China and India are very different indeed. We buy materials and finished goods manufactured in both locations. You can find excellent and terrible quality articles in either country, just as you can find excellent and terrible quality of both goods and services in any country. But since there is no functioning civil court system in China that anyone in a developed democracy would recognize, you have no recognize that this is a huge impediment to legal relief when something goes horribly wrong. While in practice it is ALSO hard to get legal relief from any legal system anywhere- it costs time and money and true justice is far from certain- what a functioning legal system does is to provide a threat of consequences to people who are otherwise reasonably honest but who are under the undeniable pressure of running a business. Remove that pressure pretty much entirely and you get China. India at least has the threat of a legal system.
Prohibiting procurement of goods from an entire country is totally unfair. It is just as ineffective to use a country of origin as a proxy for quality as is using a brand name for the same purpose. It is also totally impractical when one of those countries is the location in which a huge swath of the world's manufactured goods are now made. But it is done by some because they do not have the wherewithal to put the enormous effort into assuring the quality of manufactured articles at every step in their manufacture, and they have to be seen to be doing something- anything.
What we do instead is to bear the cost of a middleman- a distributor- who has assets here we can claim against, and who does enough business in China that they can sink the effort required into qualifying mills and doing additional quality testing prior to procurement. We do get burned every once in a while, and the costs to us are greater than the value of the material which we must replace after the fact, even though the distributor replaces it free of charge. We also find that some products are just harder to manufacture with acceptable quality than others so we know where to focus our efforts. In some cases that means banning that material form entirely, or restricting it to certain suppliers for whom we have some evidence of an ability to make it right.
As to the notion of trade protectionism, private (non government) entities can discriminate on any basis they see fit, just as individuals are. They are free to take their business where they will, and to deny it to whoever they want. They can avoid purchasing from your country, or from your firm or even from you personally because they don't like you for whatever reason- even for reasons you might find completely disgusting. It is not protectionism- it is freedom. You can only hope that other people, who understand that arbitrary discrimination is bad for business, will out-compete them and put them out of business.
