No more China guitars for me. I have a few, but I don't play them as much as my American ones. It's not a quality thing. They have gotten pretty good over the years. I just don't like that China will steal intellectual property and start making knockoffs at a cheaper rate. Maybe the tariff thing will make PRS SE move to S. Korea?
But you shouldn't stop at guitars. Take a look around your home and/or workplace. How much stuff was made in China?
I can (generally) afford to buy US-made PRS guitars, so I do, but I would never advise someone to not buy a guitar that they could afford, especially if it was the only guitar they could afford, if it was made in China. But, I would suggest, if there were alternatives of the same quality that were made in some other country that is perhaps seen in better light, maybe look at those. Some US guitar brands make their cheaper lines in Mexico, and perhaps some of those models are "good enough" for many players on a budget.
I am not aware of any useful-quality guitars made in the USA (with almost all components also US-made) for under $1400 retail price, acoustic or electric. I poked around the GC website using their filters, and unfortunately selecting "Country of Origin" as USA still gives tons of results for imports.
The "Fender American Performer" strat seems to be the cheapest US-made guitar I could find.
Maybe there are some, but they might be few and far between. And that makes sense - making a guitar takes more than a few hours of cheap labor. I can't find any hard data on what it takes to build a "production non-interesting guitar" (e.g. a Fender strat, solid color). But I found some info about PRS's Maryland factory: 350 employees make 115 guitars a day, at least in 2022-ish.
115 / 8 = 14-ish guitars per hour. That's across all lines.
That's 25 hrs of "labor" (whether direct touch labor to the product or supporting functions) per guitar. Maybe that's 30 hrs for a carved maple-capped figured top, and 20 hrs for a solid-body "slab" like the silver sky/NF 53? The simpler bolt-on solid finish models will obviously be easier to make, and would use cheaper (non-figured) wood.
That means the raw labor cost, with some typical overheads and G&A applied, would be at least $1000, $1500 for the figured core. Now add materials, distribution, and retail markup. And profit.
If you do that overseas, you can cut the labor cost by 2/3 or more, and by using simpler processes for the "carved top" and applying a veneer, and cheaper electronics, you can probably cut the price of the whole instrument to 25% of a US-made equivalent core. And that's why SEs are about 25% of the price of the equivalent core.
If PRS has to move their Chinese built SE models to S Korea, expect a price jump of at least 30%, and that's before any applicable tariffs (currently 10% as I type this, but I haven't checked the new in the last hour...), and of course massive production delays as they ramp up new capacity.
If you want it moved to the US, prices will rise to the level of an S2, because that's what it will be at that point. So PRS would just shut down the SE line.
