It is true, and some Chinese production lines are truly feats of engineering. However, it's a little tricky to determine whether this is really Chinese values a

It is true, and some Chinese production lines are truly feats of engineering. However, it's a little tricky to determine whether this is really Chinese values and engineering or the values and engineering they have imported from other countries. There's a lot of production lines in China that produce nonfunctional goods. In the microelectronic and mechanical areas the strength of the Chinese market seems to be very, very lax IP law. While most of the interesting parts don't make it over to the western market, they have very featureful, accessible, and novel components that are made by cobbling together (potentially stolen or at least unlicensed) IP. Historically US manufacturing used to be the best cost/performance optimized and this is what helped win WWII.