Frank,
You are correct about the new Chinese glass. There is plenty of well made glass etc., coming from China these days. They have no environmental protection laws, the labor force is cheap, (some is free, forced prison labor) no worker benefits, and no on the job safety laws enacted, so the cost of production leaves a lot of headroom for inexpensively producing something of high quality that can't be made elsewhere, because of restrictions and costs. One of these days we're going to run out of this type of resource on earth and will have to look for some weaker than us aliens on another planet to make good things cheaply for us :-) --- Mike