Pen Type-A: a cautionary tale of manufacturing in China

The description and photos of the etching and milling "factories" are, for me, the sort of thing that makes funding Kickstarter projects worthwhile:

... As we got into the car to head to the other factories, the factory owner conveniently disappeared and we were whisked off with his assistant and a machinist. It was unclear where we were going. After a long drive, the car stopped and we were told to get out. There was no factory.

We were on a dark, narrow road where every storefront was some variation of a live/work machine shop. Each one different. Each one specialized. A whole town of them, crammed side by side on narrow streets lit only by the glow of naked fluorescent bulbs. Think Bladerunner meets pre-industrial metal shops. The energy was palpable. Clean? No. Could we find it on a map? No. Could we have ever imagined that a factory work is outsourced to places like this? Definitely not. And even though we had never seen anything like it before, we could recognize it straight away. Every shop was run by highly skilled, passionate, self-taught makers. A lot like the shops many of our friends back home run. They are their own bosses. They live for and are proud of their work. This was nothing like the factory where we spent the past few days. It was invigorating.

The man that machines the screw parts is awesome and his setup is incredible. He has six CNC swiss screw machines in a storefront garage, in the back room is his office, a small kitchenette, a toilet (which you flush by pouring a bucket of water into it) and a small room off the back where he and his wife sleep. ...

(I received my Pen Type-A a month or two ago, by the way. It's well made and is a pleasure to use.)

In the US, you have more legal options. IIRC (and I'm not a lawyer), in China you are unlikely to be able to sue for more than what you paid. Chinese law can seem a lot more laisse faire compared to US law, unless they think you are in debt (and then you get imprisoned). Actually, it's not always laisse faire, it just looks that way because some things aren't enforced, and other things are - it's different, and your supplier knows the law better than you.

From reading http://www.chinalawblog.com/, it seems one solution is to include an arbitration clause. You can take them to arbitration in the US, using US law, and get the decision enforced by arbitration treaties. But you'd want legal advice for this - if you mess up, the you can end up in a no-man's land where the Chinese courts refuse to see you (because you've specified a foreign legal jurisdiction), and refuse to enforce a foreign ruling because it's not in their jurisdiction.

Also, you want some things in Chinese. If anything gets used in a Chinese court, it gets translated to Chinese. If the other party manages to influence the official translation (or the official translation is just wrong), it's not going to be fun trying to change the courts mind.

Whatever the case, working with a Chinese supplier requires a good OEM agreement, written with the advice of a lawyer who knows the ins and outs of Chinese OEM agreements. It's not easy, but it's better than your supplier seeing you as an easy mark.

Good,

But this works fine only as long as some guy makes the same pens and starts selling for prices way lesser than you do.

This is the reason why China exists. Because there is 'Some guy' who always sells things for prices lesser than somebody else. And not manufacturing in China isn't an option for companies like Apple, Dell etc. For their volume, the cost advantage is simply too huge.

China is also notorious for "creative interpretations" of contracts that just happen to favor the Chinese company.

Because gists are for publishing code. This is not the intended use case.