Quality And Cost

This paper uses an economic term named cost performance to estimate tea product's international market competitiveness in 1930 s in Zhejiang province of China.Before reform movement of Nanjing government,Zhejiang tea industry existed serious quality problem including low content of tea tannin and caffeine,many impurities,insanitation and so on,as well as cost problem because of pyramidal business structure,heavy taxation,labor cost and others.After this movement,the results of this study are compared with conditions of production and marketing in different years.The fruit argues,it is obvious progress that government popularized science and technology to improve tea's quality,and cooperated with peasant and merchant to reduce the cost of spending.Here are some details.Begin at technical problem,tea tannin is a very important ingredient for flavor of tea drink and has significant influence to the quality of tea.But the element is easy to be oxidized by other ingredient named oxidase in the tissue of tea leaf,it must be careful to control the oxidization within a certain range in the process of production and transportation.Unfortunately modern tea industry including peasant and merchant in Zhejiang province didn't have this ability.They lacked of necessary scientific and technical knowledge,as well as only relied on traditional experience.In order to get more profits,the peasant used to pick bigger leaves of tea which was hard to be processed to high quality.Therefore,the owner of tea factory had to use kinds of assistant materials to correct this.But these materials used to be poor in performance and made consumer lose appetite.Commercially,Zhejiang tea industry's business module actually based on its geographical and traffic level.There were three stages where the tea product needed to go through from tea garden to other country's market.The first stage was mainly based on human's power to transport form peasant's garden in mountain to tea factory in unban.This process was finished by some small merchants like vendor or peddler.The second stage had complicated vehicles including loader,boat,ox-cart,trains,truck,steamship,and so on.It was finished by tea merchants who had enough money to afford modernized transportation.The last stage was finished by English organizations which had more money to pay the fee of oceangoing freighter.Facing this condition where certain merchant couldn't pay all of money from garden to target market due to lack of capital,the higher businessman had to entrust the lower to collect tea product.The process of commodity concentration also had to be finished by foreign traders,advanced merchants,lower merchants and vendors,just like this.This module means the operating cost was added up to the final price when consumers buy it.In order to solve that,the government hoped peasants could cooperate with each other to replace the small merchant and finish the first stage.In the second stage,they enhanced the qualification of capital for the tea factory to avoid the phenomenon of capital speculation and to ensure steady supply which was in favor of reduce single product's cost of transportation according to scale effect.At last,the national government managed to monopoly the export of tea straightway.There are second and fifth paragraphs to separately assert why the price is so high and how to solve this.