The Dragonbeat blog posted a contentious article about why a brand of mediocre tea is beating the beejeezus out of local producers in China, which introduced the world to the joys of tea; a case study, really, about other Chinese industries:

Both at home and abroad, Chinese tea brands struggle to compete with foreign competitors. In China, Unilever’s Lipton brand has a market-leading share three times that of its closest local rival.

I remember years ago going to government and company offices throughout China and being served up a crappy cup of Lipton green tea at nearly every meeting. I would always think to myself afterward, “I travel all the way to the Home of Tea for a lousy paper cup of Lipton? Pull-eeze!” Occassionally, I’d get some leaves pulled from a box of local stuff (popular in the Yangtze Delta: Longjing from the West Lake District; and Biluochun, especially from around Changshu and Suzhou fields). Offices in Fujian are always nice to visit, because the officials and businessmen often go through the abbreviated ritual of serving up a pot of local Wulong tea. Admittedly, some of the nicest gifts I’ve received from government and business representatives in China have been boxes of lovely tea. Never the really good stuff, though, like Da Hong Pao. They keep that for themselves.

The challenges facing China’s tea industry are the same as those facing a host of Chinese industries: product quality issues; excessive competition in the domestic market; low prices and meagre earnings abroad; and weak branding.

China was once at the axis of world trade with its monopoly on tea (cf. my review of the book, For All the Tea in China).  A combination of corporate espionage on the part of the East India Company and the revelation that Chinese growers had been poisoning British consumers for a couple hundred years in pursuit of profit ended the British taste for Chinese tea in the mid-1800s. The British proclivity for rationalizing production and creating and then adhering to quality standards was Britain’s own  Boston Tea Party, serving notice of the end of Chinese hegemony of the tea trade.

Monitoring quality across millions of scattered tea gardens is an impossible task, and Chinese tea exporters have consistently had trouble meeting foreign safety standards. Chinese tea sells for an average of just US$2 per kg on international markets, compared with US$2.70 for Indian tea or US$3.40 for highly regarded Sri Lankan leaves.

Interestingly, most of the comments on the post were from Chinese esthetes, who accuse the writer of missing the point: Chinese tea in all its perfection was never meant to be debased through such crass commercial activities as branding and mass marketing, they argue.

Tell that to your ancestors.