Huge difference. Products that are intended to be sold overseas are made to comply with the recipient country's safety standards (although the Chinese are notorious for cheating around that in every way they can and quality control + liability is ultimately up to the importer). Random shit that you buy on alibaba, isn't.

There are several entire youtube channels dedicated to dismantling chinesium gadgets and showing how they'll burn your house down. Lack of reverse current protection, lack of overcurrent protection, trace spacing that's way too small and will arc under the right temp/humidity, mains side traces right next to each other, no grounding, ground shorted to neutral, under-rated caps and resistors that reach unsafely high temperatures, etc, etc.

There is an important difference between products built there and sold there, and products built there and sold here. The product have to obey safety and other standards of the country where they're sold. And those standards differ quite a lot between the EU and China. They can use banned chemicals, and fail many other requirements.

In the EU, products that conform to EU standards can be identified with a 'CE' logo[0], which means "Conformité Européenne". "Chinese Export" can have a deceptively similar logo[1] that does not guarantee such adherence at all, but still looks comforting to European customers of Chinese web shops. It's a blatant violation, but hard to stop, because it's a foreign sale shipped to private customers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking

[1] https://siloscordoba.com/blog/corporate/china-export-is-not-...

There's no such thing as a Chinese Export or China Export mark, it's an urban myth (see your own link).

Whether or not it exists seems to be mostly a matter of interpretation. Is the incorrect mark just a misprint while Chinese products with the correct mark are just as likely to fail to meet EU standards? Either way, that cheap products from China regularly fail the standards does not seem to be disputed by anyone. And if those products are sold in the EU, it's fairly easy to address, but if they're sold in China and mailed to the EU, it's not so easy to enforce. The problem remains the same, whether or not you see it as intentional or not.

It's the difference between deliberate (creating a confusing mark to legalistically "bypass" CE regulations - this is the myth) and negligence (China not bothering to enforce the standards set by other countries or even its own quality and safety standards - this is well known).

Germany seems to care more than other EU countries about such things like CE. They don't have trouble turning away imports based just because it's shipped to private customers.

Just ask people trying to receive PinePhones in Germany.

You don't have a german manual? Bye bye, try again later.

Similarly the UL logo and ETL Intertek logo serve the same purpose in the US. If something doesn’t have a UL logo it’s probably not safe.