* Major Rant! *
I suspect it's more of someone holding their feet to the fire than the chinese willingly providing a quality product.
Exactly right. I have worked as a product development manager, and while it is possible to get good quality out of places like China and India, it is not yet possible without constant and very vigilant, intensive Western babysitting. Without it, specs get used as toilet paper, quality control gets laughed at as a quaint little Western joke, and specified materials are replaced with whatever the factory owner's brother-in-law's cousin can supply at a cheaper price. Samples come back with twenty different problems. You review each problem carefully with the factory rep (answer: "Yes, OK, we can fix, no problem!"). Next sample comes back with two of the original problems fixed, four of them worsened, fourteen of them unchanged and three new problems. Cycle repeats itself until the Western MBA says "Enough, just run it the way it is". Only a tiny fraction of the companies in those countries making whatever kind of widget you want made are even slightly capable of following a spec consistently, and even those companies will often say "Yes, yes, no problem" to absolutely anything asked of them, even if it is a physical impossibility. Not an exaggeration, that; one of my standard winnowing-out practices when I had to source something from India or China was to send candidate companies a physically impossible specification. Most companies said "Yes, yes, no problem, we can make for you, hundred percent quality, no problem." Only those few companies who said "We have some concerns about your specification" made it into my candidate pool. So that's number one. Number two, much of what Western companies do in the way of "quality control" is a pathetic joke of one kind or another. That's another (long) post for another time.