I used to work at the Vehicle Engineering Lab at the Technion in Israel. China is the only place where large volume of tires are manufactured and distributed to worldwide retailers, which documents their tires using the DOT standard yet consistently fails all DOT tests when tested. As the DOT requires tires to be tested only after a certain number of failures, the DOT standard is meaningless when the factory can change owners and name on a whim. That consistently happens only in China.

I think those two are colloquially synonymous to most people. Particularly those with Amazon Prime accounts :)