Anyone surprised by this?
To be completely honest, no it doesn't surprise me at all.
Have you ever ordered anything straight from China? I'm not saying, bought anything from from a store in (your home country) that was fabbed in China. I'm saying have you had anything that is custom made in china, strictly for you.
I have, stuff for my fuel injection performance shop. The failure rate is extremely high on anything that isn't tested before it leaves the factory, and still too high for stuff that does pass the scam they call inspection/testing.. It almost put my shop out of business before I gave up and started having my stuff fabbed locally at about 8x the cost.
If you ain't apple, and driving people to jump off the building to commit suicide in order to get good parts, you do not get them.
ordering from china is a pain in the a**. well in the most cases and espescially when you re getting stuff manufactured there... from my point of view the most legit and reliable chinese vendors/manufacturers for mining-HW have been bitmaintech and gridseed (esp. their resellers). and i totally agree to your statement,.. so i wouldn't trust any european/us resellers which can't proof inventory with mining-HW or claiming your hardware is being shipped from china...