>As far back as 1924, the Chinese philosopher, essayist and diplomat Hu Shih wrote a piece on “Cha Bu Duo” as a way of protesting against the attitude, which he felt was hurting China as a nation.

Fast, cheap, good. Pick two.

Deng wanted poor China to develop fast. So ChaBuDuo.

The Life of Mr. Cha Buduo was an essay on the inability to adapt to modernization. Modern Chinese ChaBuDuo culture is the maximal embrace of it for specific development goals. ChaBuDuo culture can be reigned in if the government really wanted to i.e. Chinese aviation safety used to be dismal, now it's one of the safest in the world. Same with high speed rail safety after the very public Wenzhou train crash (2022 bad year for both though).

People need to understand: good enough + Chinese population means = enough occasional, actually good outcomes to reach global competitiveness in ways that matter, fast. Central government wants to incentivize innovation and research -> so huge Chinese population starts spamming garbage to ChaBuDuo tier patents and research papers. Occasionally the system produces 1 good patent or paper out of 100. But volume is so high that 1/100 is good enough to be near competitive. Refine quality to 2/100 to reach parity. Refine to 3/100 and China becomes industrial leader. It's not hard to go from 1-3/100 in a short span of time when you have a massive labour force spamming its way into maturity. This is how China went from having poor academic research capacity into leading research many key fields in the last few years. Chabuduo manufacturing with Chinese population means plastic hangers to iPhones in 10 years. Chabuduo construction means enviable transportation systems, tier1 cities from fishing villages, and ghost cities that eventually gets filled by the hundreds of millions still waiting to be urbanized. Perfect is the enemy of fast developement. So China ChaBuDuos until there's enough base to focus on "quality development".

On the matter of PRC chabuduo manufacturing - as others have stated, there are now plenty of fast + good options in China, it just won't be cheap. Ultimately it's a testament of Chinese supply chain and industrial prowess to have so much fast + cheap options, a lever most countries don't even have. One assumes there's some sort of competitive / quality advantage for western firms that survived outsourcing. Though sometimes it's market distortions like guaranteed government contracts in which case it's not even pick two categories, but pick one - usually good, but slow and expensive. One category I follow is gun optics, how fast Chinese companies like Holosun are closing in on the field while EOTECH fat on gov contracts have been stagnating for years, with drama of delivering defective sights. A few Chinese iterations and they might be neither good, nor cheap, nor fast. Incidentally, the source of geopolitical anxiety over Made in China 2025 / PRC establishing indigenous high tech industries.

Finally, consider how much chabuduo shit there are in western domestic service economy, one sector where there's options at every price point and generally, you get what you pay for. Everyone chabudos, China just has a massive industrial and manufacturing base that can chabuduo with making widgets as well.