As my wife can well attest, it is common for me to browse with her in a U.S. shopping mall and declare, “These prices are too low.”

Whether it’s shoes or clothing or camping gear, all of it from China, it strikes me that the sale prices don’t always reflect the real costs. That sense has grown deeper since we’ve been in China, even if not well-articulated in my own mind.

I’d pick up a pair of well-made thick leather shoes, and think, “These have to be worth more than $20.” I’d buy them anyway, and feel a little smug at the savings.

But after visiting riversides polluted by tanneries along the Yangtze River, I sensed that the price of the shoes did not reflect the despoiling by the factories.

Then there was the time in 2004 when I wrote about Chinese workers who lose parts of their bodies on the job or are otherwise maimed. A state newspaper said 40,000 cases occur each year, and sitting in a lawyer’s office in Shenzhen surrounded by workers with missing hands or fingers, the figure seemed plausible.

A few months later, I stood outside a hospital in Guangdong province where some 100 or so workers were being treated for the horrific effects of cadmium poisoning. They'd been producing the kind of alkaline batteries we use around our house all the time.

Certainly if factories had to pay insurance premiums that valued these workers’ health, production costs would go up. We Westerners get our low prices, and the workers in China pay with their bodies, their health and their ruined environment.

I thought about this again today as I read an excellent Asian Wall Street Journal report suggesting that powerful U.S. businesses are partly responsible for the pollution in China. Here is a key part of the story:

“In the more than two decades since international companies began turning to Chinese factories to churn out the cheap T-shirts, jeans and sneakers that people around the world wear daily, China's air, land and water have paid a heavy price. China has faced harsh criticism in recent months over the safety of exports ranging from tainted toothpaste to toxic toys. But environmental activists and the Chinese government are increasingly pointing to the flip side: the role multinational companies play in China's growing pollution by demanding ever-lower prices for Chinese products.

“Prices on fabric and clothing imported to the U.S. have fallen 25% since 1995, partly due to the downward pricing pressure brought by discount retail chains. One way China's factories have historically kept costs down is by dumping waste water directly into rivers. Treating contaminated water costs upwards of about 13 cents a metric ton, so large factories can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by sending waste water directly to rivers in violation of China's water-pollution laws.

"Prices in the U.S. are artificially low," says Andy Xie, former chief economist for Morgan Stanley Asia, who now works independently. "You're not paying the costs of pollution, and that is why China is an environmental catastrophe."

In many cases, price tags in stores clearly don’t represent the real costs of production.