During India's two-day Holi festival, which started on March 24, the country's people celebrate with color. They spray each other with water guns full of colored water, douse one another with buckets brimming with vibrant hues and toss powdered dyes at friends, relatives and anyone else who crosses their path. Also known as "the festival of colors," the celebration creates immense demand for water guns, powdered dyes and balloons - which are of course also filled with colored water for hurling at one another. Chinese manufacturers benefit from the festival because "Made in China" products have conquered the Indian market for Holi, according to media reports. Indians have come to prefer Chinese products because they are significantly cheaper than competing goods. But as Chinese manufacturers have taken over the market, questions about the quality of their products have also emerged.
Gong Xiaolu has been selling balloons in Yiwu, East China's Zhejiang Province, for more than 30 years. The 69-year-old now has a stall in the city's Futian market, a large-scale wholesale market visited daily by hundreds and thousands of buyers from around the world.
"Beijing and Shanghai are not the only international cities. More and more retailers and suppliers from all over the globe visit Yiwu as well," Gong told the Global Times on Tuesday.
He noted that some merchants from India come to his stall more than 20 times a year, buying balloons for less than 1 yuan ($0.15) each for export to India. "Total [balloon] sales last year amounted to more than 100,000 yuan," he said.
Balloons, sprinklers and dyes produced in China sell like hot cakes in almost every market across India ahead of Holi, India's annual festival of colors, according to a recent survey published in March by the Associated Chambers of Commerce & Industry of India (ASSOCHAM). However, Indian manufacturers, who have been in the business for decades, are now facing losses as high as 75 percent because only about a quarter of their products are favored by local customers, the survey noted.
"Everyone in India is aware of the cheap 'Made in China' products that flood the markets during festivals," Neelima Mahajan, an Indian who works at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Mahajan has been back to India three times in the past year and noticed that products manufactured in China such as dyes and water guns for Holi, as well as lights and firecrackers for Diwali festival tend to be cheap and trendy, but also contain harmful chemicals, she said.
According to the ASSOCHAM's survey, Chinese-made colored powder and sprinklers have been selling briskly because they cost about 55 percent less than the goods produced by Indian manufacturers.
The majority of the survey's respondents said that domestically made water pistols have almost disappeared from the markets. Instead, customers prefer "Made in China" Holi toys and dyes because they are so much cheaper, even though they are allegedly made from toxic products.
Conquering the market
The wholesale prices for balloons exported to the US and Europe are usually 50 percent higher than for those exported to countries like Pakistan and India, where there are different import regulations, Gong said.
Imported Chinese balloons account for 98.2 percent of volume and 25.7 percent of the value of India's total balloon imports, according to data compiled by New Delhi-based business consultancy Seair Exim Solutions.
According to a list on the consultancy's website, about 26,425 kilograms of festival balloons from China worth an estimated $33,371 arrived at the port of Nhava Sheva last weekend.
Besides balloons, water pistols - known colloquially as pichkaris - are another must-buy product during Holi, though hardly any are produced in India today, said a 23-year-old resident of New Delhi. "When I was a kid, we used to get the 'Made in India' pichkaris," she told the Global Times on Tuesday. "They would last longer, and they were made of some kind of metal."
When she visited relatives for Holi this year, they had at least four or five water pistols, all of which were made in China.
"The Chinese ones are mostly plastic. They break quite easily," she said, adding that she has not seen one made in India in quite a few years.
Gravity IMEX, a New Delhi-based importer, had been buying water pistols and colored powders from China because of the low prices, fast delivery and bulk supply, said Ragbeer Singh, company's director. "We imported around $50,000 worth of products before the festival and our profit margin increased by 10 to 12 percent because we imported from China," he said.
Varying quality
ASSOCHAM has said that many Chinese products are made with harsh chemicals like acids and alkalis that can damage the skin.
However, most of the local manufacturers said they only sell herbal dyes that are natural, organic and skin-friendly, according to the survey.
More and more Indian merchants have gotten into the bilateral trade business in recent years, such as sourcing products from Yiwu to export to India, said Liu Xiaoxue, an associate research fellow at the National Institute of International Strategy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "As sales channels have been expanded and diversified, it isn't easy for Indian customs to crack down every poor quality product," she told the Global Times on Tuesday.
However, Chinese-made products run the gamut in terms of quality - from very poor to high quality, Singh said. "It really depends on the buyer," he told the Global Times on Tuesday.
He pointed out that people don't intend to buy high quality products for the festival because they're only going to use them for two or three days.
Still, the idea that cheap Chinese imports are killing local manufacturers continues to be a big concern in India, said Mahajan, the employee at the business school. "For example, manufacturers in the Indian town of Sivakasi, which is known as the hub of the firecracker industry, are struggling to compete with cheap Chinese imports," she said.
In September 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined his "Make in India" program, which aims to promote the country as an investment destination and a global hub for manufacturing, design and innovation.
Liu noted that India still needs those imports because the country lags behind in consumer-driven light industry, such as textile manufacturing, "For example, in a hotel room in India, almost every item you see is produced outside the country," she said.
In recent years, there has been growing awareness - at least in some circles - about the health consequences of Chinese imports, and some people now prefer to use safer festival products that are usually produced domestically, such as organic dyes, Mahajan said.
"But these tend to be expensive, so only a small segment of affluent consumers can afford them," she told the Global Times.
