I'm not familiar with Federal, so I just did a little Googling.
Federal Tires is actually a Taiwanese company, not Chinese.
According to the
Wikipedia page , and the company's website, they have two factories. One is in Taiwan and one in China.
Federal doesn't seem to have wide distribution, though. I checked the
dealer locator and 3 of the 4 states I've lived in have no distributors.
Personally, I don't mind Taiwanese products. I find they're generally higher quality than Chinese products, sometimes significantly higher quality. Plus, there are other political reasons to purchase Taiwanese products instead of Chinese, but I won't get into that here.
I personally won't buy Chinese tires, but that's just me. If the tires I was looking at were Taiwanese Federal Tires, I would consider them. If they were Chinese, I would pass. Again, just my opinion.
But, since Federal is so small, I don't know if CR, Tire Rack or any other websites have reliable testing and customer reviews on them. They could still have outdated tread designs or other things that keep them from performing as well as other brands. But, even the big tire companies produce some tires that perform very poorly, so who knows.