Living in Asia for quite some time now has given me some insight into this. As a generalization it's not altogether false. From living in S. Korea I have been witness to the Korean crafting process in action and the standard in craftsmanship here is much lower than in my home country, the U.S..
Every appliance I have bought that was manufactured in S. Korea has been way below par on performance and longevity in comparison to U.S. bought items, so much in fact that ordering from the U.S. and having it shipped here for twice as much ends up saving me money in the long term.
To give an example I'll use fans. If I buy a fan here I can rest assured that if I leave it on constantly for a week that by the end of said week the motor will have died. This is not an assumption as I have had it happen numerous times, each time paying again for another fan. After spending about 150,000 won on fans (roughly 130 dollars) in 3 months, I decided to buy a fan from the states and have it shipped here. I paid 70 dollars for a "hurricane" fan and 40 bucks for an electrical socket up/down converter and roughly 40 dollars in shipping... that was 3 years ago and the fan and converter still work really well.
There just isn't as much emphasis on the quality control process in countries here as there are in "western" countries. As an example of this I'll use the Whisen brand. I ordered an air conditioning unit from them 2 years ago, I even paid for "custom installation". The gentlemen came to install my new air con and I was over joyed (had been in 90+ summer heat for over 3 weeks). They did a great job mounting the unit, installing the outside box and affixing the tubing, however, when it came to getting the tubing from the inside unit to the outside unit they did something so lazy that it was shocking.
The guys chipped out a corner of my window and ran the line through the small hole they had made... and cracked my window in the process. They then asked me for a spare sock and "insulated" the remaining hole with it! I was dumbfounded.
I called Whisen's customer service line and was informed this was "ok" and tended to be standard operating procedure as drilling through the concrete (which was in-line with the unit) would have taken too much time. 8-o Thank heavens I was informed of this prior to my internet being installed. When the man did the same thing for my internet line I was prepared with the matching sock from the hole in the other window.
Since then I've seen professionals measure with chopsticks, use folded newspaper stuffed on an "L" bracket to "level" a shelf, and even cut off a section of door jamb to make a new door fit... trust me it was ghetto fabulous.
Craftsmanship and quality control just isn't as much of a priority here from my experience. So if given the option of buying from Asia or a western country I'll choose the western country every time if it's a product I need to last.
