I saw close up how one after another previously solid US manufacturing corporation essentially committed suicide, one after the other, like mindless lemming following each other off a cliff. All for the sake of just a handful of people at the very top getting obscenely rich without doing any real work. Slash and burn agriculture; a big crop for the stock market the first year or two, mostly involving smoke and mirrors deception, and then nothing worthwhile grows on that soil afterwards. Got to the point where I distributed products only from privately held manufacturers.
I'm not necessarily blaming the Chinese. If useless bottom dollar un-inspected junk is what the marketing people order, that's what gets made. No pride in manufacture or doing a competent job required at their end here, just greed and cynicism. I was told that to my face by the Vice President of Stanly back in the 70's; but it just got worse and worse by the mid-80's onward. Sometimes the most incompetent person in whole corporation was the CEO, followed by the Marketing MBA's. I knew lots of them. There were stunning exceptions to that trend, but those were mainly in privately held corporations, and mainly European. A sober tortoise always wins the marathon over a drunken hare.
As far as nautical junks go, some of the largest ships ever known were of that design back in the Ming Dynasty. Gavin Mendez was full of horse poop when he claimed those trade barges reached the Western hemisphere; but they did travel the circuit of the Indian Ocean. A close friend of mine carefully studied Ming joinery techniques in China; but due to his advanced age, I don't know if he'll finish publishing his book about it. He was featured on a PBS Nova science special. He was actually my gallery rep at one time, but then got heavily involved in grand scale woodworking here, at least two decades for Ellison, building that giant Port Orford cedar home and its furnishing over at Woodside, as well as both his enormous wooden yachts (but not the even bigger carbon fiber yacht later). I equipped all those projects with their tools, machinery, even coatings. Last time I visited him he had just completed a little scale model of a Ming temple all floating tenon style just like the original. No nails or glue.