What has astounded me about all this is the extent to which so much of our industry fall crisply into one of two groups: 1. Chinese stuff is cheap incompetent rubbish anyway, anyone near it is by definition a loser, so who cares? 2. Chinese stuff is perfect, amazing and we should just stop doing everything and buy what they're selling. They'll totally open factories here and give us jobs too!

The actual reality, which people like your asset inspection firm are dealing with, is the Chinese have leapfrogged the west in so many important respects, but to preserve security we have to live in an expensive technological backwater since the leaders of our society are so resistant to internal disruptive competition that may result in other people displacing them.