Chinese plastic

Moving day looms, so I have been packing today.  All day.   This is a process which threatens to be long and painful.   It wouldn't be quite so bad if I weren't having to use Chinese made plastic crates.  As I've mentioned before on here, Chinese plastic appears to be made according to a special formula which renders it super-brittle.   I've had two of my crates break on me today as I tried to pick them up.  Not just break; SHATTER into ten or twelve fragments.     I often fret that this is emblematic of Chinese manufacturing industry in general.  It's not just that the Chinese are slapdash and inconsistent in their working practices; it's not just that they're unfamiliar with quality control procedures, or so relentlessly penny-pinching and corner-cutting that they always try to do something to the minimum acceptable standard.  No, many, many times they will actually contrive a really mind-blowingly crappy way of doing something; they'll produce something so completely bloody useless that it should have no value, find no market.  And yet it does.  The Chinese consumer seems to accept worthless, useless, possibly hazardous crap as the inevitable way-of-the-world and keeps shelling out his yuan for it because..... well, who knows why?  Because there's nothing else, I suppose.  (Unless there's some perverse streak in the Chinese psyche that actually desires crap, that is.  It may be so after all: maybe this stuff is cannily targeting its market.  It does seem as if it would take more effort to create products with such remarkably little utility than to just, you now, copy the way everyone else around the world makes something - like plastic: robust, durable, easy-to-clean plastic.)   It's one of the most mind-boggling things about this country.  And one of the most depressing.   [Anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating has never purchased a Chinese plastic washing-up bowl.]