Well actually, most of the flashy multi-geared road and mountain bicycles
you see out there today have frames made in China, even though they are not
Chinese makes. This has been going on since the early 1990's. As for the
rationale behind having multiple gears, if you ride any further than your
corner convenience store, it quickly becomes apparent - although I agree
that 21 is more then plenty. A headwind is much the same as a hill, and when
you're riding a bike for any distance, you quickly find out that things
aren't as flat as they appear to be in a car. The purpose of multiple speeds
isn't only to be able to ride uphill, but also to be able to choose gears so
that the rider can maintain the same cadence, no matter what the terrain or
wind.

The thing with cheaper third world production is that, a great many
Americans and other westerners wouldn't today be able to afford all the
electronic and other consumer goods they buy, including the computers used
to read this newsgroup, fancy digital cameras, mobile phones, etc. What's
the alternative? Tariffs? Who will buy the more expensive goods then?
There's only so much money around to be spent.

Pierre


"tommyknocker" wrote in message
Most Chinese bicycles are one gear, just two sprocket wheels and a
chain. I never did get the point of having 21 different gear settings on
a bike that will be used only in a city (unless your city is San
Francisco ). I guess American bike makers do that to extract more
money from customers. Also, I should note that before the era of
transistors most of the world's people couldn't afford a radio, much
less a TV or a satellite dish. America was an anomaly with a radio in
every room-average people in Nazi Germany or Japan could barely afford
one tabletop set built worse than the average American table radio.
Using transistors eliminated the need for the craftsman skills that went
into building tube models, so the radios could be produced in Asia
(first Japan, then China) for much less than in America. This trend has
hit all industry in America-for example, once a way to standardize beef
production was invented, the skilled butchers at the slaughterhouses
were fired and the jobs given to unskilled Mexicans working for much
less. The end result is that skilled, highly paid manual laborers have
been thrown out of work, reducing the size of the middle class.