This is a complex issue . . .
I buy Chinese made products, and find some of them to be well made, while some aren't. My Olympus SLR camera was made in China, as were some of the lenses. My favorite and best lens is Japanese, but it cost more than the camera body. The point is that the Chinese can make as good quality as anyone else if they have the budget, but really cheap stuff is really cheap stuff no matter where it's made. China does need to allow the value of the yuan to float. They've undervalued it too much for too long, and this isn't good for anyone.
A few observations:
-Simple and very inexpensive items should be made in third world countries. It costs too much to make them elsewhere, and the foreign exchange helps raise the living standards of those who need it most.
-Rampant protectionism isn't the way to revitalize American manufacturing. Countries that go this route end up with too many isolated industries that can't compete on a worldwide basis. The former Eastern bloc is a great example of this: when the iron curtain fell most all their home-grown industries quickly failed and the factories were bought by multinationals. Why? Because their products were mostly crappy, poorly designed and poorly made. The manufacturers lasted for decades in that environment because there was no outside competition.
Instead, take a look at Germany and Japan; their labor is expensive, often more so than American labor, but their products are famed worldwide for being well designed and made, and as such sell for a premium which earns lots of foreign exchange for them.
-To a large degree incompetant management is why our manufacturing sector isn't where Germany and Japan are. Go back to 1970 and look at where BMW was at the time. A very small company with very little name recognition in the US, they had a new line of big six-cylinder cars, pretty luxurious by European standards but hardly so by American standards. They were very nicely built however and the company always put a premium on driving dynamics with good suspension, steering, and brakes. Over here Ford had just introduced a redesigned Lincoln which abandoned both the '60s unit body construction and the Lincoln engines, so a Lincoln could be made with Ford/Mercury components. Over at GM Cadillac was busy cheapening their cars too for '71. Neither could be bothered to install four wheel disc brakes or independant suspension like the BMW, or precise steering. For the next 25 years all three companies continued on their same paths, with Ford and GM integrating more parts for their upper level makes with their popularly priced brands. BMW kept making sophisticated cars that drove well and gradually introduced larger V-8 and V-12 engines, better a/c, and other things Americans insist on.
Today when I drive around through wealthy neighborhoods I hardly ever see a Cadillac or Lincoln sedan, but E and S-class Mercedes are everywhere, along with 5 and 7-series BMWs, lots of big Lexuses, and the odd Bentley. Simply put, Cadillac and Lincoln lack the credibility to sell much in the over $50,000 market, while wealthy people are happy to part with $80,000-$90,000 for the high-end German and Japanese stuff because they've never forgotten that the customer is likely to see and feel the difference between a mid-range product with extra trim and a true high-end product. The same thing has happened with appliances - why don't we have anything to compete with Miele? It's because American management frequently wants to deal only with really high volume products, but that puts them into competition with foriegn made stuff from countries with cheaper labor, and then of course it's hard to make American products competitive.
Health care is the 700 lb. gorilla in this mess. High health care costs have been a big part of the difficulty of making competitive mid-range products here, and until this is resolved in some manner American companies will be working with an inbuilt disadvantage.
