Again, I understand it's an experiment, and you're not proposing to do this as a lifestyle rule (at least not yet), but does it really have value as an experiment? Will it teach you (and by extension anyone you discuss it with, like this forum) anything that can be used to make positive changes in how we wield any of our consumer power? I may be missing something, but so far at least this proposition strikes me as having a number of elements that could undermine its usefulness:
1) timespan: you said you wouldn't *acquire* any MIC for one month, not that you wouldn't *use* any MIC (that you already have). Surely, providing a reasonably complete and well-organized household, not acquiring anything new other than food during one month is hardly a major challenge, so you avoid MIC easily by the same stroke? If you'd said you wouldn't *use* MIC for a month, or even committed to a year-long timespan as in the book, that would have been another thing entirely, but as it is, the experiment may be scuppered before it's even begun :-/
2) sampling: even if you were to go for use rather than acquisition, MIC is too broad a criterion to be very useful, in that there are certainly plenty of items made in China that are grade A quality and cannot be sourced elsewhere (at least not without a monstrous price hike...but that's another matter). For example, silk, like all my numerous scarves and the cheap-and-cheerful silk tops I wear to sleep and around the house - I have enough to wear a different one every day for two weeks without doing laundry, and it really is a boon for my sensitive skin and the extreme hot weather where I live (it's one of the most skin-friendly fabrics you could find). Most of my mother's entire wardrobe is Chinese-made silk clothing, and so would mine be if it weren't for the cut of the clothes not serving my shape (hourglass). And silk isn't the only thing, either - just a large, easily identifiable group of items (others are more individual).
3) definition: what is MIC anyway - where do you draw the line? Here's another kind of things that are made in China that are first-class quality: my iphone, ipod, and macbook. Same for a bunch of kitchen gear and other household appliances. Do we just decide 'oh no, these are really american/german/french products' and add yet more convenient exceptions and caveats to an experiment that's beginning to look like swiss cheese from all the stuff we're taking out of it? Or do we go all the way and say these are also off-limits, thus depriving ourselves of using the best we can afford out of something that is beginning to sound more and more like arbitrary prejudice?
Which brings us to
4) I agree with Netleigh that this smacks of protectionism, but fear it could even be its rather more sinister cousin at work - racism. See, protectionism is usually more about buying only from your own country (what RebeccaL said). Nothing against other people, the argument goes, but you wanna take care of your own and let others take care of themselves as best they can.
When you see just one country, or one racial/cultural entity, excluded, that's when it rings racial alarm bells, particularly when that entity is 'other' in all three ways - different country, different cultural AND racial entity. It seems to me that a lot of the discussion of how we in the west arrange our economic dealings with china is saturated with the kind of colonialist-era alarmism for the 'Yellow Peril', which seemed to have mercifully gone away but appears to be resurfacing in new and somewhat more insidious ways, including by taking the mantle of traditionally progressive concerns such as the environment.
Do I have concerns about how we in western-style economically developed democracies (that means Japan, too) engage with China on an economic, diplomatic, and social level? Sure! Do I think demonizing China and/or its people as basically the source of all that ails us (and our economy) is either useful/productive (in the sense of helping us move forward) or even fair and just (in a moral sense)? Nope :-)
