It's like we're completely spoiled by how absurdly cheap and mostly reliable things that we use on a day to day basis.

To me, it's akin to the stereotypes of foreign professional athletes such as European basketball players or Russian hockey players. When we find the examples that validate it, it reinforces the stereotype. But then, we completely ignore the countless examples that counter it, both in terms of high quality performers from the foreign country as well as poorly performing examples produced from ones own country.

There's nothing that implicitly makes something made in Canada, or USA, or Germany that much better than if it were made in China.

I'd say that there is, sort of. Much of the manufacturing that remains in the USA is for industrial applications, with specific requirements for performance and reliability. We basically exported the consumer product manufacturing category, and with it went the majority of the low quality market.

It's like the legendary status of "American made tools". When my grandfather passed away, I got some of his American tools from the 40s - 70s. They're junkier than most tools you'll find at Walmart or Harbor Freight today. Why? Because he was relatively poor and bought cheap, domestic tools built for the hobbiest market.

The one exception I've read is that China isn't producing raw steel that's as high quality as US and German steel. I was looking into tubing benders awhile back and read several accounts of even high-grade Chinese steel kinking at the same wall thickness where American and German steel continued to bend smoothly.

Cheap is top of most peoples wish list when shopping and China can do cheap. Cheap tends to be the enemy of quality.

So it's actually true that we're flooded with cheap crap from China and that the production quality of those items is better than from elsewhere. (For the same price range.)

African-Americans traditionally have had a reputation of enjoying watermelon and fried chicken. Is it "reasonable" to label casual and/or backhanded references to that reputation as racist?

Hint: Yes. Yes it is.

It would have been perfectly easy to write a story like this, decrying the modern marketplace full of cheaply made, disposable, plastic, ghost-shift junk products, counterfeits, and fly-by-night non-brand brands, without naming the most common country of origin. We all know the stuff largely comes from China; pointing it out explicitly doesn't add information, only sentiment.

Yet so many stories bring up China specifically. There's an impulse there the author(s) aren't examining in themselves. The author(s) may not have explicitly racist intent, but the result is absolutely a racist pattern.

Why is creating an environment where my neighbor is suffering a good thing? We've built this fragile global supply chain for things that benefit the large scale producers and distributors and deliver low value to the consumer. Amazon is the great middleman and ultimately raises costs for the market.

I was in Georgia last year at the heart of peach harvest season. The local supermarket sold Peaches shipped in from California that cost 100% more than the fresh produce sold by small purveyors and were an inferior product in every dimension.

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/04/11/nyu-student-undercover-...

Note that this is the very upper end of factory worker conditions in China. For the local market, this is genuinely considered good. Knowing that conditions for "cheap" stuff produced in China are as bad as those documented in the article or (a lot) worse, it is almost immoral to buy that stuff.

If you buy cheap stuff from China or almost anywhere in Asia or Africa, you are inflicting a small amount of harm on every employee that has better conditions than that, and harm on humanity as a whole.

People forgot, but post WW2 this also applied to German engineering!

"Make America Great Again!" Maybe Trump is onto something! </jk>

If it were Chinese companies that were making their own products I wouldn't mind so much. I happily buy from Lenovo because I think they make good quality laptops and treat their workers better than other laptop manufacturers.

But it isn't, it's just big corporations that want cheaper labour.

However anyone moving their production to China is doing it for one reason only, that it is cheaper.

Racism blinds people. So does anti-racism.

By providing a simple derogatory label one avoids the need to think and instead imposes their prejudice upon the world - ultimately doing the very thing they are decrying. Ironic. Both ignorant bullies lacking self-awareness, compassion, and empathy, but on opposite sides. If only they realized how much they have in common.