in terms of whether china (or whatever country it is at the time) makes garbage ... yeh, I agree, the quality is a product of what the owning company is willing to put into it - and yeah the quality of stuff from china has improved as companies who want to make better stuff have shifted there .... but generally companies who are setting up businesses in somewhere that has low wages (like has been the case with china over the last decade) are doing so to save money and often in the process cut quality to "save money" .... I have noticed a drop off in the quality of lots of brands of clothing - sports gear like Nike, addidas, etc are far worse quality than 7 or so years ago.
I am not saying its the chinese's fault (altho there are some poor standards in some areas of manufacturing there) - but when companies setup there its generally to save money and the quality of the inputs probably head downhill, so the output suffers too.
The last decade it was china - I remember my mum saying years ago you wouldn't have touched sh*t from japan, then japan turned into a manufacturing giant with high quality standards .... its probably moving to India now ... then to vietnam ... will probably end up in africa one day .... we'll run out of countries with cheap labour one day
