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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Where are you going to shop? And how do you know something is the 'Chinese version'? It's not like for example Apple advertises where they assemble their products.

For a concrete example, we get very good rice varieties specifically from certain parts of China. (But here in Singapore people also really care about rice. You generally can't buy good and fresh rice in the middle of the Polish countryside for example.) And, yes, for this product the 'Chinese' variety is superior to eg generic Thai rice.

I put 'Chinese' in scare-quotes, because just like you don't just drink 'French wine' when you know what you are doing, you don't just eat 'Chinese' rice.

For a lot of tea drinking paraphernalia, the most top of the line items also come from China. Even if you are into, say, Japanese tea.

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I either look at the label or do research beforehand. I buy from all kind of places.

I wasn't thinking of agricultural products, but rather anything manufactured. As an example, appliances made in Germany will have a cord long enough that you can actually plug into the wall, while the one that's made in China will have a useless 10-centimeter cord that would force me to use an extension.

Your mileage might vary, this is just my experience, but it's been pretty consistent for a few decades, with things going downhill in the past I'd say 5 years or so.

We are happy with our Miele appliances (washing machine, dryer, dish washer.) But we also have plenty of Chinese stuff that works well.

I've recently had kids, and I'm actually impressed at how much toys have improved in quality since I was a kid growing up in Germany. And, yes, most of these new toys come from China etc. By and large, they seem to be sturdier and last a lot longer, and are cheaper, too.

I'm especially impressed by the light-up shoes we bought. I guess you can blame that on general improvements in LEDs and battery technology in that specific case, maybe.

For what it's worth, I now live in Singapore, and we are very open on trade, so as a consumer you benefit from especially brutal competition.

Could also be that if you're in Singapore you get better stuff. It's possible that European companies pick crappy, cheaper products that they have a higher margin on to cover importing and transport. I have no idea.

It might be possible, I don't know. Singapore is a fairly small market, so we don't really get any bespoke stuff.

Transport shouldn't really be worse: once you put anything on a container ship, it doesn't really matter much how long the ride is. But imports could be more annoying in other ways.

We do have a lot more people speaking Chinese here (around 3/4 of the population are ethnically Chinese after all) and lots of personal contacts, so we get a lot of people running small import businesses getting in Chinese stuff.

Of course, there's still plenty of low quality stuff you can buy. But I see that as a benefit: it's good to have the choice available, if you want to take it.

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