homogeneous culture. foreign elements remain obviously foreign until they manage to adapt and become attractive.

Markoff4• 4 years ago

From my personal experience with wife (CN citizen) working recently for Chinese company I can tell you many of these companies not realize they are already outside China in very different enviroment, they still treat employees as if they were in China (pay low, expect unpaid overtime, think everyone is easily replacable), break labor code, etc. Wife just left one she just recently joined and told her not ever try Chinese company here in EU, it's just waste of time after my experiences with Chinese companies in China and this just confirming they are behaving same here.

yayitswei• 4 years ago

I'd like to nitpick that the song he linked is by MC HotDog from Taiwan, home to semiconductor fabs which produce some of the most precise manufacturing in the world.

futhey• 4 years ago

Just adding color – the article is quite short.

Taiwan has its fair share of Chabuduo "culture" – you hear it all the time. TSMC and other high precision firms exist, and Taiwan markets itself as being able to handle this better than other alternatives (Taiwanese Foxconn is named HON HAI PRECISION, for example). But, if you see a major accident on the news, etc, people may joke that it's "chabuduo culture" at work.

throwaway4good• 4 years ago

Where as in my world we have fake doors and minimal variable products.

Let’s not mix up culture with something that is just business strategy driven by incentives and opportunities.

thematrixturtle2• 4 years ago

Great 2016 essay in Aeon about this topic, with concrete examples of how chabuduo is not just an annoyance for manufacturers, but often actively hazardous:

https://aeon.co/essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-a...

fmajid2• 4 years ago

Also an excellent Wharton article on the related pgenome non of Quality Fade:

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/quality-fade-chi...

fmajid2• 4 years ago

How autocorrect thinks “pgenome” is a correction for “phenomenon” is beyond me.

dirtyid4• 4 years ago

Not really. James "Beijing" Palmer bemoaning how most of PRC is still a developing country doing developing country things, including in tier1 cities full of poor, undereducated, undertrained, migrant workers who has to improvise/chabuduo their way to survive. That's the economic reality when about half the country are still lower middle income even if PRC is going to enter upper income per capita by years end. Ground conditions simply reflect disparity in material conditions throughout the country.

He insinuates China is caught in a chabudo trap because CCP's afraid of plumbers (or anyone) organizing when it's really about the hundreds of millions left behind by rapid modernization who are trapped in informal economy because they're chabuduo tier workers and the country must accomodate their existence by accepting chabuduo level work where possible.

He thinks PRC should be run by crafts people produced by years of rigourous training like in developed countries, when most of the country are tinkers produced by mediocre vocation training system established pre 90s when PRC was dirt poor. A system that's just getting some attention after being neglected for 20 years because state correctly prioritized resources towards highered / STEM.

Really that's the crux of the situation, large swaths of PRC is still a developing country where good enough is a realistic baseline but also one so large the central gov can intervene and titrate resources / enforce policies to be globally competitive in domains that matter more for "national rejuvenation" or "comprehensive national power". Afterall, PRC didn't chabuduo it's way through a relatively sucessful space program, or other critical strategic indigenous industries. Note, this doesn't mean they didn't wildly spam industrial policy to inefficiently pursue goals, at PRC scale means hammering 100 chabuduoing iterations to generate 1 gem is a viable strategy.

thematrixturtle2• 4 years ago

That's a pretty hostile take? He's not saying chabuduo as some mythical, uniquely Chinese characteristic, and specifically calls out the migrant worker situation as leading directly to chabuduo.

While wild income gaps definitely generate chabuduo in any developing country, as anyone who's seen electrical work in Thailand ("mai pen rai!") or road construction in India ("jugaad!") can attest, the uniquely Chinese spin is the hukuo system: those migrant workers are indeed "trapped", without any realistic possibility of ever graduating into a bona fide resident of Beijing or Shanghai, no matter how good their skills are.

qprofyeh3• 4 years ago

This attitude can be found anywhere in the world.

illuminati19112• 4 years ago

As someone who has lived several years in China, it most definitely cannot be found. In some places maybe, but not anywhere or at least not in the same magnitude.

This article may simplify it too much and fail to explain it properly but the "cha bu duo" really is part of every single thing in every day life within Chinese society. It's how people cook their food, it's how delivery services function, it's the promises that are given to other people and it's also how the manufacturing works etc. And it's definitely much more common in China than elsewhere. Also it's not always a negative thing, although most western people would definitely think it is in most cases.

qprofyeh3• 4 years ago

So in other parts of the world services are subpar and people lie to you about how they put in all that effort or blame someone else, then you foolishly forgive them for trying but failing due to incompetence or bad luck.

When the services are equally subpar but people are actually honest about not giving a fly and just making a living, you feel that that country doesn’t have the right attitude.

It’s funny how communication/presentation matters. Consumers want providers to at least pretend they like them and gave a 100% for their money.

cyber_kinetist• 4 years ago

For example, most of the software industry…

Markoff4• 4 years ago

No, it can't be found to such extent almost anywhere in Europe (it's quite rare), maybe in in (lazy/poor) South Europe, but it's prevalent in Southeast Asia to same/similar extent as in China, by my experiences Laos is beating even in China in chabuduo approach to everything, which is reason why they are developing at such pace compared to their neighbors.

qprofyeh3• 4 years ago

Ever renovated a house? These people only ever aim for good enough.

To someone with any standards regarding materials and construction, most IKEA products are basically crap.

Hairdressers, chefs, drivers, 95% of the world don’t operate in an exact sciences mode. We can get mad at all of them for not having enough responsibility and passion for their craft.

TheLoafOfBread• 4 years ago

5,8mm or 5,75mm bullet? 5,8mm or 5,9mm barrel? Recent video test of Chinese new QBZ-191 shows that something is wrong with the rifle and it won't even spin the bullet. Probably result of Cha Bu Duo

https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinesium/comments/wcrxad/brandnew_...

dirtyid4• 4 years ago

It's called simunitions / training rounds with underpowered powder loads. Notice the low penetration on the cinder blocks behind that would shatter using normal rounds that would also ricochet dangerously in enclosed CQC training spaces. Racist dummies at /r/chinesium thinks NORINCO doesn't know how to make a rifle when their decades of exports models that shoots fine.

flohofwoe2• 4 years ago

In a previous life when I learned a 'real world job' (industrial toolmaker in Germany), our master used to yell: "Not as precise as possible, only as precise as necessary!" (essentially the German version of "Cha Bu Duo" I guess?) when we spent too much time on one thing.

This is exactly why tolerances exist which are clearly defined upfront for every measurement. Inside the tolerance is by definition 'good enough', outside is not. Very simple and leaves no room for discussion.

ucha• 4 years ago

Well this article seems to be about the opposite of that, less precise than necessary or slightly outside of tolerance range!

user_named2• 4 years ago

Absolutely not the same thing. Chabuduo is often disregarding the question or requirement and doing whatever they were going to do anyway.

flohofwoe2• 4 years ago

It was my (typically German) poor attempt at making a joke about the 'German precision engineering' cliché ;)

Markoff4• 4 years ago

I hihgly recommend book Poorly made in China, which describes Chinese companies culture in regard to manufacturing products, I can confirm this applies everywhere across other companies even in IT by my 5+ years exprience living there.

https://www.pdfdrive.com/poorly-made-in-china-an-insiders-ac...

mobiuscog• 4 years ago

Isn't this exactly the same approach as the majority of the Software industry ?

beachy• 4 years ago

We have a similar expression in New Zealand: "she'll be right".

Expresses the belief that "whatever is wrong will right itself with time", which is considered to be either an optimistic or apathetic outlook.

sslayer• 4 years ago

Seems to me if you expected a specific item within a specific tolerance and received said item outside of that tolerance, you could then negotiate a lesser payment calculated by being a percentage equal to the difference in tolerance. So ultimately it would equal out by over engineering/over speccing the item to end up with a product within tolerance. Of course if they protest the price difference, well then... 'Cha Bu Duo', right?

xtiansimon• 4 years ago

I think this describes many products on Amazon, Alibaba, eBay shipped directly from China and also resold by US small businesses/online resellers. Sometimes it’s fine. Other times not.

I purchased replacement foot peg for my Suzuki. They look exactly the same, but are in fact maybe 90% smaller. Same proportion, but just smaller.

Not so good was an emergency/travel wrench for my rear axel which was 1mm bigger than the spec. That bolt is $35 and rounding it off and fracking up the whole axel is not acceptable.

ilaksh• 4 years ago

My cynical take on this is that they are manufacturing in China to save as much money as possible, and the manufacturer, even though he is in China, still has small margins, since he is occupying this resource-constrained part of the market. So he tries to fulfill orders with less precision because its much faster and more likely to actually result in a profit.

That's not a cultural issue, that's because you are so cheap.

Similar to the way people will try to outsource software projects to India for ridiculously small budgets, then claim there is something wrong with Indian culture when they get software that barely works.

So, unfortunately, it seems as though the cheapest business people are also often the most racist.

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

What is hard to understand about "minimum standards". It's a floor not a "get close to"

Schroedingersat• 4 years ago

Yeah, we invented them for much the same reason as minimum wages and environmental law.

You shouldn't be surprised when you specifically go out of your way to find the cheapest factory to avoid paying non-slave wages that ignores what little laws for protection of workers and nearby residents that china has that they also ignore your spec.

Cha Bu Duo: The expression that fills western manufacturers in China with dread

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