i have no clue about fake watches factories, but do not underestimate what asian are able to achieve in term of QC when they really want it, when the client is paying the price of a good QC they can be over any European standards, even though like you say they are working in a shiny place. Only problem most of European company moving to Asia are moving to reduce costs, and so in the same time they also reduce quality control.
for my business, I visited several manufacturing companies in Taiwan and china, and trust me plenty of them are able to be in line at least with a German quality std.
For your information, unfortunately iso certified doesn't mean anything when we talk about the quality of a product unlike many are thinking. TUv for example certifies the methods and the rules are respected to build the product and of course that there is a "certain"* consistency in the production.
* in short if the product is shit you have the guarranty** to get a full batch of shit, BUT well documented.
** in reality plenty of Southern European companies are good to document plenty of QC and tests to match their certification while in reality they still have inconsistent production tolerances.
to give you an example i was working some years ago for an iso certified italian company very well rated by TUV, we were absolutely not able to maintain anodization color quality and stability from batch to batch and also within the same batch ....
You're talking absolute rubbish.
You visit manufacturing places in China congrats. I assume you're not trying to make illegal goods?
These guys are. They work in small batch factories where each factory makes a small component and is then sent onto an assembly "factory". Factory in this case could be a small back room. Things change in this world, things are not stable. It is illegal, raids happen. Machines get seized... workers get imprisoned.
You're comparing the legal world of stability, with the unpredictability of the illegal counterfeit goods world.
They might have 1-2 workers whom are very skilled at making the right case for example. The authorities raid them, and boom 2 workers are locked up and taken away from that business for x time. They have to retrain workers, maybe the quality goes down as a result, maybe it increases. Who knows.
The point is, this isn't a legitimate operation. You cannot hold them to the same standards.
People like to talk shit and say "her der, the factory v2 is worse than v1 on purpose, so we'll buy v3" Truth is, it's more likely that they've had a supply issue on one area of the components. And rather than not push a product to market, they make do with the subpar component.
This is organised crime, not legitimate factories. Stop kidding yourself.