I had a chance to form an impression of Chinese manufacturing when I did bicycles a while back- they were capable of doing really good work, if they cared to. Manufacturing defects were corrected with promises and assurances, and the defect would remain firmly in place for the following production runs. The defect would be fixed when they were threatened with nonrenewal of contract. The factories would quite happily look you in the eye and lie to your face, right until the check didn't clear, and then things got taken care of.
There's a fairly famous story about a British shipbuilder being asked for a bid to build a new class of destroyer, I think it was, for an Asian country. They knew that their design would be copied, and that there was no chance of them getting the contract to actually build the ship, this had all happened before. They submitted the design with an obvious flaw, a serious stability issue that should have been detected by any competent marine architect, and sure enough, some time later, a ship was observed leaving the shipyard for sea trials. Nearly immediately, the ship started a slow turn, rolled over, and sank. I think this story is told in engineering classes. There are similar stories about machinery designs with meaningless features, watermarks, if you will, which are copied exactly on the knockoffs.
I'm not anti-Chinese per se, but I like a level playing field.