See, and here I'll have to disagree. I spent two days at IMTS - biggest machining trade show in the world. There was no shortage of Chinese manufacturers attempting to sell anything and everything... but they were all garbage. Build quality was poor, interfaces were nonsensical, they were Potempkin Villages of manufacturing. Buddy of mine has a Chinese machine; it's a patent-infringing Fanuc Robodrill that he paid about 1/8th as much as you'd pay for a Fanuc Robodrill. Which is fine for him, he's making Harley parts. But Bulgari uses Fanuc Robodrills to make watch cases and I guarantee you, this machine will never cut that precisely even after my buddy has sunk $10k in a new control system for it.

And the problem is that expectations have been lowered to match the output. We put up with shittier stuff than we used to because the delta between the good stuff and the shitty stuff is such that the 20 cents on a dollar ripoff is good enough. Which I wouldn't mind except I need the good stuff and there's no market in making it anymore.

I've taken apart three or four Chinese watches. Their manufacturing ability far outstrips mine. But their yields are shit, man. Stuff that absolutely would rip ass if they had any quality control will barely tick because they don't. It's yield curve engineering - you make 100 things, the top 5 are export grade, the 25 below that are domestic, the 25 below that are sold out the back for night market ripoffs and the 40 that are left are junk. It's how the Swiss did it before Florentine Ariosto Jones taught them manufacturing; it's how a biomedical company I worked for 20 years ago did it because their 20-person handwork assembly line couldn't get above a 17% yield in a 100% test environment.

I think that culturally, the Chinese will never make it to expertise because they don't value it. But I also think that so long as we're competing with the Chinese, our experts will starve.