I'm less bothered about where a specific item is manufactured but more bothered about it's quality or ability to do the job it's designed for.
I would say that, I deal with the far east heavily.
But I do like to support small local business with traditional customer services values. That's not quite the same as buying British.
Rainsco made some good points. I've spent a fair amount of time in China over the last few years, I used to visit a particular factory o n the outskirts of Shanghai, not far from the F1 circuit. The firm next door was ZF gearboxes, next door to that was Seimens and so it went on. The stuff is made in china, assembled into two or three large modular sections, shipped to Germany where it's all bolted together where it then earns "made in Germany" as it was put together there.
Actually if you ever go to China you'll realise just how big VW is out there - all built there.
China is the world factory now.
"Made in China" used to mean cheap low cost tat. If you don't do your homework properly there's still plenty of that available. But once you find a decent firm out there you open a door to a lot of their trading partners. It's then really easy to get a quality product out there.
Pretty much every computer or phone used to view this forum will be Chinese built. Along with the servers, the routers and highly likely the cables transmitting everything.
We can't compete here, the wages and overheads would be prohibitive, we have become a service based economy apart from very advanced technology that is yet to be mastered in the far east. Plus an arms industry that is worth circa £1 Billion a year in exports. We are the 6th largest exporter of weapons on the planet.