For work, I've traveled to China helped launch production lines in factories for products I helped design, and I've gotta side with CK on this one.
Most of the ideas about the quality of chinese factories and chinese workers being thrown around on this thread are antiquated, or just plain uninformed.
The picture that gets painted by the north american media about the conditions in the factories is simply not true in most cases. Like anywhere in the world, there are good, reputable, high quality facilities, and there are shady, low quality ones. I've gone out for drinks with the floor managers in the chinese factories I've been to. They made about the same amount of money, and had about the same standard of living as I did as a design engineer. Many of them started on the production lines and worked their way up. They all had cell phones and electronic toys too, btw, and typically stuff that wasn't even on the market in North America yet for another few months. They take a GREAT DEAL of pride in the quality of work they do and the expertise they have. It's part of their culture. It's also part of their culture to not boast about the quality of their work, so you'll never hear them waxing poetic about something they've made the same way as, say, an Italian, or an American would.
The fact is, modern Chinese manufacturing has become the best there is in the world. In the west we've let that knowledge slip away from us and become outdated as we outsourced, and could no longer compete even if we wanted to without some serious growing pains.
They got that way by being cheaper as they learned how to be a manufacturing powerhouse and master modern production technologies, but in the last 5 years, prices to manufacture have come up dramatically from what they were in china, and at the same time, so has the quality. Now the chinese factories build the higher end products and components we consume and outsource cheaper stuff to singapore, malaysia, thailand, etc.
Bikes are no different. China has some of the highest level of expertise in the world when it comes to manufacturing composites. You'd be hard pressed to find anywhere in the west that could do it better than the top chinese factories in building you a good bike frame.
