I like to think of it as competency being bucket with a small hole. Some folks have a big bucket some small but all of them need experience to fill the bucket. In the US maybe we have larger buckets but it doesn’t matter because we’re not filling them fast enough or have enough of them. The Chinese are filling millions of buckets to the point of overflowing while the US has a thousand half full ones. Chinese products in the us tend to be garbage because that’s just how incentives line up. There is no brand, the amazon ratings have no transparency or consistency so high quality goods don’t stand out except in niche areas. The market incentive is just too cheat the ratings and put out the cheapest product possible. That could probably change quickly if Amazon wasn’t so damn evil. Many American brands are like that now too, they sold their brand name to some private eq firm gutted their core product to shave off a few cents., they fired their core engineers and moved production to a state that still allows federal minimum wage pay and prohibits unions. That might be ok if it shifted experienced workers but usally the workers don’t stick around for very long and the company goes bankrupt or goes overseas at that point. Point being that knowledge is simply being lost. Now your set spindle as an American buyer you got no chance of buying a real one but if you were in China and you knew how to work the right channels you might be able to get one that’s closer to spec, one where the corners weren’t cut as badly and the product is better, but if you need a 30k precision tool China isn’t the place to get one. The supply chain just isn’t controlled enough for top of the line products in most places.
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.