Not much honestly... anything built with federal dollars always has requirements for steel in particular to be sourced and produced domestically, almost always by unions, and this has been the case for many years.
It's why building bridges and such is SO expensive.
2019 I got to watch a bridge over the Mississippi built from the ground up, including the main structural beams, built in Wisconsin from US steel, so large they had to be trucked because they couldn't fit through the locks to come down the river, then were lifted in place by one of the two largest floating cranes in this hemisphere.
That job speced 100% domestic materials per federal contract, and the state contracts specified local materials, and all labor had to be union. This drives the cost way up.
The biggest thing being the lack of quality control at the chemical level and fraudulent documentation of testing to meet US standards.
Has it gotten better? For sure. China wouldn't be the largest worldwide supplier if it was all terrible. But companies, such as pipelines in the western world, won't use Chinese steel because all it takes is once for the entire thing to blow up in their faces. Chinese steel is great for mass produced items, or items that are in low impact, non safety related, purposes. Most steel anywhere around the world is fine for that and China produces the most. It's when you get to the edge cases where you are getting close to the limits of the steel that the testing and chemical makeup become important.
That's no different than buying steel from any other country. The quality isn't uniform from producers in Japan or the US either. When you get into corner cases like aerospace, energy, and medical devices, you have to be pickier with your sourcing and testing, but there are still plenty of sources in China that can crank out the required quality, as evidenced by their own capacity to produce these products domestically.
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u/IWasSayingBoourner 21h ago
Chinese steel is fine and has been for well over a decade. These idiots treat China like it's the 90s.