Americans do quality control and reliable contractual law which is actually really valuable.
The Chines can buy other Chinese goods sold in the US with some degree of assurance to quality standards and minimal supply chain fraud. Without that expensive high tech devices will fail due to pervasive fraud in the supply chain. China can try to crack down on such fraud but that is really hard to do effectively, much easier to ‘outsource’ quality control with normal business incentives.
The US isn’t the only country with quality control and the standards have degraded, so has the reliability of contract law has also degraded. So this ‘service’ may not be maintainable long term. For example, Amazon to me is now a faster and more expensive Alibaba, I cannot rely on Amazons quality control or reviews. It would have been so easy to algorithmically ensure quality but less profitable and Amazon chose the option with more profit.
In Australia there are faux grocery stores where people (often Chinese nationals) film themselves buying groceries to send to China. Is called ‘daigou’. Things like baby powder and alcohol. For one I would never drink alcohol in China, a friend almost died there from drinking fake beer. The idea of using sewer oil for cooking still makes me gag.
I think they’ll keep getting better at fraud and it’ll be harder and harder to avoid. The world seems to be increasingly corrupt and the general population does seem more amenable to fraud than even 10 years ago so I do worry that quality standards will slip to the point that we’ll have our own ‘tofu-dreg’ projects. Australia already has problems with poor concrete standards for high rises and I expect this to get worse over there.