HOW YOUR GADGETS ARE REALLY MADE: “Those who’ve journeyed to China to see how electronic devices are made have been shocked by working conditions.”

UPDATE: A reader — and high-school friend — writes:

As a creative person who traveled to China to help products get made I have a couple of takes on this.

In the 90’s I got to visit the Crayola factory in Pennsylvania and it was like visiting a high tech Willy Wonka factory. Beautiful and gleaming, the unwrapped crayons were beautiful. At my next employer I traveled to Taiwan and saw Crayola’s competitor ( on a small scale ). There was a tin shed out back with an ancient man hand-pouring colored wax, heated over open flames, into soot covered molds. It got the job done, but the contrast was pretty extreme.

In this last decade I visited plush factories in the Shanghai area. For the most part they weren’t new, but they weren’t terrible either. I got the strange impression that it was a substitute for a women’s college. The young ladies lived in dorms, ate together and shared the same schedule. The funny thing was what happened at break time. The bell rang, they all flooded into the commons and the uniformity disappeared. They all had modern, multi-colored hair styles, hip jeans and clothing, and all were chatting away on cell phones that were probably better than mine. It seemed like a pretty good metaphor for today’s China. Professionally one appearance, socially another.

Also, the massive construction, the unbridled pollution, the sense of plunging into the future whatever the cost, had an oddly compelling effect on me. Even the architecture was ambitious. We look so clean, almost sterile, restrained and tentative by contrast. Al Gore and his eco-posse are preaching to the wrong country for sure.

“Restrained and tentative.” Indeed. And yeah, except that in China, nobody would listen to Gore et al. Too interested in plunging into the future. We used to be that way.