The price a manufacturer charges could be cost plus (design, engineering, bill of materials, labour, shipping, distribution and marketing, sales, taxes) in which case you get what you pay for. The margin is usually small, and they work on volume. Or it could be what the market will bear. The audio industry leans heavily to the later for audiophiles, to the former for everybody else.
Walmart and Canadian Tire couldn't exist without China. The North American consumer wants a certain standard of living, but isn't willing to pay for goods built under that same regime. If you want cheap, then the vendors have to control costs somewhere, and that currently means using manufacturing/sourcing in countries that don't have high labour costs or environmental controls.
Again, manufacturing in China is not a guarantee of crap quality. If you are old enough, this is the same reputation that Japan used to have, then Taiwan, then Korea, now China. Get used to the fact that these are driven, hungry, ambitious people and they go up the learning curve incredibly fast.
What you should really be worried about is that new research is starting to be published in Chinese only. We have all long benefited from that fact that we didn't have to learn two or more languages to get ahead, and that everybody was coming to our universities and working for our companies.
What are you going to do when your competitor is publishing in Mandarin and you have no idea what is going on?
[soapbox off]
