The main issue with China (as I said I've been buying everything like PCBs, cables, machines parts, etc, etc for 30 years, and even used to make whole products there for 20 years) is basically this
- a firm of say 500 people may have just 1 who speaks English and when (not IF) he/she moves on, they have to find a replacement, so the comms gets broken and you get a series of weird emails from the new person
- the culture is dramatically different; in the West if somebody delivers crap you just tell them it is of poor quality, but a chinese chap will take it as you commenting on his mother's secual performance, and total excommunication is easy to achieve
- generally you cannot phone them, because the switchboard can't speak English, and this IS a big problem when you need to phone to check "new bank details" - see below
- their IT setup is usually totally amateurish and their email (usual gmail addresses!!!) is frequently hacked, so you get very plausible "new bank details below" emails, with all the right context, invoice numbers, PO numbers, because the hacker has the whole context, and phoning the company to check whether the bank details are genuine is hard (I have spent days doing just one of these), and they NEVER accept responsibility, they just say you have to pay again or you can f-k off (I got a 10% discount once)
- fast staff turnover - anybody with a brain moves every 6 months or so (the business scene is largely a dog eat dog and make a fast buck setup)
- customer details are completely routinely stolen when X moves to a new job so e.g. you send an order to JLCPCB or ITEAD and a few months later you get offers from other PCB firms with "all the right details", so your product details are probably stolen too, so never put the name of your product on your PCBs!
- destruction of tooling (it may be in the small print but...)
- vandalism (I've had multiple cases of custom gear smashed up when somebody had a bad day)
- real hard cases of ambiguity (e.g. a quote for a 2-part moulded case is actually for just one half of it, no matter how many times you email - and even Zoom - to SPECIFICALLY check this one damned point!!!) and of course it is always to their advantage
- payment is mostly 100% in advance, so maximum commercial risk + poorer cash flow
- air freight not viable except for high value / small parts, and sea freight (or train/truck) is slow - 25 days sailing time from China to Felixstowe in the UK and this is added to the above cash flow issue, so basically you can spend 3 months discovering that the stuff is crap
- freight is not cheap; you can easily be paying 10-20% on top for it
- you never actually know if the part is made by the firm "making" it, and when your supplier vanishes, you will never find the real mfg
The above points all add up to a significant extra cost, direct and indirect, and when you look at how much easier your life is doing stuff locally, the cost is not so much more. PCBs, cables and machined parts are one exception and are much cheaper in China. I looked at S Korea
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/avoiding-china-for-pcbs-anyone-tried-s-korea/msg4956838/#msg4956838but it's hard to establish contact and for prototyping JLCPCB is much cheaper.
For amusement, read this
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/does-anyone-recognise-this-chinese-moulded-case-yorktron/msg4346914/#msg4346914That said, you CAN develop long term relationships with firms there. Generally if you email a firm you dealt with 5 years ago and they are still there, that's a really good sign. I have ~5 good suppliers like that.
With chips, you will obviously never build a relationship. You are one of a thousand of customers, and decoupled from the chip mfg by multiple layers anyway.
The political risk will not reduce. It will increase as China builds up its military. The US is not stupid and they will take steps. It will take years but they will do it. Like the small step in Europe (way overdue) of not using Huawei 3G 4G 5G gear.