alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
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?