You can find some interesting examples of Chinese (non)reliability in the motorscooter industry. With no domestically-manufactured scooters on the US market, there's a range of imports sold here, from the top-price European bikes (e.g. Piaggio Vespa) at the top, Japanese (Honda, Yamaha) and Taiwanese (Genuine, SYM) in the middle, and P.R.Chinese (generics) at the bottom. Those "chinascoots" sell for mere hundreds of dollars, have a poor reputation for quality, and are sneered at by everyone who understands that.
However, a few scooter manufacturers based elsewhere have tried opening plants (or using existing ones) in the PRC, and applying their own corporate quality-control standards to them, with rather good results (e.g. Piaggo's PRC-made Fly). You'd have to be both racist and ignorant of the iPhone to think that Chinese workers can't produce quality goods; like anyone else, they build to the specs that are given to them and standards that are expected of them. The difference is the legal environment in which they work. They don't have the environmental, human rights, or labor standards of their competitors in other countries, and that's why they cost less. (But give it time: I hear the US GOP has a plan to fix that.)