Those aren’t new complaints. Joe Chen, president of Tung Tai, repeated them to me as he recalled his days as a traveling scrap buyer in the 1970s and ’80s. “They load the container with not what we bought,” he told me softly in the back of his Mercedes as it sped through Foshan in November 2009. “If we saw this pile—and even if we are there—they push the other pile into the container.” When I asked Joe why this happened in his traveling salesman days—whether it was racism, or just the very human assumption that all foreigners are stupid—he answered, “Yes. You are correct.” I feel bad for Joe,
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