No:
That's bigotry. Pure and simple.
When you find yourself excluding a whole nation because you happen to think that they are incapable of producing anything worthwhile, you have allowed your own prejudice to cloud your judgement. The fact is that the Chinese have led the world in manufacturing since the Fifties and they have done so by being both cost effective and very, very good at what they do.
Now if I said "Don't buy American stuff. It's all junk"... acceptable/unacceptable?
Since the '50s? I think you are confusing the Chinese and the Japanese, and even the Japanese didn't really get going until the '60s, after absorbing the lessons of Deming et al.
The Chinese in the '50s and '60s were busy with agricultural "innovations" like the Great Leap Forward. Google that one sometime
Chinese economic reform started in the '80s, and it's true that now Chinese factories are capable of very high quality production. But there seems to be a huge disconnect between the factories that build marvels like the iPhone and the sort of stuff that comes stock from a generic Chinese microphone manufacturer.
For example, this site that has been spamming me, trying to get me to distribute them:
http://www.nbmic.com/products.asp?id=78
Do you see how all of their products are kinda generic looking, and not well differentiated? I mean, they have five models in a U87-ish case, and about a dozen others in total. It's not exactly state-of-the-art product segmentation. It's indicative that they don't understand their market, and they aren't driving innovation in customer preference; they are hardly even reacting to customer preference. It's the shotgun approach to marketing, and that does not bode well for quality since the only possible competitive advantage is price.
Now, if this same factory was contracted by a knowledgeable person in the target market, and had strict specifications for the product desired, I have little doubt that they could produce a quality product. And there are companies who are managing their business in that manner.
The other method is to simply take what they sell and fix ("mod") it. That's easier and cheaper in smaller quantities, because probably that factory won't pay much attention to an order smaller than 1,000 units.
But if you simply take the stock product with no QC and resell it (<cough>group buy!</cough>), well then you better be competing on price.
This is not a cultural criticism of the Chinese; it's a basic difference that occurs between any two cultures. Europeans have different microphone preferences than Americans, generally speaking. What, you say? Every loves Neumanns, right? Sure, but nobody here talks much about Schoeps or DPA, do they? Except the classical and location recording set, who have those sophisticated Euro-style preferences and thus love all things small and wonderful
Whereas high-end studio recording engineers in Europe do consider those brands frequently.
And hardly anybody in America wants to drive a modern turbodiesel car, right? So why do Europeans love them? If you don't understand the culture, you can't market successfully.
Same thing here; the Chinese simply aren't familiar with American home recording culture, so their marketing isn't very effective, which means that their product design is suboptimal. That could change anytime; next year, next month, whenever. But for now, it's true.
...I dig Chinese people and culture...it's their manufacturing MO that tends to be poor QC assembly-line production, often of poorly copied existing products, in an effort to under-cut the price of existing (well-made) products.
...but I'm rarely *impressed* with Chinese Made products. I have a bunch of RI Hagstrom guitars that are Chinese made. Overall...the wood and finish is great, but the setups are bad and the hardware is so-so...and this is stuff that is just made there but is actually R&D'd elsewhere.