It's still incredible how many people STILL equate "Made in China" with low quality. These folks are stuck in the 90s. China builds things to spec. If you want low quality they'll give you that. But require high quality, they can do that too. You just need to pay for it.
As someone who works in US manufacturing, the situation is much more dire and I think the "low quality / high quality" back-and-forth is burying the lede.
It's not just that China has reached some kind of quality parity with North America. There are now significant market segments that the US functionally cannot manufacture because we completely ceded the institutional knowledge and infrastructure in favor of financialization and outsourcing of the US economy.
My specific area of expertise is robotic / computer controlled manufacturing equipment and a lot of the components (high precision servos, sensors and other motion components) are functionally impossible to source domestically. There are still some boutique manufacturers making things in low efficiency / low volume in the USA but touring the manufacturing campuses of Chinese suppliers has been shocking in the last five years. The sheer scale of efficient, automated assembly they are capable of operating at makes a big-three automotive assembly line look like a dirt-floored shack with men knocking things together with rocks.
They are laser focused on lights-out manufacturing at extreme volume in ways I have never seen in the US. Entire production lines of high complexity electronics that are completely vertically integrated (everything from the injection molding for the plastic enclosure to the PCB manufactured on one campus) with human hands touching them for the first time as they leave the automated quality control line to be boxed up.
I don't think American people fully comprehend the brain and skill drain that has already taken place.
Do you think this can be reversed and brought back in one generation? Two? Three?
Assume a generation to be about 21 years (birth to high school + trade training).
Our business leaders since the 1980s failed to quantify the cost of a possible revamp, and I wonder what the true cost will end up being.
I’ve seen some of the Great Lake cities and towns that are in sad shape; but I was too young (and being
immigrants, also too poor) to tour those areas in any depth in the Reagan/Carter days so I can only imagine what they were like back then.
