Quality comes from the desire to build a brand and be able to sustain what you want to do as a result. The Japanese wanted western markets and to win races and adopted Demmings ideas when the Europeans and Americans were building top-down corporations.

Once you have the culture it doesn't matter where the factory is. Nissans best factory is often the one where British Leyland once made awful vehicles.

My dealings with Chinese owned companies suggests that they have no such desire. When they get caught telling lies about things like material certificates and actions taken to fix problems they just close down, change the name and re-open with the same attitude. The only desire is instant profit.

They seem to apply the same attitude to their workers.

Needless to say I will not buy a Benelli, BSA, Norton or whatever other old brand they buy to hide behind. Zontes and Geely I will watch for a change of attitude.

Andy

«The only desire is instant profit»

EXACTLY - thats my experience too with chinese stuff. Mobile phone chargers and cables that stops working within a week or two. Hiking shoes that fell apart within the first weeks of use. And the list goes on and on and on..... How hard is it to make such relatively simple products as above mentioned with a certain quality and reliability? Not to mention more complex products such as motorbikes?

Maybe chinese stuff can be made reliable if western or japanese/korean companies add in their own staff and quality controlers at every link of the product making chain. But that desire for instant profit and all that comes with that seem to be build in every chinese person and company....

A very few exceptions there are such as this CFMoto company. I wish it would be more but I have my doubts...

__________________
In the end everything will be fine. If its not fine its not the end....

What a pity I can't find a photo of my Rolex watch. Or something close enough to a Rolex on the outside anyway that it fools the uninitiated. It only cost about £20 so I'm not that bothered it only lasted about 5 yrs before the winder broke. It's costume jewellery really - it looks the part but it's worth nothing. And where did I get it - yup, that's right, China.

When we were last in Shanghai (about 10yrs ago now) we'd wander through the western branded goods malls looking at the genuine 'aspirational' goods on sale. Every big brand you've ever heard of, all on sale at prices not that dissimilar to their western price tags (give or take a bit of import duty, profiteering etc). So to someone (like me) on a reasonable western level income, bl**dy expensive. And if I found them expensive imagine how a Chinese shopper on probably less than 10% of that average western wage saw them. These things were not just aspirationally expensive, they were over the horizon expensive. It didn't change the desire for them though - the marketing was doing its job. So what they did what any businessman seeing an opportunity would do - they made their own.

A couple of streets away from the glitz and glamour and western prices of the Nanjing Road you could visit some bland, featureless (and often windowless) brick buildings where a marketplace of small traders were selling copies of western goods to the local population. None of this stuff was very good (although my £4 branded wallet lasted until recently) but it was good enough if all you wanted was to look the part / impress the neighbours / get something vaguely functional at a Chinese level price. Yes there were all sorts of legal infringements and yes the traders knew it (a lot of them shut down quickly when cops patrolled the aisles) but mostly these malls were tolerated by the authorities. So a lot of stuff we're seeing from China now is absolutely in this tradition - slap a western label on it for marketing purposes but use a 'copy mall' approach to what's inside.

Whether things have moved on in China's domestic market I don't know but I'm still seeing the same 'caveat emptor' mindset in action. A country that allows explosives to be carted across a city centre in the top box of a moped, Deliveroo style, isn't going to worry too much about an underspecced wire in a phone charger.

No Rolex, but here's a picture of another watch I bought for a few quid in a Beijing mall. When this one packed up I did miss it. It even keep reasonably good time