I have relatives that are regularly over there, as they have business dealings in China, and I also hear from them.
There are a few chinese nostr developers if I'm not mistaken.
There's a lot of misinformation and propaganda about China, specially on the US and EU. I recommend this channel https://www.youtube.com/c/Adri%C3%A1nD%C3%ADazMarro for an outsider's perspective, he has been living and doing business in China for >20 years. Take everything with a grain of salt but I think his view is nuanced and accurate.
Discussion
My previous company had to order some parts from China, during COVID, as the local producer was overwhelmed with orders, and the safety-critical components _literally melted_ in the test. We had to throw away the entire batch.
They put those components in their cars, that's why we ordered from them.
yikes. no wonder their cars are so cheap lol
It's industrial corruption. Terrifyingly common. The screws were only _slightly_ smaller and lighter than the standard, but that increased the friction during rotation. You couldn't see the difference, with the naked eye.
And just try returning the boxes for a refund. 😅
Skim off tiny amounts of metal, from each screw, over millions of screws, and pocket the difference. Most people won't test them.
This is why European airplane part producers have to have databases for tracking the origins of every single part, right down to the screws. If someone reports a producer delivering sub-par screws, all of the planes need to be grounded, taken apart, and the screws have to be replaced. If an accident happens, they check all of the parts and sue the part manufacturers.
Or, like, a local software department works with some engineers within the same company, located in China. These are some of the best software engineers they have, but the mentality makes interaction burdensome, so they only get lower-criticality assignments. For instance, the department set an 80% test coverage goal, and the German engineers were embarrassed to admit that they hadn't even managed to reach 50%, after a year. Really terrible. The Chinese engineers hit 100% coverage. Wow. Amazing, right? Except that most of the tests were just:
```
Setup Test
#TBD
Teardown Test
```
They didn't realize that Germans software devs would read the code. But they have electrical engineers. They still read code.