Are these ideas really based in reality? Is it mostly stereotype?
In: Economics
To be clear, there’s more to this, but I’ll let somebody else cover the economics and history side of your question and stick to what I’m familiar with.
While Chinese goods can be good quality, it is difficult to know ahead of time what suppliers will be reliable unless you have an existing relationship with them. There’s very little regulation on how Chinese goods are advertised overseas, so you really have no idea what you’re getting. Maybe it’s quality parts on the cheap, maybe it’s literal garbage for the price of a genuine product.
The result is that unless you’re willing to shop around and test products that you probably can’t refund, you will often get screwed, and for many use cases this shopping around phase totally offsets any money you might save going Chinese.
In my personal experience, as a buyer from Chinese (PRC) manufacturers, they commonly make changes without authorization, in order to cut costs. The result is a product which does not meet specs. In the BEST CASE, it fails incoming inspection. In the worst case, it gets shipped under my name, and fails in the field.
yeah its based in reality. china is the worlds top manufacturer, by quite a bit, so they make ALOT. they also generally have underpaid workers and terrible working conditions, as well as huge knock-off industry. you can imagine why quality suffers because of stuff like that.
that said it has also become a stereotype, and of course not everything made in china is low-quality.
General comment on “made in China”:
When companies outsourced manufacturing to China they did so to cut costs. They gave manufacturers specs and awarded jobs to the lowest bidder who looked like they could do the job.
The resulting products to hit the shelves were sometimes not to the quality previously expected. The cause for this was either:
1. The company speced lower quality to double up on savings
2. The cheaper manufacturers delivered below spec but their goods were accepted by the company anyway because they were cheap and “good enough” to sell.
China has very sophisticated manufacturing, they can build high spec products when high specs are, well, specified and enforced. But a lot of companies either didn’t state high specifications or were swayed by low costs to accept below original spec goods.
This race to the bottom on price led to a lot of shit-tier goods coming out with “Made in China” tags, which the brands then blamed on China instead of their own procurement process.
At the end of the day, most people demand cheap goods which tends to be low quality. China makes what sells
That was true decades ago when manufacturers turned to China for low skilled labor. But it’s no longer true as China has advanced over the decades. Now manufacturers turn to Apple for their skilled labor to produce precision manufactured products that they can’t get anywhere else at any price.
Here’s a quote from Tim Cook.
“There’s a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I’m not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is…The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields…”
In many African countries, Indian motorbikes and tuk-tuks have overtaken Chinese-made models due to much better quality. That is quite embarrassing because China has had a 20-30 year head-start in manufacturing compared to India. I will say though that China is far ahead in electric cars and they are starting to dominate the market.
They are currently selling laser welders in the US that are not compliant with *any* of the laws or regulations. These have *zero* safety features or warnings. These lasers are strong enough to burn skin at 50 feet, and blind someone at 150+ feet.
It depends on the product. iPhones are pretty good. Stiff on Amazon with brand names that look like a cat walked over a keyboard are bad.
Basically because importers of these goods from china to u.s. are the middle men. Either are having them manufacturer at the lowest cost possible for maximum profit. So you can’t blame china on that one cause the person ordering to sell to us are basically accepting the bid from the cheapest manufacturer for that product. Probably never even stepped foot in their manufacturing plant. Even in china we have to VERY carefully choose what we buy. In the U.s. depending on type of goods we maybe have a hand full to choose from. Over here you might have 10+ or 20 brands manufacturing the same thing with their own logos and slight differences. Also U.s. buyers have brand loyalty and pic products depending on brand and design. Not saying us as Americans don’t look for quality. Just as a collective and mass majority of Asians when they shop and spend money are VERY picky and inspect the merchandise thoroughly before buying. Ever seen a Chinese lady buying fruits? They don’t go just by how it looks. They smell it. Squeeze it a little and then inspect it. Just an example
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