The Chinese can make perfectly good kit. Some of Kuhn Rikon cookware is Chinese and it's pretty good stuff. When Sturmey Archer's UK plant was moved to the Far East, anecdotal evidence suggests that the machinery had been neglected to the point that it could no longer manufacture to the tollerances of specification and an old engineer would look at it and say, 'Well, it's not that far out...'. The Easterns, lacking our experience of what they could get away with, scrapped the machinery, replaced it, and thus built far better hubs than most of those made in Nottingham.
Hell, I've heard they are intelligent enough and resourceful enough to look at a demonstration of a piece of equipment, then not buy it, reverse engineer it, and make their own.
The Chinese, however, are not cutting out Western businesses as such, although some factories are indeed owned by the Chinese government. Many European businesses (for example Luxottica) opened their own factories in China where labour is cheaper, and made their European workforce redundant because they work to the best profit margin and have little sense of community. Like Thatcher, they presumably believe 'there is no such thing as society'.
My concern about China is what rights and remuneration the workers in the supply chain have, whether the factories and suppliers function to the same environmental standards as UK, and the environmental impact of importing the goods to the UK. Assuming, of course, that UK businesses are not flouting the laws themselves!
One clear advantage of UK manufacture is that it is much harder to evade or avoid tax when you have workers on the payroll and a factory to run.
Import of goods has more environmental impact with large products because it is volume that determines how much can fit on one boat, but the cost of transport for large items of plant such as AHUs and chillers (I have some experience of the costs of these) plus import duties mean that to be competitive on the UK market these items must, of course, be built to a very low cost. In any case, your flight to China is probably of more concern than the products, shipped by sea, will be.
If Chinese manufacture means low quality and exploitation at expensive UK prices, I have issues. If it means a fair wage for a fair day's work and no dumping of costs onto other people or the enviroment, I have no specific problem buying Chinese goods. What we need is for import firms to write quality into the spec and guarantee that by buying their product, you are not ripping people, and our home planet, off. Or better still, a government that truly cares about this sort of thing and legislates accordingly.
I had hoped that perhaps, with Brexit, we could change the rules so that imported goods would have to comply with all sorts of standards, thus meaning that home manufacture would become equally affordable.
