OK, I was worried about posting that because I didn't want to be misinterpreted as being prejudiced / bigoted in any way. I have nothing in theory against China or any other nation, and it is very sensible (in some ways, not in others) that there should be a global economy / industry.
That being said, it is well known that outsourcing electronics manufacturing to China (or sometimes Mexico or anywhere else) is done, 99.999% of the time for one reason and one reason only -- to garner the ROCK BOTTOM COGS / production costs for whatever it is you're producing, generally cutting every possible corner in terms of bill of material costs for the parts and cost of testing / approval / quality control. Middlemen are cut out of the supply chain to save cost. No-name "clone" / "generic" bulk discount parts are substituted for "name brand supplier" parts in the bill of materials. Regulatory restrictions for industrial factories are lower, so costs are lower, and processes that are relatively more polluting in their releases of water / vapors / dust / solid waste than would be permitted by EPA or most European regulations are used. Parts are generally acquired on a "lowest bidder" basis with frequent swapping of any given component from one company to a similar (but often not as high quality) part from someone else that will sell it for $0.0001 cheaper per part in lots of 100,000.
I am a design engineer for electronics. I've worked at US companies that have had similar "race to the bottom" / "lowest bidder" type of procurement and supplier type of processes. I've seen production lines of electronic products transitioned from being made at, say, some ISO 9000 rated supplier in Denver to being outsourced to a lowest bidder fabrication plant in China / where ever. I have personally seen the increase of actual engineering quality / reliability problems due to switching parts suppliers / fabricators in these fashions. I've seen cases where you find something like a PCB mounted telephone jack from one company with reputable / consistent quality, look through the latest asia source supplier catalog, find some random company that makes one that looks similar but is $0.02 cheaper, and then specify the cheaper overseas supplier to be used for the next production run. As a result I've seen container loads of thousands of boards come back with WARPED, MELTED jacks that didn't survive the necessary soldering processes. I've seen thousands of boards even without melted jacks that had such poor connections to the phone line that they'd simply not make connection depending on which way the slack on the cord was pressing.
I've seen companies select a lowest-end US made product like a transformer from a reputable quality supplier, a product that met all of its specifications reliably even though its USE was ill suited for the manufactured product because of its very marginal capabilities given its low-end specifications. After using that for years (because it was the cheapest possible one), I've seen them send samples of that product to a Chinese manufacturing company to be disassembled, reverse engineered, and copied (with no respect for any applicable patents or whatever). I've seen the resultant situations where thousands and thousands of assembled products come in off the boat from china and they don't even work barely at all because the quality of the clone of the already low quality US made part is so much worse that the end product the item was assembled into is just totally garbage. I've seen the company jump through hoops to slightly "kludge" such products and sell them anyway, figuring it was more profitable to make money off the 95% of the people who'd be out of warranty / return period before they got fed up with the "designed to be defective" product sold to them.
It isn't anything ethnic or national or political (in these cases) that I hold against Chinese or Indian or Mexican, or wherever made goods, it is the mere fact that there is a well understood, widespread institutionalized acceptance of these kinds of deplorable engineering / quality / manufacturing ethics, policies, and practices that I find unconscionable. I agree that is is generally done with the full expectation / cooperation / direction of US or European companies which may be doing the outsourcing. I disagree with the "race to the bottom" ethic of cost reduction uber alles at the expense of quality, service, support, craftsmanship. I've got nothing intrinsically against mass production and economies of scale, but if you get into the industry I think you'd notice that those are almost wholly lacking today as compared to the way that, say, 50 years ago things were made by IBM, AT&T, DEC, or so on.
The companies that intentionally do the outsourcing to "race to the bottom" / lowest bidder suppliers at the recognized EXPENSE of quality / ethics / sustainability are just whores for the lowest dollar. The suppliers to them (whether they're Chinese this month or little green men from mars next month) that get into feeding frenzies over who can be the lowest bidder TO the lowest bidder at the expense of any ethics/quality are just the whores of the whores, and are, if anything, ethically / culturally (corporate industrial political culture -- not ethnic) even more despicable / pathetic / deplorable because their willingness to perpetuate, encourage, industrialize, and refine to a science the techniques of making barely acceptable junk is even more intentional than the mere buyer who just says "sell me X cheaply".
There's nothing hypocritical about voting with your wallet / conscience about trying to pick the better quality products. Yes, most of them are made in China. I said that lack of quality was fairly pervasive and institutionalized in the corporate culture, though I didn't cross the line and say that it was sine exception ubiquitous. If I can find "exceptions to the rule" that are products with good quality, I'll try to selectively buy them. If I realize that 95% of IT goods are junk from China it is reasonable to state that the overall industrialization of making junk in China sucks without contradicting the laudability of the 5% that aren't.
I'd rather buy a quality locally made product than a quality foreign made one just for environmental / efficiency reasons due to transport pollution and costs. As you correctly point out, one seldom has a realistic choice but to buy Chinese made goods today. I'll pragmatically look for ones that seem better than the others while still categorically (statistically) decrying them as 90% probable junk.
There's a problem of shifting baseline here. We're often, as a group, knowingly / intentionally buying 1000W or 650W power supplies to power 350W PCs simply BECAUSE we realize that only by such over inflation of specifications of our needs do we stand a better chance at getting a product that'll actually survive the meager uses we'll put it to. There was a time when people might've made something like a PSU that might've been rated to produce 200W but in reality due to high quality engineering the typical unit might be resilient to 300W usages at high temperatures. In contemporary times we're lucky of a 300W "rated" PSU can actually faithfully deliver 200W. That is an institutional / cultural (corporate / economic / industrial) problem.
I deplore, I deplore junk, I deplore scams, I deplore frauds, I hate the P.T. Barnum attitude of "there's a sucker born every minute", "this way to see the egress, only $5", et. al. I don't hate China. But if many / most of the IT or other industrial concerns there decide to become willing whores of the "race to the bottom" mentality, then I'll certainly become more skeptical about my trust in their industrial ethics. It takes 1000 acts to build a good reputation, and only one to destroy it.
Would you, sight unseen, probably rather work in a Chinese industrial manufacturing plant, one in Munich, one in Zurich, or one in Mexico City? Why?
China and Iran (Persia) for that matter (since you mentioned them) have great histories; 1500-3000 years ago they were doing things industrially / culturally that were well ahead in some ways of the quality of those arts throughout most of the rest of the world. It is just unfortunate that in some (sizable) sectors China's exporting industries have sunk to the lows that are typically enshrined by the contents of Wal-Mart. I am quite sure that 3000 years ago they produced finer goods of the some of the same natures as you can now find in Wal-Mart.
What propaganda am I eating with a spoon? I'm complaining about my own experiences with brand new products that often barely work to specification, and which often are of shoddy workmanship and which often fail within a short time.
In fact my house almost caught fire and we had respiratory smoke problems due to a defective by design power adapter within the last month. Having shopped around quite a bit for such a power adapter I found it virtually impossible to find one that was of decent quality wherever I locally shopped.
Where do you think all your consumer products are from? China. Yes, the red state. CHINA. I can't stand this China-hate, and it's so hypocritical.
Those good brands you love? Where do you think they're all produced? Apple's products? MSI? Acer? Everything is China, or goes through China, at some point.
You eat this anti-china propaganda up with a spoon, and I bet you eat the anti-Iran propaganda the same way. Media chimps.
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