Don't make it about the people, of course nobody questions the individual ability of chinise people, it is a culture / system problem. A system that lets sweatshops like foxconn exist. With enough QA of course unskilled biorobots with slave wages can put together an iphone. But I'd rather fairly paid skilled labourers built my stuff. QA costs money too, the better the labor force the less QA is necessary. But also there is the humanitarian side.
Have to be specific
Being a bit of an audiophile, and also a photographer / photography geek, there's a lot of
quality work and quality
innovation coming out of Chinese companies.
Further, while I agree wholeheartedly that I'd prefer laborers to be paid and treated fairly, it's important to understand that this is a 'privileged' perspective. One example I ran across was that of child labor: people were incensed that children were being put to work and the operation was closed down. And instead of making clothes (or whatever), the children wound up in brothels.
Obviously that's somewhat extreme but it's worth considering the 'whole' problem, and understanding that first-world outrage doesn't solve third-world problems, and that these problems will only be solved through painstaking efforts over time.
Which I wholly expect the USG to champion!
No Chinese manufacturing is not up to other standards even with stringent QC. That is why they are cheaper. You don't get low prices and quality. Look at their turbofans, still behind Cold War era Russian standards.
Turbofans are still out of their grasp, so yeah, the PRC is still buying Sukhois for their best pilots and working with Boeing to procure engines for passenger jets. Don't have a clue if / when they'll catch up in that regard as even the Russians are pretty far behind other 'western' manufacturers.
Still, while still applicable, that's a bit of an edge case: in many cases, China is perhaps a decade behind indigenously, at the very most. Quality is lower, yes, but improving, and like every other fully industrialized nation has done before, China is both learning everything they can as well as innovating and tuning for their own needs.
