Curious George goes to China.

• Author: Cote, Mike
• Position: COTE'S colorado

When Curious George came home from China last year, he had a face painted full of lead. Though parents should be alert about toy safety, where those toys are produced is usually ignored until something goes wrong.

Anti-China backlash emerged last year after tainted pet food and a myriad of children's toys laced with lead paint made headlines after recalls from such iconic manufacturers as Mattel and Fisher-Price. What's most surprising, however, given the pressures for keeping prices down, is that it's taken this long for such headlines to become commonplace.

It's not like we haven't been dependent on China to produce children's toys for decades now. For more than 20 years, nearly every McDonald's and Burger King kids meal toy trinket--whether they were Disney windup cars or Simpsons figurines--has had the words "made in China" stamped on the bottom.

We're so used to buying Asian-made products that it would take more frequent threats than some pet food and toy recalls to really make us change our behavior. In a study of 30 million blogs released in late November, Boulder-based Umbria found that conversations about where products are manufactured jumped from 241 a week before the March recall of tainted pet food made in China to 865 a week after Mattel issued the first of several recalls of China-made toys in August.

Despite the spike in conversations about safety, however, about 79 percent of the people commenting could be classified as "passive" or "un-fazed" consumers, said an Umbria researcher, predicting that toy sales for the season would only be minimally affected.

China's rise in recent years is too large for us to ignore. Most of it comes in the form of exports to the United States, but the market for our products is growing there, too. Colorado companies exported about $584 million worth of goods to mainland China and $707 million to Taiwan in 2006, including electronic circuits, industrial measuring instruments and animal hides.

Business people who contract with Chinese companies also know it's no longer just a source of cheap labor, as the country continues to advance as an economic power.

At a recent luncheon meeting of the Association for Corporate Growth, Ralph Pollock, CEO of the Denver-based consulting group...