You know the sort of thing all too well: poor imitations of designer clothes, cooking pots with handles that fall off the first time you use them, batteries that run flat within five minutes, umbrellas that disintegrate in the rain, and - I'm not kidding here - in one case a ruler with centimetres that were just 8.5 millimetres long.

Of course, this sort of tat is not unique to South Africa. It is found all over the world; that ruler came from one of Hong Kong's very own Wellcome supermarkets. But wherever they are sold, Fong Kong goods are invariably made in China.

For the most part we don't complain too much about the shoddiness. Fong Kong stuff is so cheap, we tell ourselves we really can't expect any better.

Sometimes we even get a good laugh out of it. South Africans found the fakery at the Olympic opening ceremony hilarious, when a silver-voiced schoolgirl singer was barred as insufficiently pretty and a cuter substitute brought in to mime to her words. If even the biggest, most expensive party ever held by the Chinese turned out to be Fong Kong, they chortled, what hope is there for the stuff they send us here?

But Fong Kong is not funny. China's economy has only been able to expand as fast as it has because government and businesses have cut corners. Growth in market share, revenues and profits has been paramount. Quality, health and safety, and the environment have all been ignored.

The result is a culture of corner-cutting. Those substandard schools which collapsed killing hundreds of pupils in the Sichuan earthquake were pure Fong Kong. Officials had received plenty of warnings about the dangers, including from such reputable international bodies as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College London. They did nothing.

Now we have another Fong Kong scandal. In a scam of unbelievable cynicism, dairy companies in China have been doctoring their products with the industrial chemical melamine to bulk up the apparent protein content of watered-down milk.

The trouble is that melamine is a deadly poison. Last year Chinese animal feed containing the stuff killed thousands of pet cats and dogs in the United States. Despite repeated warnings and vows from Beijing to tighten food safety standards, nothing much appears to have been done.

Now melamine in milk is poisoning babies, with thousands in China sick and three dead. It seems Beijing's new safety regulations were themselves Fong Kong.

The trouble is that enforcing quality standards is time-consuming and expensive, while China's whole economic model is based on churning stuff out quickly and cheaply. Dairy products are a good example. Milk production has exploded so rapidly in China (see the chart below) that quality control hasn't had a chance of keeping pace.

Similarly in China's export industries, the focus has been on manufacturing as cheaply as possible to grab market share. Cutting corners is a big part of that. A 2006 study by the University of California-Irvine's Merage School of Business found that most of China's international price advantage could be attributed to low wages. However, counterfeiting and lax health and environmental standards were even more important than a cheap yuan in ensuring China's export competitiveness.

The fault isn't just China's. In recent years companies from around the world have rushed to shift their production there so they can take advantage of its slack standards to boost their own profit margins.

The result was a tidal wave of cheap Chinese exports, China's ballooning trade surplus and the vast accumulation of foreign reserves with which Beijing bought foreign - mostly US - debt. The sheer cheapness of Chinese goods kept global inflation low while Beijing's debt purchases held down long-term interest rates, encouraging the consumption and credit bubbles whose bursting led to the current financial crisis.

It seems Lehman Brothers and AIG were just two more examples of Fong Kong.

Well, as we've learnt this week, cheap Fong Kong can turn out to be very expensive. On Wall Street it's costing billions of US dollars. In China - infinitely worse - it's killing babies.

It's time for a change. It's time to sacrifice speed of growth for quality of development. In short, it's high time for China and the world to turn their backs on cheap and nasty Fong Kong.