5 ms·

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 becau

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.

acdha 4mo ago
> 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.
- p_l 4mo ago
  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.
  - acdha 4mo ago
    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.
    - p_l 4mo ago
      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
- piltdownman 4mo ago
  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 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?
  - therealpygon 4mo ago
    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.
  - handle584 4mo ago
    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.
  - acdha 4mo ago
    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.
viceconsole 4mo ago
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.
smugma 4mo ago
Apple in China is a great book and shows how good China is on focusing on quality when that is the given objective.
roncesvalles 4mo ago
>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.
- epolanski 4mo ago
  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.
  - King-Aaron 4mo ago
    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.
  - dumb1224 4mo ago
    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.
    - handle584 4mo ago
      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.
Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
> 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.
uejfiweun 4mo ago
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.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  >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.
  - km3r 4mo ago
    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.
    - King-Aaron 4mo ago
      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.
      - km3r 4mo ago
        And I don't approve of Trump doing it either. And I'd certainly call it Trump being hostile to the entire world.
    - yorwba 4mo ago
      This is now limited to only some restricted industries: https://www.ndrc.gov.cn/xxgk/zcfb/ghxwj/202504/P020250424307430450848.pdf 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.
youre-wrong3 4mo ago
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.
everdrive 4mo ago
>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)
- radiorental 4mo ago
  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.
  - DangitBobby 4mo ago
    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.
    - hylaride 4mo ago
      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).
    - jermaustin1 4mo ago
ninininino 4mo ago
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.

acdha 4mo ago

> 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.

p_l 4mo ago
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.
- acdha 4mo ago
  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.
  - p_l 4mo ago
    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
piltdownman 4mo ago
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 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?
- therealpygon 4mo ago
  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.
- handle584 4mo ago
  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.
- acdha 4mo ago
  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.

viceconsole 4mo ago

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.

smugma 4mo ago

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

roncesvalles 4mo ago

>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.

epolanski 4mo ago
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.
- King-Aaron 4mo ago
  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.
- dumb1224 4mo ago
  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.
  - handle584 4mo ago
    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.

Cthulhu_ 4mo ago

> 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.

uejfiweun 4mo ago

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.

joe_mamba 4mo ago
>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.
- km3r 4mo ago
  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.
  - King-Aaron 4mo ago
    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.
    - km3r 4mo ago
      And I don't approve of Trump doing it either. And I'd certainly call it Trump being hostile to the entire world.
  - yorwba 4mo ago
    This is now limited to only some restricted industries: https://www.ndrc.gov.cn/xxgk/zcfb/ghxwj/202504/P020250424307430450848.pdf 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.

youre-wrong3 4mo ago

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.

everdrive 4mo ago

>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)

radiorental 4mo ago
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.
- DangitBobby 4mo ago
  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.
  - hylaride 4mo ago
    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).
  - jermaustin1 4mo ago

ninininino 4mo ago

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.