Others News
- Chinese consumers demand better services from foreign companies
Date: 19-Mar-2007 Sources: (Xinhua Online)
Facing the increasing violations on consumers' rights, Chinese consumers are being awakened from the worship of big name foreign companies and demand better services.
In May 2006, Yu Huimin, a Shanghai resident, complained that the Apple Inc.'s Shanghai repair branch refused to fix her malfunctioning iPod music player but replaced it with a new one, telling her the new player had a mere three-month guarantee rather than one year of the first purchase.
Last year, many cases of complaints were filed against iPod's after-service. The complaints focus on the shortened guarantee period and the suspicion that the repair branch substituted used iPod players for the broken ones, said Tang Jiansheng, deputy head with a Shanghai-based non-governmental organization for protecting consumers' rights.
'The new guarantee period is greatly shortened by three fourths. We hold that this kind of after-service has infringed upon consumers' rights because products' guarantee period should not be cut short for any reason.
'When we tried to mediate the dispute, we were simply told this was Apple's practice worldwide. They refused to talk further with us, let alone taking care of consumers' complaints,' said Tang.
Over six months, Tang and his colleagues had gone through scores of tough negotiations with Apple's Shanghai branch, the headquarters for China and the headquarters for the Asia-Pacific region.
Finally they received a letter from Apple saying they would take effective and practical measures to improve their after-service in the Chinese market,' Tang said, not sure how much they could improve.
'We paid much more money for a iPod music player but we received poor after-service. Anyway, six months' efforts came fruitful. I look forward to Apple's improvement,' said Yu.
A similar case is U.S.-based Kraft Foods Inc. which was suspicious of employing double standards in the Chinese and some other countries' markets, according to a report by the GreenPeace organization early last year.
The report said Kraft had promised to withdraw all the genetically-engineered food in the European market years ago but it kept producing food out of genetically-modified material in China and did not indicate food's ingredients on package, which violated Chinese consumers' right to know and right to choose.
'Compared with Europe, China has no restrictions on genetically modified food, so we are not accusing Kraft of violating Chinese laws but demanding Kraft adopt the same standards in all markets,' said a staff member with the Greenpeace organization.
With the report exposed to the public, Chinese consumers complained loud about 'being taken' and the food in question were soon removed off supermarket shelves in Beijing and many other cities.
Under the pressure of the Greenpeace organization as well as the public complaints, Kraft stopped providing genetically-modified food in the Chinese market in January this year.
The rising complaints on foreign companies have not only awakened Chinese consumers from the worship of 'big names' but also forced China's quality control watchdogs to tighten their surveillance over well-known foreign companies.
Last year, the industrial and commercial administrative departments in east China's Shanghai, Zhejiang Province and southern Guangdong Province carried out inspections over name brand clothes and accessories. As a result, some world-class brands, such as Amarni, Zegna, Louis Vuitton, were below standards in some aspects.
'Chinese consumers are more aware of protecting their rights from being violated, which poses a challenge for those multinationals,' said Qi Xiaozhai, head with Shanghai Commercial Economic Research Center.
'Regardless of double standards and social responsibility, any company, including the big name multinationals, will end up losing attraction to customers.'
The day March 15 witnesses Chinese consumers' increasing sense of protecting their rights since they observed the International Day for Protecting Consumers' Rights for the first time in 1984. On that day, staff members from local industrial and commercial administrations and consumer associations take to the streets to provide people with legal information or advise them about their rights.
The current laws, however, are not efficient enough to deal with violations of consumer rights, which means there remains much to do before customers can really protect their rights and interests by means of laws, Tang admits.
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