2 Answers

Imagine a billion unemployed people wanting their  Government to collect the money we owe them  . If they are working making crap we buy .Then we buy some time and put off paying our bills. So its like this for now ,we have a T-Rex in our back yard (China) we feed it cows one after another (money) so it wont eat us (collect the debt) It gets bigger and more powerful with each passing day. One day we will run out of cows to feed this thing ,and the T-Rex is going to Collect . We buy their junk to put off disaster. Consider the outcome if they stopped making crap and turned out some quality stuff with a work force of more than a billion people . Who could compete with that.

The simple answer is that we American priced ourselves out of our jobs. The reason so much production is in China is because the cost of manufacturing here in the USA had risen so high that manufactures either shut down or moved to China.   Everyone wants more money.. Now Obama wants to tax the wealthy, its many of these wealthy that employs the American worker, they too will now shut down or move operations to china and more people will be out of work.  This is a whole other subject but I think it touches on your 'why china'..

On the other hand, the Chinese workers are going through many changes, they now have assembly lines and they now teach trades to qualified persons and they now allow them to perfect these trades where before they did not, quality standards in China is on a rapid rise.  You are too young my guess to remember the Japanese goods here and and around the world, they started to arrive in the early 60's, they were also 'crap' but a few years go by and Japanese goods were becoming the best --  But they too allowed their workers to speak up and they protested and eventually they begin to price themselves off the production market as well, many Japanese goods are not Japanese anymore, they are coming from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, as well.