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A South African car reviewer recently showered it with relative praise. “Cheap and not at all nasty,” said the headline. The reviewer noted the usual reputation of Chinese cars in Africa: “rubbish” quality, “appalling” design and a disturbing smell of glue.

Chinese automakers must overcome this credibility problem as they ramp up exports and build new assembly plants in Africa, in an attempt to maintain growth despite sluggish car sales back home.

Call it the “fong kong” curse — a slang term in South Africa for cheap made-in-China products that fall apart soon after purchase. Zimbabweans similarly call low-quality Chinese products “zhing zhong.”

While China’s auto industry is the world’s biggest, new vehicle sales in the Middle Kingdom have slumped due to the country’s cooling economy, and manufacturers are making a push overseas, according to a 2012 report by the international consultants KPMG.

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From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Argentina to the Philippines, here are the six areas of conflict -- all tied to energy supplies -- that have made news in just the first few months of 2012:

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The conflict began in mid-April, when a Filipino frigate — a 1960s Coast Guard vessel bought from the United States — attempted to stop several boats of Chinese fishermen who had taken live sharks, giant clams and coral from waters claimed by the Philippines around a rocky patch called the Scarborough Shoal. The Chinese dispatched several larger, more modern boats from one of its civilian maritime agencies, which intercepted the frigate, allowing the fisherman to escape with their catch. Filipino fishermen say they have since been barred from fishing in the lagoon.

Now, after nearly a month, ships from the two nations have refused to budge from the waters surrounding the shoal, while populists back home have whipped up a nationalist frenzy.

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The show uses 20th- and 21st-century photographs to examine the experiences and preoccupations of Chinese people living in the U.S. -- visitors, immigrants and residents with multigenerational roots.

Over email, curator Herb Tam explained the exhibition's philosophy and themes. Click through the following slide show for a glimpse of the show's photography.

Where did you get the idea for this exhibition, and why did you choose to put it together now?

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For years, the Taiwanese electronics giant has been dodging accusations of bad labor practices, charges that have tarnished the reputation of the world's hottest gadget retailer.

But electronics industry insiders caution against celebrating a labor victory too soon.

It will only be a matter of time, they say, before contract suppliers simply shift operations to cheaper Asian destinations and replace hundreds of thousands of Chinese jobs with robots.

“It’s just cost efficiencies. Like any other company they’re trying to cut costs," said John L’Epagnol, a managing partner of Goldhawk International, which marries Western buyers with Chinese factories.

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You have said that many students of Chinese in the U.S. come away with a very narrow understanding of Chinese language, culture and society. Are the five books you’ve chosen a way of counteracting that?

Yes. I recently asked some school kids, “If you had the opportunity to go to China today, what do you think you would see?” One of the students said there would be a lot of lanterns everywhere, a lot of red, and a lot of dragons. I thought, “Wow. If this kid stepped into Shanghai in 2012, he would really be bowled over.” A lot of people in the U.S. and other countries have a very narrow, stereotypical idea about what China is. It’s really important for Americans to understand that China is an incredibly diverse and even multicultural society. It is not a monolith, it is not isolated from the rest of the world, and there is, at the end of the day, no easy definition of what it means to be Chinese or China.

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All of these explanations are fables with a purpose: They are designed to deny the obvious by pretending that exploitation and policies that encourage exploitation aren't the root cause of offshoring. More specifically, they ask us to ignore the fact that tariff-free trade agreements and tax loopholes incentivize companies to shift production to countries where slave wages, environmental degradation and human rights abuses are tolerated.

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China and the United States have launched numerous energy cooperation initiatives during the past 30 years.  Only over the past decade, however, have they become global leaders in the relevant technologies, both as users and manufacturers. China now leads the world in wind power deployment, followed by the United States. Chinese investments in clean energy exceeded those of any other country in both 2009 and 2010, but the U.S. was back to No. 1 in 2011 (where it had been for several years prior to 2009).

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It hasn't gotten any notice since Adelson became a player in presidential politics, but it turns out that the trove of diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks contains an interesting anecdote about how Adelson aggressively promoted his casino and hotel business in the Chinese territory of Macau -- and a run-in he had with the central government in Beijing.

First, some context. The news broke last March that Adelson's Las Vegas Sands Corp. is under federal investigation into whether it has complied with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The act makes it illegal to bribe foreign officials to obtain business deals.

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Behind them, Tiananmen Square stretches out in all directions. I can see Mao’s tomb and swirling crowds of tourists and police and the imposing entrance to Beijing’s ancient Forbidden City. At my back is China’s imposing Great Hall of the People, where the fate of a billion people is routinely determined by a handful of aging men.

Like Meryl Streep, I am playing Margaret Thatcher. But this is no Hollywood production. This is a Chinese government TV movie showcasing the accomplishments of Deng Xiaoping, the country’s late paramount leader.

Again, the director yells. My translator barks out his message: “Take a step forward! Fall down the steps!”

No stunt coordinator, no safe place to land off camera. No net. Just 50 feet of steep cement. I may break my neck doing this, I tell the translator. She shoots me a blank stare. The camera rolls. And the Iron Lady falls.

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The path to U.S. college acceptance, however, increasingly compels students to sacrifice their integrity. For the right price, unscrupulous college prep agencies offer ghostwritten essays in flawless English, fake awards, manipulated transcripts and even whiz kids for hire who’ll pose as the applicant for SAT exams.

“Oh my God, they can do everything for you,” said Nok, 17-year-old Thai senior in her final year at a private Bangkok high school. (She asked GlobalPost to alter her name for this article.) “They can take the SAT for you, no problem. Most students don’t really think it’s wrong.”

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The new policy was signaled by President Obama himself on November 17th in an address to the Australian Parliament in which he laid out an audacious -- and extremely dangerous -- geopolitical vision.  Instead of focusing on the Greater Middle East, as has been the case for the last decade, the United States will now concentrate its power in Asia and the Pacific.  “My guidance is clear,” he declared in Canberra.  “As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” While administration officials insist that this new policy is not aimed specifically at China, the implication is clear enough: From now on, the primary focus of American military strategy will not be counterterrorism, but the containment of that economically booming land -- at whatever risk or cost.

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A much more useful approach was laid out by the journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann in "U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic," which he published in 1943 during World War II. Lippmann spoke of “the order of power,” that is, the relationships among the handful of great military and economic powers that matter the most. In his view of history, American foreign policy has always been defined by America’s relations with other great powers: first Britain and France, and later Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union.

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This model still works pretty well. Migrants make up about half of the workers in the United States with science or engineering qualifications, and accounted for two-thirds of the growth in that talent pool between 1995 and 2006. Half of the bosses of Silicon Valley start-ups in 2005 were migrants, and foreign-born workers at America’s most innovative firms file most of the patents: 72 percent at Qualcomm, 65 percent at Merck, 64 percent at General Electric and 60 percent at Cisco.

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It might therefore be thought essential that the world’s democratic  nations should address this trade collectively and urgently. If it must  exist, then surely it should be coherently regulated, legitimately financed,  effectively policed and transparent in its workings, and meet people’s need for safety and security?

Instead the trade in weapons is a parallel world of money, corruption, deceit and death. It operates according to its own rules, largely unscrutinized, bringing enormous benefits to the chosen few, and suffering and  immiseration to millions. The trade corrodes our democracies, weakens already fragile states and often undermines the very national security it purports to strengthen.

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And while one Chinese province’s minimum wage might seem like a local issue, the salary question underlines a continuing momentum in China toward building higher-end business and better jobs.

In other words, the days of endless, cheap Chinese labor are limited. What that means for consumers in the United States and elsewhere is simple: Things are going to cost more, soon.

“I think there’s quite a good argument now that the global race to the bottom has been concluded,” said Geoffrey Crothall of the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labor-rights group. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

The Pearl River Delta is no longer a cheap place to produce, but it does have established supply chains, factories and infrastructure. Companies that want to produce ultra-low-cost products are moving inland in China, or to poorer countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia. Yet there’s nothing on the horizon to replace the cheap China model of the 1990s and 2000s.

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