Yes, this is a good point.

Previous posts have trotted out examples some of the big foreign names that are producing in China, but it's disingenuous to represent those examples as indicative of the current state of Chinese product manufacturing as a whole. We must remember that in the entire Chinese Production Universe, the overwhelming majority of products are cranked out by completely local enterprises without managerial involvement of the Fortune 500.

Furthermore, when decent products come out of factories, even WFOE or joint venture enterprises, it is usually because of training and quality control, and frankly, a good dose of continuous @ss-kicking by foreign managers. In other words, top-down. I have yet to see a major enterprise in China produce quality goods on the strength of bottom-up cultural tendencies of the average individual. And in China, the average individual worker or manager is not perfection-driven (a la the Japanese), but rather to do the minimum possible to "get by" or to solve a problem with a quick-fix short term solution that may have serious long-term consequences.