For many years, almost all sewing machines were made in Japan. I like to use cars as an example when selling our machines. Sewing machines made in Japan are like their cars- they just run and run and run. I am sure you will agree if you own a Japanese car. Most sewing machine companys started moving their factorys to China about 15 years ago. This trend covers just about every single product made in the world today- you can not escape the fact that just about anything is now made in China- get used to it. In the beginning, quality was quite poor. Very cheap labor, crude manufacturing and inferior materials were the main reasons why their products were poor. In 1992 we bought a pallet of sewing machine motors from China at a very low price- i thought it was a no brainer. We opened the boxes and noticed that the paint was chipping off. We tested the motors in our shop and they seemed to be ok so we started putting them on the machines we sold. These motors started going bad one by one. I had a lot of angry customers telling me that i sold them junk- they were correct! We have seen quality in China made sewing machines get much better over the last 10 years. We have been using a China made motor called Stitchline on our machines for the last 9 years- it is rare when one goes bad. It is important to understand that there is different levels of quality with new sewing machines made in China. We can buy new machines with A,B or C quality. Example A for $300, B for $275 and C for $200. We will only sell A quality machines-after all, it is our reputation. We watch many others list and sell a lot of C quality machines at very low prices. Remember, you usually get what you pay for. In my opinion, Japanese machines are still made better than Chinese made machines but the Chinese machines are catching up. For those of you that are old enough to remember, Japanese cars were considered to be junk compared to USA cars- it did not take them long to catch up and pass us in quality