What does it take (beyond hard volumes) to get the price down to where these could be built for maybe $7? PCB, connectors, assembly - everything has to be the lowest of the low cost. When cost is the primary driver for the product, the goal is to find the lowest cost parts. In my experience - knock-off's and counterfeits are the de-facto way to get the cheapest price on parts. Paying people $1/day is another way to save money. Regardless of how they are able to pull it off, it is reasonable to say that corners are being cut at every opportunity without any consideration for the long term consequence. Suppliers, sub-suppliers, and sub-sub raw material suppliers are all cutting corners to meet the low cost demand. Consumers love it because they get the $10 thing. A decade or two from now, and all we will have access to is old stale tech because the big innovators are always being undercut. Good luck world. If your target is hitting the bottom, it's a pretty big target and you are sure to hit it. With a thud.
You're missing a big part of global economics in your rather cynical analysis. It costs a lot more to produce stuff in the US because the source materials bounce all over the world. In China, materials come from themselves, and, as such, Chinese manufacturers get special deals. Other nations do not usually get such deals. Your righteous indignation is misplaced: China manipulates their prices and their currency to encourage the world to rely on them; at any time, they could decide otherwise. They're successfully moving the world's manufacturing infrastructure into their control, and it will not be a good day when they decide to squeeze.
Tangential anecdote: A while back, there was an international investment shit storm which was precipitated by a leaked internal Chinese government document describing their outside investor policies. It translated as, "Let the dog in, beat the dog up, let the dog out." The Japanese were furious, but pretty much everyone was like
![WTF? :wtf:](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/wtf2.gif.pagespeed.ce.pxLiY5pjs4.gif)
Back to the point: Cheap stuff is correlated to bad quality and slave labor, but is not necessarily causally related. And that's not even taking into account that the cost of living in China is absurdly low. Even describing the USD equivalent of wages there is bound to be fallacious in countless respects. That said, everyone buying cheap stuff from China may lead to a rather nasty outcome.