It's not racial discrimination, eversince I started to buy more electronics since the 1990s (time when most electronic comapnies started to shift production from Europe, USA, Japan to mostly China and Malaysia) the quality of products has degraded big time, my grandmother has a Sony TV (made in Japan in 1970's!!!) still working with a clear beautiful picture and it has never broken down. Currently none of my electronics last more then 3-4 years without at least something minor going wrong and I get a sense from a lot of reading that I am not the only one.
And what high quality product? Most of these 50 cent per day employees (who you call not greedy and I call them not having too much of a choice in a communist China where you need a government permission to go for a trip from city to city on their own soil) are away from big cities and lack proper education so the quality issue starts right there (and it has nothing to do with being lazy or not). Also I suspect that the actual quality of building materials has also decreased in order to make big bucks. Companies want you to replace TVs, DVDs, whatever, every few years to move the economy. Besides, it's funny how you called Chinese people less greedy than us and didn't mention that Apple is the greedy party. American companies are taking advantage of 3rd work countries cheap labor and cheap is exactly what they get as so do we.
And whose fault is it to have economic disparity and a military disparity to back it up in the first place ?
The fact that someone mentioned products specifically produced in China are shoddy is implying some type of racial dissent, since we all agree the fundamental problem is not the Chinese, but rather cost cutting and underpaid workers. The statement saying that products produced in China are automatically "bad" is a over generalization of problems and bundling them into the world "China". If one were indeed trying to state the problem clearly, it would be more like this "cheaper labour causes quality problems, in China or Malaysia, or even the USA" with no attempt to single out the Chinese as the soul bearers of the problem. Or we can do even better "greedy bastards in the states, like always, takes advantages of people who can't protect themselves any other way, to make cheap crap and sell them to idiots who buys them to get stinking rich to buy German cars." But this last one is obviously not neutral if interpreted by an American. Which is the same way some one of Asian descent would interpret the original statement regarding Chinese workmanship.
That the fact there exist correlation for cheaper labour implies lower quality products says nothing about rectifying the image of Chinese = Lower Quality Products. Besides, overtime, the management and marketers realized after learning a few lessons from failed industrialists that profit doesn't directly depend on quality of products, sure, if we take the number of competitors to infinity, then yes, profits will be a linear function of quality, etc. However, in the low competitors limit, where one company can successfully predict the moves of the other company using various techniques, market economy doesn't strictly obey the rules of free competition, which is the idealization of all so called "free markets".
The reason that quality of products, especially in electronics, degraded overtime, is also due to the perception of progressive improvement. That people have gotten used to better products in one way or another over time. That perception is used then to selectively invest in certain companies which makes them viable. Any company that fails to obtain this perception will fail shortly. Herein lies the problem, this perception becomes more and more costly to maintain and requires more and more manpower. So naturally, we take short cuts, in the amount of time testing, evaluating and developing products, and we lobby governing bodies and groups to lower previous constraints, or to develop in a direction not covered by previous constraints, like the ever bigger heatsinks and their requirement for new form-factors and bigger power supplies. This process is made much worse by imperfect "free market" competition, since we don't have enough competitors in most areas of consumer products, implying that one competitor can easily find out what the other competitor is up to, and gauge how much progress needs to be made, like in the CPU and GPU market, and thus they attempt to "out do" each other using whatever means possible, which, usually as it have been in the past, means lower reliability and quality products dressed in a outer shell that convinces the average buyer that infact, no degrading has happened, of course, until the end of the warranty period. This artificially inflated progress rate, is of course, sustained as long as we can get labour, resources, etc at a cheap rate. What you observed as a trend in products is a result of this shortcutting to use less to make more money, and when you combine cheaper labour in the form of people who will never even be able to afford the final product, nor would they need it, you have products designed not to last combined with workers with absolutely no will or desire to produce products using a higher workmanship and take any form of personal responsibility.
