The out-of-the-box reliability has been a little spotty on some of those Chinese '87s. If I was looking to buy one, I'd go to Coyote Cap's web site. He's the guy that went to China (several times) in order to get the gun into production. He knows them inside and out, and he can get them to work their best.
The flaws that I've seen with production guns have been failures to feed from the magazine, usually a second or third energetic rack of the lever gets things working again. When they have been slicked up and made reliable, they are some very nice, fast-shooting shotguns. The action is built like a tank, too, and proofed to something like 40,000 cup. I'm not for a second suggesting that you load your shotgun shells up to those pressures, it's just nice to know the gun has a big safety margin.
