Is chinese food hard to cook well?

Real Chinese food is very labor intensive and takes a lot of skill to do it right.  Besides the actual cutting and slicing of meats and vegetables (which is a skill in itself) there is the frying or broiling, steaming and grilling that has to be timed exactly.  Then there is also the need for some specialized equipment.  I'm not talking about American Chinese food.  I had a Chinese partner for a while and his family ate out for almost all their meals because the mother refused to cook.  The kitchen in that house was pristine.  I should add that ingredients are often hard to find especially the herbs and spices outside of Chinatown.

Chinese cuisine is not at all hard to cook, but it is outlandish to most cooks with a European tradition (or American: the Americas mostly cook in a European style!) and I guess most Chinese cooks would not find it particulary easy to adapt to the European styles of cuisine as well. It's a matter of training and habit.

Chinese fods can be qite simple , and some recipes are quite stringent. Fish head soup at face value apears simple , just fish heads gren onion and mung bean spouts , untill you look at the fact the fish is air dried with out the use of salt . A bow if noodles like famen , seems simple till you see the noodles are hand made with out the use of modern convenience.

Just to set the record straight,most ofthe food served in Chinese resturants does originate in China, but was the food of royalty not the common folk a very smal portion of the population could affird to eat in such manner . Fact is even today many people in china have no way to store fresh meats and produce and tend to  gather and fish/havest daily . To butcher a pig is reserved for special occasion that everyone in the village participates otherwise the meat goes to waste .

With a shout out to Citizen, American Chinese food is not difficult. However, I believe your question is about Chinese Chinese food, which can be quite difficult, depending on the starting ingredients. 

Chinese food is different from the American kind as Meat is used as a flavoring, rather than the main ingredient. So often it is highly spiced. So it concentrates more on vegetables and rice.  

The actual Cooking of it is not all that much more difficult, assuming the braising, frying, etc., but the prep work for some ingredients, like seaweed, eel, some types of fish, are more difficult. 

Here's what I learned from seeing someone's spilled chicken and broccoli. They can make something so complex because they have 7 guys. Learning to deep fry chunks of breast is easy enough. So is making a sauce and applying it right. So is steaming broccoli. But you can't do all that in one sitting. Well, not without making that a 5 hour sitting. So yes, it is not easy for one person to make Chinese American style food at home, even if they are proficient. It takes six masterful chefs to make 6 masterful things and someone's job is to plop it all onto a plate. 

It's simply a fractal incarnation of the $1400 cheeseburger, that is, an experiment someone did to show when you start raising cows and growing grain for yourself, it costs $1400 for one cheeseburger. Involve the whole food supply chain and they are giving away their too much stuff for you to assemble a burger at home in 20 mins for $3.

American style chinese food is completely not what the people in China eat. If u are asking if American Chinese food like the kind Americans get at Chinese restaurants in the US(yes, the Chinese people preparing our food in the US know it is not what they eat in their native country), is hard to cook? Not at all. Its really quite simple. You cant screw it up unless u run off during the cooking process and leave it to burn in your wok. You can even use frozen veggies and have things turn out tasty. If you arent a good cook and want to make people think u can really throw down in the kitchen, follow a shrimp fried rice, General Tso's Chicken, or crispy garlic and green onion chicken wings or any stir fry with veggies like snow peas and bamboo shoots and people will be in love with your cooking!  Give it a shot! Its fun to cook.