On September 5, the US's Mattel Inc., the world's biggest toy manufacturer, announced a recall of 848,000 Chinese-made toys which were said to probably contain excessive amounts of lead. This was the third time that Mattel had recalled Chinese-made toys since this August. Frequent recalls have provoked crises over China's toy exports and even "made-in-China" products as a whole.

Reportedly Mattel has 65 percent of its toys produced in China. As matter of fact, Chinese producers make these products solely based on the designs provided by foreign companies. Previously the foreign companies even provided raw materials to the Chinese toy makers. Currently they allow the latter to use Chinese-made materials in order to cut costs. Consequently this makes quality monitoring more difficult.

In addition, a market analyst pointed out that Mattel should assume the bulk of responsibility for the recall. Constant charges against Chinese manufacturers on the part of Mattel may arouse suspicion that Mattel wants to duck its reliability, the analyst warned.

For more details, please read the full story in Chinese. (http://paper.people.com.cn/gjjrb/html/2007-09/06/content_19014476.htm)

(China.org.cn September 6, 2007)