The few I have looked at, Chinese, have had very poor build quality, cheap fasteners, poor casting, general pot metal
i agree with this for the most part however i have got very good quality bolts off cheap chinese bikes. Alot of 6mm bolts. So basically the bikes can be good for robbing bolts off of but otherwise suck.
Put it this way, I would rather have any year Honda ch-80 with 10k or more on it that a brand new Tao-Tao.
Tao-Tao is the prime example of garbage... there has yet to of been a Tao-Tao worth buying. Complete garbage. Now Kymco would probably be worth riding if bought for a cheap price.
There was a thread a while back where someone listed some of the better quality Chinese brands, but they use mostly the same engines..
So alot of the engines are copies however it does matter which Chinese company builds the motor. Lifan actually puts ok decent stuff... zongshen is ok i if my memory serves right. I had a Panda (honda Z50 clone) that was really nice quality - that might have been zongshen build.