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Comment by gofastercloud | Hacker News Reader

In the last few years Chinese manufacturing has reached a very high-level. The reason most people still believe that Chinese-made stuff is poor quality is because they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills.

While I reckon some other countries still have specialist manufacturing in key areas that surpasses China, most “common” parts can be made in China to a standard that meets or exceeds Western countries, if you’re willing to pay for it.

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>they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills

It's more complicated than this. Historically, Chinese manufacturing has been notorious for quietly undermining the quality of the product to improve their margins over time, in a way that the commissioning brand doesn't notice. If a Chinese manufacturer quotes you a price too good to be true, they're probably quoting you at-cost and will build in their margin later, once the orders start flowing in.

People should realize China is huge and manufactures one third of world's goods.

You're going to have excellence and crap across such a gargantuan amount of production and companies, a high amount of variance.

High amount variance of quality is a daily reality and as any chinese consumer we are very used to that since the beginning of e-commerce. However there are multiple aspects to the quality feel. Production of high quality items is one thing (e.g one can do better QA etc), what I heard from some local car garages in China is that standardisation in the industry is still quite poor. E.g Parts to replace and bolts and nuts are not as standardised say as the German counter parts (purely from a mechanics point of view).

Having said that a lot of German car suppliers are in China, and the German car manufacturing industry evolved over a significantly longer period of time.

Also the enforcement of standardization is really poor, almost to the point nobody cares.

Chinese manufacturers can make quality stuff and can be rather honest to work with once you show certain knowledge of the field, they will even tell you which products are to avoid.

A really good example of this is the luxury watch market. China manufactures a heap of shitty knockoffs. They also manufacture a heap of the high end legitimate brand watches. And they manufacture some nice and obscenely expensive high end luxury watches.

"Quality fade".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quality_fade

>Chinese manufacturing has been notorious for quietly undermining the quality of the product to improve their margins over time

Famously Gemtek Technology (https://www.gemteks.com/en/about/about), Apples small obscure modem OEM at the time, when presented with contract to manufacture 1999 AirPort Wifi cards made first batch of complete duds because factory owner saw picofarad smd caps and decided it will be more profitable to for him to GLUE tiny plastic rectangles instead, after all picofarad is like nothing so nobody will tell the difference.

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273798...

Gemtek’s headquarters is established in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Republic of what?

The most infamous example of this is hip implants made in China that had to be recalled due to being made wrong. This is also why Chinese structural steel is rarely used in North America and Europe.

>The reason most people still believe that Chinese-made stuff is poor quality is

I think most people just buy trash at WalMart and Amazon and it's 99% Chinese disposable junk. That doesn't mean that China is incapable of producing high quality goods, but just that the average interaction that people have with Chinese goods are low quality.

It's the manufacturing equivalent of "How could the government be efficient? Haven't you ever been to the DMV?" (set aside that fact that many DMVs seem to be quite efficient these days)

While true, imho its more complicated than that

* PE, on the whole, has extracted wealth from quality. This is true at both the consumer level and B2B. E.g. its impossible to trust any aftermarket car part manufacturer, and some OEM brands have turned to dogshit too.

* "most people just buy trash at WalMart and Amazon" I'd rephrase that to: most people either can't or are unwilling to pay the premium for quality in an increasingly disposable world.

So, I'd say that similar to post war Japan, while Chinese manufacturing has an image problem, they're just producing what we asked for.

I'm very willing to pay a premium for quality, I just can't seem to find any reliable signal for quality before buying. Price and brand are both increasingly meaningless signals.

I'm in a similar boat, and it annoys the shit out of my wife, and any family member that thinks I'm "just cheap" or a "budget shopper".

I'm a value shopper. I was happy with the McDouble when it was under $1, but not now that it is nearly $2. It isn't worth that, but the BK Double Cheeseburger IS worth it even for $1 more than the McDouble (at least in my location).

Same is true for almost everything I buy. A certain fabric I want in my button ups, or a stich type I want in my pants. I hyper inspect almost every item of clothing I'm even contemplating buying. Same with furniture, with tools, with appliances.

It is almost a compulsion. I cannot pay more for something than I think it is worth... unless I REAALLLLLY want it.

The lengths "drop-shippers" or similar groups are willing to go to game the system also has made almost all reviews and feedback useless. A few years ago I bought a feline water fountain and the lengths they went to get a 5 star review (extra free filters, etc) made me realize just how bad amazon reviews had gotten. I've slowed my amazon purchases significantly since then (along with other problems ordering from amazon has slowly introduced).

The book "The Paradox of Choice" led me to using Wirecutter and Consumer Reports in recent years - if it's not something I care that much about, I will just buy whatever their top recommendation is without second thought. The cost of the subscriptions pays for a human to wade through all the junk and select something that is at least adequate for the job, and is cheap compared to the effective hourly rate of having to search through mountains of junk.

For more niche stuff, Reddit groups like BIFL and seeing what niche hobby groups coalesce around is helpful for me. Which I suppose is the same reversion to word-of-mouth expertise when, as you said, brand and price are degraded signals.

I'm in the same boat. The only signal that I still trust is (for want of a better term) governance longevity, i.e. how long has the company/brand been under its current management structure. This requires some digging, but good salesmen are usually well aware of management changes at their brands. That may not apply to generic clothes shops, but in my experience this still works for tool shops and appliance stores. You'll want to talk to tradespeople though, not sales drones.

Then there's two signals that negatively inform my trust of a brand:

- company size: the larger the company, the lower they start on my trust ladder;

- advertising: when a brand is overly present in the public sphere, that to me signals that they're overcharging for their product.

I buy Xiaomi products. I know I get high quality products. From Xiaomi Kettle to Xiaomi SU7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaomi_SU7

I don’t fully agree with either of those arguments. I think parts of it are certainly true but at the end of the day it takes two to tango. American consumers on average want high consumption for the lowest cost. I hate the argument “just buy less $5 coffees” but there is at least a kernel of truth in it. Consumers stretch the limits of their budget.

I find that Chinese manufacturing offers the complete range of quality for every price point. At reasonable prices, the quality meets or exceeds that of other countries. But if you want something cheap and cheaply made, you can find that as well. And at the extreme, you still have counterfeit parts and products.

> While I reckon some other countries still have specialist manufacturing in key areas that surpasses China

I don't think this is true. Maybe super specialist things like chip manufacturing products, but it's guaranteed China is spending heavily on R&D to develop their own. When it comes to cars / car parts they will be on par with if not surpassing most countries.

Also keep in mind China's sudden onset had a big impact on European and US car manufacturing, with VW / VAG closing major factories in Germany. Mind you, that's also because VAG was the biggest car manufacturer in China, until suddenly BYD and co opened up their factories and dominated the market in a short amount of time.

Apple in China is a great book and shows how good China is on focusing on quality when that is the given objective.

> The reason most people still believe that Chinese-made stuff is poor quality is because they will do what they are told and they are usually told “make this as cheap as possible” by whoever is paying the bills.

I’m reminded of all the dismissals people made about the skill levels of Indian software developers when the explanation was that the more skilled ones knew they could do better than the MBAs were offering to make the savings sound even more impressive.

Also because of the appalling track record of QA/QC, and subsequent cover-ups, at every level of government and enterprise from regional to national.

In the 2008 milk Scandal, for example, the offending company Sanlu were aware of infants becoming sick December 2007, but refused to test until June 2008. Shijiazhuang city governance failed to report the contamination to provincial and state authorities September 2008 and Sanlu subsequently asked the Shijiazhuang city government to assist them in controlling the media's reporting of the recall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

300,000 affected children were identified, among which 54,000 were hospitalized and 6 deaths were officially attributed to the adulteration and cover-up. If the government and industry were willing to collude to the detriment of their own populace so as not to sully the PR appeal of the Beijing Olympics, what level of care and consideration are we to attribute them in matters of low-consequence export to the West?

Yes, not having QA is one of the ways unscrupulous businesses boost profits. The answer isn't to say “everyone in China is like that” any more than it was to say “every meat packer in the United States will serve you dog meat and pink slime” but to accept that some things need to cost more.

I would also note that in the case of that melamine incident 2 decades ago, several of the business leaders involved got death sentences which seems relevant to the question of how much the larger country supports it. For example, I note that no member of the Sackler family has failed to die rich out of prison.

Very true, though it isn’t like we need to look very far to find similar instances of government and media collusion to control stories, laws passed to protect companies from liability for direct causally linked chemical dumping known to induce tumors, cancer, neurological diseases and other things, so on and so forth.

Every country seems willing to trade the lives or livelihood of citizens, much less people of other countries, to ensure their status quo. Some just pay more lip service to “rights” they will violate at the drop of a hat when push comes to shove.

The best part of this scandal is in a press conference a major producer, Mengniu, publicly announced that milk made for Hong Kong is not affected.

This one-sentence message demonstrates a lot of the problems of Chinese manufacturing if you think about it for a minute.

Unfortunately, the manager pushing the outsourcing pockets the money, outsourcing company pockets the money, and the local and indian teams get to be abused and latter gets extra blame for things outside their control.

I would say the problem is heavily structural and linked to few companies that very much pursue lowest possible effort, harming both employee and customer. We had a company that infamously pursued a somewhat similar (just with not as much leverage over employees) strategy in Poland - a common refrain was how other companies would get people jumping jobs from them who gave variants of "I needed some spending money while finishing my degree, escaped as soon as I could" story.

Unfortunately it seems a bit harder to do when some places apparently hire with only category appearing to be "according to census they speak english", then put them on project with minimal training and zero time or space to acquire more training.

Yes - I remember one time hearing someone from a big consulting company make the argument that even the top Indian graduates would work for peanuts (even by local standards) and asking them how likely it was that they’d be that smart but unable to determine their market value.

This was unsurprising after my entire life hearing people complain about declining quality and imported junk while always picking the cheapest item on the shelf at the store, even when they had plenty of money for a better quality option. There’s just a certain mindset which can’t look past the lowest possible price.

Also sometimes you have few big companies dominate local market to detriment of choice, even if your plan is on getting further away.

The polish company I mentioned was infamous for using still in education students especially from an university where its founder was a professor, and for his motto of "you can replace any specialist with finite number of students, and the number is usually one". I met some of them later who worked there for first few years only to setup conditions to jump ship.

But along the line I heard how few big outsourcing/consulting companies dominated IT hiring in bunch of cities in Poland, with Warsaw being the odd one out because suddenly you had to fight for candidates with 100-150 person "minnows". I imagine without such minnows finding sensible work would be way harder

It's not just that they do what they are told, whether that is low quality or high quality.

It's that if you don't have a way to measure quality yourself (you're not an expert), or if you don't ask for exact specific features/qualities even if you offer a high budget and ask for high quality, manufacturers absolutely will cut corners, do stupid things, etc. to increase their own margin at the expense of quality and just hope you are none the wiser.

The US had the same culture in certain periods and certain industries, so I am not suggesting it's some innate Chinese characteristic. The meat factories exposed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, where he documented unsanitary conditions, spoiled meat, rat infestations etc come to mind.

But one cannot just ignore that the China of today has had problems with fake baby formula, fake alcohol, fake medicine, fake everything and expect that that doesn't make its way into manufacturing of other classes of goods.

I wish China didn't have such a hostile government to the West. Because I'd love to buy a BYD car and see this for myself, or try the Xiaomi car that MKBHD was so keen on. But because of the hostility I kind of get why there are bans.

>I wish China didn't have such a hostile government to the West.

In what way are they hostile? I am also part of "the west" and they never threatened us.

The west != just the USA.

Are western companies able to freely compete in China? Last I checked, no, they need local partners at best, or are blocked completely at worst. And not just American but any outside company.

What their government does in regards to local industry is effectively what donald trump is attempting to do with the US economy. Except they do it well.

And I don't approve of Trump doing it either. And I'd certainly call it Trump being hostile to the entire world.

I consider you as a victim of the brainwashing by your main stream media.

there are tons of western cars on Chinese roads, tesla was given free land and close to interest free loan to build its factory in Shanghai. there are numerous apple shops in China. guess how many Chinese cars are driving on US roads, how many Huawei phones are being sold in the US.

if you are open to the idea of jumping out of your comfort zone of your favourite brainwashing media, some westerner actually went to China and counted every single car at an intersection for 30 minutes with all brands summarised. over 40% are western cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZKbEj39gEw&t=1496s

again - it is not your fault, you are the victim. I just feel sad for you.

> And not just American but any outside company.

Would you call that "hostility to the West"? Sounds like an attempt to protect their own interests.

It's benefiting from the globalized market without freely competing in it. It gives them a massive edge in many industries and the world couldn't say no because of cheap manufacturing.

And certainly hostile when you add currency manipulation onto it as well.

>It's benefiting from the globalized market without freely competing in it.

Ha, very rich criticism considering the US economy and stock market has been benefiting 1000x more from said "globalized market without freely competing in it", by printing money and exporting its inflation across the world with dampened consequences domestically, then using said printed money like liquid gold to buy valuable assets around the world (like real estate and innovative companies) thanks to its status as a reserve currency (something Charles De Gaulle complained about since the 1950s), a unique US cheat code enforced thought force via its massive military.

>And certainly hostile when you add currency manipulation onto it as well.

Again, very rich criticism considering the US's abusing its status as the reserve currency for its own benefit, see above.

This is now limited to only some restricted industries: https://www.ndrc.gov.cn/xxgk/zcfb/ghxwj/202504/P020250424307... Yes, the list is long, but it's a significant improvement to the before times when all industries were off limits save for a few exceptions where foreign investment was allowed. Notably, the car industry has been mostly unrestricted for a few years now.

It's a myth. It depends on what the company does.

Internet services? Yes, you need a domestic partner, because you'll disseminate information to the public.

If you're in the automobile industry, you can import cars to China. China was Porsche's largest market until 2025, and all Porsches are imported. It used to be that a Chinese partner is needed to manufacture cars in China, but Tesla did not need one, and that policy was dropped. Anyway, it's nowhere close to the complete ban the US placed on Chinese cars.

In many other industries, you can create a foreign-owned company and operate in China.

>Are western companies able to freely compete in China? Last I checked, no, they need local partners at best,

Tesla operates Giga Shanghai fully independently and competes freely.

>And not just American but any outside company.

So did Italy, Germany, Japan and Korea to build up domestic auto industries otherwise Detroit would have steemroled them.

Giga Shanghai is the exception the proves the rule. It's one of the few, if only, foreign businesses that operate without a joint venture with a local company.

Again, nobody forces you to open your business or manufacture your stuff in China. Plenty of companies do not, like Google.

Companies abided to ruthless Chinese rules because they were greedy and wanted to exploit the Chinese slave labor and also get access to Chinese market, but the CCP didn't put a gun to their head and forced them to come to China, they decided that themselves for the sake of the holy shareholder growth. And now, 2 decades after you've made your money, you're complaining over a consensual arrangement?

And trade is always gonna be asymmetric, with rules in foreign countries that don't exist in the US. That's why the EU fines US companies regularly. China isn't much different. You want to operate in China, then you gotta follow the CCP rules. You don't? Then just leave. Easy.

Lots of countries are like that though. America has an unusually free system where anyone can do anything for better or worse, but Walmart failed in Germany by ignoring all the local processes like employee protections. (But I hear Aldi is taking over the UK!)

Employee protections aren't hostile, blocking Facebook while exporting Tiktok is a hostile trade imbalance.

>blocking Facebook while exporting Tiktok is a hostile trade imbalance

The US also threatened to block tiktok unless China sold it to a local US oligarch(the Oracle guy). The US is no saint here. And good luck getting people to shed a tear for China blocking Facebook. Good riddance to both of them.

The Tiktok we get that's full of slop isn't allowed in China either. China has a completely different set of content on its TikTok. Trade imbalance is a skill issue and within the country they compete fairly.

China is just as much of a guilty party as the “west” could be. From massive corporate espionage, open stealing of western IP, blocking western companies from entering markets. It is foolish to think they are not at some level an adversary. I would still absolutely buy a BYD car but China plays the same game, maybe even better, and that the west has also played for decades.

>From massive corporate espionage, open stealing of western IP, blocking western companies from entering markets.

"the west" did the same. You can't play fairly if your opponents never did.

Did I not already say that? Both are just as guilty but your original thesis is simply wrong. Sorry.

Why is it wrong? China is just playing the greedy globalist capitalist game the west has created, but they haven't bombed foreign countries or kidnapped their leaders like the US has, so from that perspective China is not a military threat to us, they're just ruthless competitors. So you are the one who's wrong.

Whataboutism is a weak argument. China is an equal player on the world stage when it comes to propensity to harm. From the many human rights violations over the years, how they orchestrated the takeover of Hong Kong, frequent border disputes that continue to happen and the continuous posturing of naval fleets. I am not saying one is better or worse than the other but don’t confuse yourself, China is absolutely a threat to global peace.

>Whataboutism is a weak argument.

Whataboutism is the magic gotcha card invoked when people have no answers to the absolutely fair question "why is X allowed to do Y but Z is not allowed to do Y".

If there's no hypocritical double standards then you'd have an answer instead of calling whataboutism.

>From the many human rights violations over the years

Their problem, not ours. Just don't buy stuff made in china and write to your politicians to stop sending your manufacturing jobs there out of greed of stonks go up like they've been doing for 30 years, if you want to do anything about it.

>how they orchestrated the takeover of Hong Kong

The British gave it to them. US also took over several overseas territories. Where's the hubbub there?

>frequent border disputes that continue to happen and the continuous posturing of naval fleets

Again, their problem to deal with not ours. I don't want to police and get involved in centuries old conflicts on other side of the planet that have nothing to do with us. I only care what happens in my backyard. Feel free to go join the Indian military and help them fight China if you actually care that much about it.

>China is absolutely a threat to global peace.

Then US is an even bigger threat. And still I don't want to go to war with them.

The hostility is a result of a long reading of history. If you think Chinese leadership has forgotten European colonialism, you are mistaken. If you want to understand how deeply the maximalist mindset runs in Chinese culture, look up what the name of the country - zhongguo - means. I love Chinese culture, and lived there, but make no mistake about how clear eyed their leadership is about competition with western hegemony.

>If you think Chinese leadership has forgotten European colonialism, you are mistaken.

You are mistaken to think I forgot that. The west is the one who is mistaken if they think all other countries and cultures forgot that. If they can, they would gladly enact revenge over Europeans and whip them. Which is why it's best to arm ourselves to the teeth and ensure they'll never be in a position do that. So no, i haven't forgotten, the west has.

>but make no mistake about how clear eyed their leadership is about competition with western hegemony.

Isn't hegemony what US leadership has been doing since WW2, increasingly more vigorously and more intensely today? Except China is doing without bombing other nations and kidnapping their leader. So in this game China is the righteous ones.

BYD cars in China are not very good. But to export them they need to be higher quality to meet criteria. I would never buy one in China. Happily own one outside of China.

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