Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

When summer, the season for rainstorms and flash flood, comes, the time for lavishing praise on German-made drainage pipes and metallic anti-flood walls has also arrived. Unsurprisingly, when China's Jianghan Plain, especially Wuhan, Central China's Hubei Province, suffered from the most devastating floods in over 18 years, a certain group of people who worship Western products turned into critics. While turning a blind eye to the soldiers who are currently rescuing residents besieged by historic heavy rain and carrying sandbags to reinforce a dyke in a crazy storm, all they did was ask why China doesn't have a mighty anti-flood barrier made of a thin piece of metal like those in Germany, as shown on social media.

However, the truth is that many parts of Germany, including Nordrhein-Westfalen and Rhineland-Palatinate, have also witnessed deadly floods in late May and early June this year. Bavaria State even declared a state of emergency due to rising water levels last month.

Roads and bridges were blocked, power supplies were cut off, and towns and villages were inundated. To top it all, there seemed to be no amazing drains and anti-flood walls that could stop the storms and downpours from causing damages. Just like Chinese soldiers, German people were also using sandbags to consolidate their flood defense walls.

Are those pictures in the Chinese Internet about incredible mobile-bearing walls for flood fake? They are real, but not as convenient and efficient as they are described on Chinese social media. Take the metallic wall in the city of Grein. First of all, it's actually in Austria. Although the walls can be installed shortly before the flood, still, it took a decade to complete the foundation of the barrier. It is also too expensive to be widely used. The 765-meter long dam was built at a cost of over five million euro ($5.51 million) per kilometer.

Therefore, only a handful of cities in the whole of Europe have so far installed such short flood barriers to protect ancient buildings and tourist attractions. For heavily populated mega cities along the 6,300-kilometer long Yangtze River, such as Wuhan, Chongqing and Shanghai, building such walls will only be a drop in the bucket.

The German drainage pipes in Qingdao, Shandong Province are another popular myths in China. A number of Chinese people believe that given historical German colonialism, German engineering has contributed to the city's effective storm-water management and this made Qingdao one of the only cities that were equipped to handle the floods in 2012. Later, when statistics showed that only 3 percent of the current drainage facilities in Qingdao were built a century ago by Germans, some even cried that "The 3 percent of German-made sewage system is fulfilling the task of 100 percent of the city's drains."

Such obsession with Germany or German products has gone too far. There is no need to point out that Germans are also humans like us, and they also make mistakes. German trains are not as punctual as we imagine, German cars are not as flawless as we presume, and German people also have to fight floods with sandbags.

Nevertheless, there is really no need to boast about other countries' products while our family, friends and soldiers are struggling in the flood.

Yet such worship does exist for a reason. If our air, products, and traffic rules were superior to developed countries, there would be no place for such stories. German products became legend in China because they do have better quality. But "made in China" is also improving day by day. We should hence humbly learn from good qualities of others to better ourselves, instead of indiscriminately eulogizing others while neglecting or even belittling our own achievements.

The author is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Bonn. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn