Some tidbits and facts from being in the manufacturing field during parts of my life. As well as, living in reality and understanding how a nations economy works. Everyone wants to blame the Unions, Taxes, or wages here in the US for the lack of manufacturing. When the cold hard reality is, unlike other countries, our government failed to protect it's own economy at the cost of being a global economy. Companies manufacture in China, because china has the largest populations of any country in the world, next is India. Which means if people are making money there, there are more potential customers. But, they have to manufacture there, because China taxes the hell out of imports, while everyone else taxes imports from china at close to nothing.
The downsides to manufacturing in china are it takes longer to get things into production, due to having to train people how to make or set up the lines. Quality goes down, due to their being more willing to cut corners, and product safety has been lax as well. Working retail, I can tell ya how many toys get recalled every Christmas due to manufacturing defects or presence of lead or other bad things in the materials.
At the person who say china has such a lead on the US in being able to manufacture things. Not really. Most of their ability to manufacture was given to them or bought from US manufacturing companies, or based on our designs, or those of the USSR in the late 70s. You have to remember that we were an industrial nation, LONG before they were. One of our advantages is having ready access to Die cutters, Die Makers, and Mold makers at the front end of any manufacturing plant. These people can have machines up and ready to make parts within Hours, or a couple days at most. Rather than having to train someone to make said molds and dies, and then wait for them to perfect them. Which like they said, would slow things down.