Capitalizing On Christmas: America's Celebration Is China's Windfall By Peter S. Goodman. The article ends:

Many of these products were being sold in different versions for different markets. Liu Li, marketing manager for Shenzhen Seapower Electrical Products Co., pointed to a shelf of miniature topiary-style Christmas trees made of synthetic fabric, some neon orange, some baby blue and others hot pink. She held out one with tiny lights imbedded in its fake pine needles. It glowed silver and pink.

"That's very popular in Japan," she said. "Especially among girls. They like cute things. Americans don't like this kind of thing."

Within minutes, Junichi Ikawa, a wholesaler from Tokyo, arrived and picked up the glowing tree, then inquired about the price in halting English -- $1.20 per unit. "The price is good and the design is fantastic," he pronounced.

At a nearby booth, Zhang Jianguo, a partner at Hutian International Corp., explained the quality differences in the products churned out by his two factories. He pointed to a wreath made for the American market. The plastic pine needles were thicker than some of the others, and they were dyed a surprisingly natural-looking shade of green. "In the United States, people prefer more traditional kinds of things," he said.

Then, he touched the needles of a wreath his factory makes for sale in Argentina and Brazil. They were thinner, and the dye was lighter. Plastic balls coated with silver paint hung from the front. "In poorer countries, they tend to prefer bright and flashy things," he said.

There was another difference, unrecognizable to the untrained eye. "This one isn't coated with fire retardant," he said, touching the wreath bound for South America. "It's not environmentally protected. The lead content in the plastic is very high."

The wreath for the American market -- made to meet U.S. health and safety codes -- costs about $2.50 to make, Zhang said. The one for South America costs him only $1.80.

A similarly single-minded devotion to the bottom line explains why workers toil inside the factories -- almost none of them air-conditioned -- in the semi-tropical heat. Most are from hinterland provinces where farming incomes have been slipping for years while the transition to the market system has eliminated subsidies and formerly socialized health care and education.

The workers eat meals collectively in the courtyard, on wooden benches parked alongside a linoleum-topped table -- rice and steamed vegetable from inside a bare concrete kitchen, a lone burner in the corner. They live upstairs in dormitories, four bunk beds side by side in a 10-by-12-foot room. Laundry hangs outside, strung from discarded fake Christmas-tree-branch material used as a line.

"It's easy to find work here," said Xia Dechuan, 35, as he packed Christmas trees into boxes bound for Korea at Zhang's factory. "This job is not hard." He is making about $90 a month now, helping support a wife and two children at home in Sichuan province, where his household generally used to have to make do with about $500 per year.

He plans to go home for Chinese New Year in January, but he will work through the holiday that is now providing his income. "Christmas means something to Americans," he said. "To us, it means nothing."

Perhaps. But at Liao's factory these days, Christmas has become a real holiday, one celebrated annually, though not with eggnog and yuletide carols. Liao takes his workers out to a restaurant where they eat Chinese food, drink Chinese whiskey and dance to Chinese pop music, toasting the influx of other people's money from around the world.

Note the Japanese fondness for cuteness, the American fondness for the traditional, the fondness of people in poorer countries for "bright and flashy things", not to mention their acceptance of lack of fire retardant or high lead content, not to mention the workers from the countryside making twice what they did at jobs that are "not hard". But the subsidies and formerly socialized health care and education that the transition to the market system has eliminated largely benefitted the urbanites, not the farmers. And what does the reporter mean by "Few of these goods will land in homes within predominantly Buddhist China"? Predominantly atheist, maybe, or maybe even predominantly Confucian.