Here's a fine column from the MSNBC site about the Chinese drywall scandal. Briefly, the construction boom that coincided with the recovery from Hurricane Katrina and the real estate bubble meant that U.S. manufacturers could not meet the demand for drywall, a crucial component of building construction. So contractors turned to Chinese manufacturers, and some of the imported drywall was toxic.

Ugh. But my post is not actually about the quality of Chinese industrial imports, the housing bubble, or the economy. It's about grammar. 

Here's the last sentence of the story:

China needs to understand that if it wants to be our trading partner, it needs to be a partner in every sense of the word.

The writer wants China and its business owners to cooperate more, to see themselves as fellow citizens with the people who consume their products, and thus be partners in globalization. But I think his sentence actually says something different from what he intended. 

It's not China which "needs" to understand what it means to be a partner in globalization. China acts like it doesn't give a shit, and by doing so, it is prospering.  Clearly China does not have a "need" to understand anything. It's the U.S. and other countries that need China to understand the partnership concept. I think the author should have written:

China should understand that if it wants to be our trading partner, then it must learn to be a partner in every sense of the word.

All this is to say that the writer of that article has fallen into the pit of the strange new use, circa the late 1970s, of the word "need." Sometime around the 1970s, political and social activists and theorists started using the word "need" instead of the word "should" in sentences like: 

The men need to give up their moonlighting jobs and share in child-raising.

That is from a Dec. 6, 1970 story in the New York Times headlined Prescribing Careers--Not Tranquilizers--For Women. This sentence isn't talking about men's "needs" but about women's needs. Substitute "should" for "need to" and the sentence is just as clear, but more honest.

Or look at this sentence from an Apr. 9, 1975 article in the Penn State Daily Collegian:

Americans need to understand that all the children in Vietnam orphanages aren't orphans.

Really? What need is met by that understanding? There's no need at all; Americans continue to thrive whether or not they have the understanding sugested by the writer.

As you can tell, this is a bugaboo with me. But compare the following two sentences and you'll understand the real difference between using "need to" and "should":

Writers need to use the words "need" and "should" properly. 
 
Writers should use the words "need" and "should" properly.

See the difference? In the first one, I'm making a prescriptive judgment about other writers, that they have some strange "need" to use proper grammar. Clearly writers do not need to use proper grammar in order to thrive, but they would be well-advised to. (In some cases it's essential. For example, it would be all right to say that "Newspaper reporters need to use proper grammar or they will be fired.") The second sentence, with "should," contains merely my opinion.

Personally I think it's weird that this "need to" construction has become so widespread. Why do we think it's all right for people to constantly prescribe what others "need to" do? How do I know what others need?

People should know better.