Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

It is the best and booziest time of the year in China, when nine out of 10 factories cease to hum, shops lock their doors, and hundreds of millions of people trek back to their hometowns for weeklong sleepovers, hangovers or makeovers, all for the Lunar New Year.

But in recent years, a swelling tide of Chinese have jetted off for holidays abroad during this period, thinning their wallets on a laundry list of must-haves whose walloping turnover has made foreign dealers laugh their heads off.

Among these merry fellows this year was Sagami, a Kanagawa Prefecture-based condom maker. Chinese tourists trooped to Japan's stores and snapped up its thinnest-ever rubber. The sales were virile enough to battle an aging, "low-libido" native clientele, as Bloomberg put it.

Such shopping sprees are evocative of Spring Festival 2015, when an estimated 450,000 countrymen headed to Japan and splurged 5.93 billion yuan ($903 million) in the local shopping malls. The hottest item then was battery-powered, water-sprinkling, heated toilet seats.

Back in China though, flushed Netizens mocked their compatriots that had been wooed by loos. Some called for a blockade of Japanese goods over a historical grudge.

However, customers are free to decide upon their own deals anywhere in an unfenced, non-demarcated global village. Beyond the ocean, we Chinese travelers have splashed out on Australian milk powder, South Korean facial creams and American iPhones.

Moreover, sometimes the grass is indeed greener on the other side of the hill. For example, Japan's prophylactics can be "softer, silkier, sweeter" and are the "closet to wearing nothing;" lavatory buttons rinse out users' bottoms with a near-spa experience rather than a wishy-washy answer to the call of nature.

I succumbed to the siren song of foreign electronics lately after I wanted a lint remover.

My first gadget was from a national machinery tycoon, but I returned it since after charging it for eight hours, it cheeped-cheeped for half an hour and trimmed a skimpy quarter of one cashmere sweater.

Next, I had to shift to an obscure brand from a neighboring country via the Internet. It cost me an arm and a leg yet was hands down a thumbs-up helper. I held this plug-and-play, megawatt, streamlined tool buzzing for seven minutes and ta-dah, a spic and span woolly!

It's sad to say that even several mini alien household appliances can pulverize China's counterparts to a fine dust. Other than technologies, industrial powerhouses like Japan are also a cornucopia of craftsmanship, very attuned to nuances, intricacies as well as a human touch.

There runs a perennial tale in sino-blogsphere: in order not to release a soap box unfilled with a soap, a European conglomerate set up a task force, ploughing loads of money and time into mechanical arms that could sense and sift out any empty box. A worker in a township sweatshop in China though, just bough a 10-cent electric fan to blow away lighter boxes.

That numerous Netizens sneer at the former while cheering for the latter reveals an unsetting reality: Chinese manufacturers kowtow to street-smarts juggling, hence jerry-built, cut-price, low-tech products.

Just as I believed my new clothes gadget must have risen from tons of fleecy ashes and flown into my arms from thousands of miles away, my eyes popped up over three words in the corner - Made in China! The online seller confessed this little Japanese thing was assembled by a foundry in China's Dongguan.

Before the next blink, he blurted out, "Take it easy, darling! Its core technology came directly from Japan. It is a Japanese commodity from stem to stern!"

These are precisely the horns of the dilemma on which Chinese enterprises find themselves impaled. Being the workshop of the world, our nation, with its low labor costs, is running the planet's production lines hand over fist for overseas corps. On the other side, hi-tech foreign syndicates are keeping their fingers on the pulse and purse of the Middle Kingdom's ever richer and pickier people.

Little wonder China's Premier Li Keqiang urged domestic firms to upgrade products to be more competitive. "At least we can save our customers the price of a plane ticket," said he during the last year's two sessions.

The good news is that more homegrown companies are getting down to basics and business. It seems merely a matter of time before upscale "Made in China" tags soar and roar.

The author is a Shanghai-based freelance writer. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn