Many Chinese restaurants can't keep their consistency as they are too flexible or ignorant in so many areas. A recipe or portion mean little to locals, ingredients are adjusted according to needs of the kitchen, cleanliness is open to translation and so on and on. Then, when one cook leaves and another comes in a restaurant, the menu items are often up to the newcomer. And then, there are the silly excuses; "the dishwasher made a mistake". This is truly what I had to hear in an upscale restaurant today, after I had specifically ordered a non-spicy dish of vegetables which clearly had some "leftovers" of chilly peppers in. I was actually told the dishwasher "did not clean the dish" (whatever that means).

So, Chinese food may be great sometimes, although how healthy it is given the way it may be handled in restaurants and produced locally prior to the arrival to kitchens is questionable. There are many restaurants in China, but there aren't as many toilets or sinks and soap to wash hands. There are many employees that run around their customers in restaurants; however, few of them know what their kitchen is able to prepare. Much of the food industry in China seems to be an underground economy.

In the end, restaurants and their workers are living examples of what China is about, since standards in other sectors or public aren't much different at all. Whether this is a complaint or reflection of how locals go about their daily businesses remains up to you.