When I was a young guy, I reconditioned fixtures to finish grind the root of turbine blades (a sort of Christmas tree shape) for General Electric. I had to hold a 0.0005" tolerance on fixtures that were 3-4 feet across. Only three thousandths total runout was allowed in the final assembly.
The blades and vanes themselves are like works of art, and the investment casting process leaves the internal passages incredibly slick. If you look along the trailing edge, you will see a row of 0.012" holes EDM burned to connect to those internal cooling passages.
That's just one component in an extremely complex assembly, and it is amazing all by itself.
Ok, this is very interesting. I have some questions:
1. You repeatedly say that China has “failed” but then proceed to say that they’re about a decade behind. You also point out that the iteration cycle for jet engines is much slower than the cycle for other industries, like EVs. So is China’s current status really “failure” or just part of the expected slow catch-up progress you’d expect in a long-cycle industry?
2. You mention that China has other opportunities they’re risking, and give examples that Western capital is investing in. The two you give are supersonic commercial airliners and autonomous planes/drones. But supersonic commercial airliners don’t seem like an obvious winning bet: given fuel requirements (baked into the physics) they’re a very commercially risky bet, and there’s not much technology can do to change that. Drones are different; but from what I understand, China is not underinvesting there. If anything, Anduril exists as a response to China’s dominance in drones, batteries and other parts of the low-cost military tech stack. Maybe these just aren’t the best examples, but it feels like Western capital is not winning in this area, we’re playing catch up because our big defense contractors were less efficient than state planning by a communist country!
3. This is really the big one I’m curious about: what happens when/if China succeeds at building excellent, commercially-viable jet engines that are cost- and feature-competitive with those built in the West? Specifically, what happens to the Western companies that compete in this area? It seems like they will immediately lose a big Chinese market, not to mention maintenance revenue. Then they’re likely to lose big parts of the non-Western world. For an industry that’s already operating on small margins, can those industries continue to exist (absent direct industrial policy interventions by Western governments?) Does the Western jet engine industry become financially unsustainable? Most critically: does this strategy potentially weaken the West’s ability to dominate this market and also (through that) in some ways limit the West’s military capacity? That seems like it would be more relevant than “ideology” as a reason China might want to pursue this strategy.
1. Failed is perhaps too strong a word, yeah. I don't think they've failed - they're further than every other country trying to launch their own jet engine program. But they are in a very long catch-up process in a very difficult industry, and they haven't produced asymmetric progress. By Chinese standards, they are failing.
2. Agreed that Boom/Hermeus are unlikely bets that probably will fail. I think there's potentially some interesting IP that can come out of either, but the actual task of building a commercial airframe and a custom engine are nation-state level accomplishments, not VC-funded startups. I think the interesting thing there is rather the capital infrastructure to make long-term, high-risk bets, and the potential spillover effect of the progress they make. I think companies like Boom are there almost primarily to generate demos and proof-of-concepts, so that something potentially viable can be picked up by a company that can scale it.
I personally think that commercial jet engines are a massive time-sink for low ROI, and China would be better off making an array of low-probability bets to find something that can leapfrog the turbofan, redefine the market, and use their advantages in scale and capital. This is how the won so thoroughly in EVs.
3. On Anduril, though, I think the calculus is different. They aren't building the low-end drones for swarming - they're building high-end unmanned tech. Their products aren't particularly cheap, and they're in an entirely new category. It's not clear if the current iterations are what the future needs either. I think Anduril and the like are the DoD's attempt to seed a new generation of defense contractors to succeed the Lockheed/Northrop/RTX model.
I also don't think our defense-industrial complex is failing. Much is made of Chinese quantity, and there is something to it, but high-tech weaponry has asymmetrically higher impact. Also, the US has prepared for drone swarms and missile clouds and so on, and they will continue to. It was fairly natural for the military manufacturing capacity to decline post-Cold War - they had the same budget pressures we do, and cutting defense in peacetime is the best option. It's being rebuilt now, on not-unreasonable timelines. There's also much to be said about training and experience and doctrine, which matters a lot in war, and in which the US is unmatched.
4. I just don't see China entering the commercial market for a very long time. There are so many obstacles to entering, then scaling, then remaining on the cutting edge. I also think you're neglecting the network of trained maintenance personnel and distributed facilities. China will have to build these up all over the world to make it viable for airlines to rely on their tech. For all this, they need to be considerably better than the West, not just at-parity. I think that's a very large ask. We can see how viable this is over the next 5-10 years.
But let's assume that China is determined to be a player in this industry, and they're willing to expend the necessary (state) capital to make this happen. Moreover, they're willing to use the biggest tool at their disposal, which is at some point in the future, to ban/discourage the use of Western jet engines and to mandate that domestic carriers must use primarily domestic engines. (Perhaps not immediately, but sometime in the 2030s when their engines are mature enough to be a viable, if slightly substandard, replacement.)
What then happens to the Western manufacturers who build jet engines?
I asked ChatGPT and the answer is: it's pretty damn bad. If *only* China disappears as a market for Western manufacturers, then in the 2030s and particularly the 2040s, the Western manufacturers survive, but are badly hurt. They not only lose engine sales, but also the future maintenance business where they make their real money. But this assumes that China intends only to supply its own carriers within China, and has zero export sales. If they also come up with a viable product that they can export, then things go from "terrible" to "existential" for the Western manufacturers. There's a real possibility that some will not be financially viable anymore. And who knows what follow-on effects this has on Western military capability.
So if I'm China and I'm capable of planning on multi-decade scales, this would be pretty damn attractive to me. You insulate yourself from the loss of Western products, and also (at some point in the 2040s) might have the option to dominate the manufacture of these critical technologies, the same way they dominated EVs and batteries and solar modules.
I'm not following the logic here. Losing the China market isn't a huge deal, as most airline demand is outside of China. The other growing air travel markets -India, SEA, West Africa - are all on the Western ecosystem.
In the other case, you're basically asking "what if China solves a massive engineering problem, producing at-parity engines at lower cost?" Obviously this scenario is bad for the West, and it's definitely the ideal outcome China wants. I just don't think this is realistic. What evidence do we have that this is feasible? All I see is overhyping based on China's previous (quite impressive, mind) success in very different technologies.
"Losing the China market isn't a huge deal, as most airline demand is outside of China"
China represents about 16-18% of the global jet turbine market today, and that number will probably increase to 20-21% in the next two decades. They're the biggest single consumer of jet engines, and the largest projected growth markets.
There are basically four major turbofan manufacturers in an industry with tight margins; pulling nearly 1/4 of the revenue out of that system will produce consolidation. Even though the actual revenue loss will take years to be felt, the valuation of these companies changes the minute it becomes obvious that China is going to make this move. China is their biggest growth market, and without that their future trajectory changes. That can also have downstream effects on their cost of capital.
"I just don't think this is realistic. What evidence do we have that this is feasible?"
We know that China is rapidly gaining experience in advanced materials science across a range of domains, they have the world's largest demand for power turbines, they have the largest supplies of elements like Rhenium (which they now strictly export-control). More critically, they've made it clear that they'll pursue this goal at any cost. Basically I would flip the question around as follows:
Given that we know China has the motivation, the resources, and the skills, *and* they're making slow but steady progress, what evidence do we have that they won't reach near-parity within 15 years?
This entire article is about the various headwinds that make the West's lead in commercial turbofans very hard to contest. Which part of that do you disagree with? You've posed the exact question I set out to answer.
As for expansion: the C919 has a path to domestic success, and the Chinese government can force it to use domestic CJ-1000A's once those are viable. But the export market is a very different equation. The path to EU/US certification is long. And then you need airlines to actively diversify their fleet by buying from a new carrier, involving training a new set of mechanics and engineers. China needs to establish maintenance facilities all around the world as well. They'll also need to prove reliability over the long-term to build the same faith airlines have in the Boeing / Airbus duopoly. Also, the C919 is very far from "indigenized:" it imports most of its components, including the engine. China is a ways off from building all of these internally.
These are all very difficult constraints. I think the mostly likely outcome is the C919 growing domestically but not internationally, and then internationally, starting in smaller African state carriers that are cost sensitive and the beneficiaries of China's Belt and Road investments. These are likely the same countries that bought Soviet airliners. From there, maybe we'll see SEA for non-Western flights. This is the optimistic case for where we are in 2045.
Estimated world mine production in 2024 was about 62,000 kilograms, with Chile producing 29,000 kg, the U.S. 9,500 kg, Poland 9,400 kg, China 5,300 kg, and Uzbekistan 5,000 kg, a distribution that underscores how little of the periodic table's third-highest-melting-point metal actually reaches market each year.
The article was great. It convinced me that China has a lot of challenges ahead of it, and they're about ten years behind. It convinced me that there's some risk to the path ahead of them. It did not convince me that they won't succeed. I've been doing a bit of (Internet) research since I read it, to try to understand what the actual technical barriers are and what the trajectory looks like.
So far as I can tell, there are no fundamental technical barriers. China is doing just about everything right. They have all the resources they need, excellent manufacturing stacks, skilled people, a well-supported program with long-term government backing, a captive domestic market to consume the engines they produce (and help drive the learning curve even harder). The problem itself may be fundamentally time consuming to get right, but there's no magical barrier that prevents China from getting there if they want it bad enough. The question is whether it's worth the investment of time and money. But China has already demonstrated that they're willing to allocate the time and money, so it's likely that they'll succeed.
And so the main question I'm trying to untangle from your article is your conclusion. Specifically: is China being stupid? Are they pursuing a bad bet here, mis-allocating capital because of ideology? Or are they instead pursuing a time-consuming, high-risk and massive-reward bet that will ultimately give them a huge commercial and military advantage, and leave the West materially less capable of competing in a critical field of advanced technology? To answer that, I'm suggesting you have to think about more than the short-term return on capital. I am concerned that China is making a smart, rational evaluation -- just using different parameters, and on a longer time horizon than we're used to thinking about here in the West. And that eventually we (or our kids) will regret that our society didn't plan things on those same time horizons.
ETA: To put a slightly finer point on this: China seems to have taken the lesson that if it simply approaches industrial planning on a timeline that is longer than the timelines used by Western capital allocators, it can essentially bankrupt competing Western industry in specific areas and then dominate those industries. It's successfully done this in several industries and seems to be in the process of doing it with cars. But turbofans are much more significant than cars; if China is able to repeat this trick and gut the Western turbofan manufacturers, the implications are very significant going forward.
PPS The danger with Internet research is that sometimes you get wrong answers: Rhenium came from Google's AI answer, which sucks.
Why would Boeing and airbus switch to Chinese engines if they are only on par with the western engines? Do they also not want to be beholden to a non-western country. Moreover, one needs a significant reason to add another engine supplier and it’s hard to believe Chinese jet engines in the 2030’a would offer much cost savings since there labor costs are rising fast.
The issue capitalism raises here is China spends massive state sponsored sums of capital, builds a competitive offering then to recapture ROI exports those engines and planes and takes market share.
How exactly would a bolt from the blue with a prepositioned drone swarm occur without being detected by the US? Could you spell out the details here? China . . . builds drones that can swim underwater in the Pacific before rising and attacking by air? Somehow manages to disperse a ton of drones to the US without detection by US intelligence?
So small drones (that can't carry more than a tiny amount of explosives) will all simultaneously hit our military planes and . . . that would knock out all our planes? Are our planes that fragile?
Are they made of balsa wood or something?
And so many would be launched without being detected?
Evidently you also have extremely little confidence in our SIGINT.
Not to mention that there is pretty much no way the PRC can prepare to launch an actual war without our intelligence picking up on it.
Well, Western airplane manufacturers (Airbus and Boeing) just won't use Chinese engines. So China would have to deliver a commercially viable plane. But according to the author, they are nowhere close to meeting the safety standards of the US and EU. And considering that people value their lives, how many people would be willing to risk riding on an airline flying a Chinese airplane if they have alternatives?
China has as much as 18% of the global airline market. So assuming they export zero planes they will still be the largest market in the world, and the one with the most expected growth. I can’t speak to the airframe issues, but this does not seem like a permanent condition. They’re not switching to domestic airframes or turbines tomorrow.
The engines for narrow body (CJ-1000A) have 6000+hrs ground and flight testing, expecting to get certificate of complains very soon. Equivalent to Leap-1c on performance with 2-7% lower fuel consumption, production expected to start in 2027.
The wide body variant (CJ-2000) has demonstrated 35.2Tonne thrust at high altitude and expects production 2030-2032
Excellent piece. I would only add that China’s progress should not be judged only through the CJ-1000A as a single commercial turbofan program.
The broader question is whether China’s “two engines” industrial base is taking shape. Aero engines and heavy-duty gas turbines share a large technical substrate: superalloys, single-crystal blades, turbine disks, combustors, thermal barrier coatings, control systems, full-engine testing, and long-run operating data.
That is why China’s recent heavy gas turbine commercialization matters. It suggests the learning process is moving beyond papers, prototypes, and isolated demonstrations into real operating environments where process knowledge, reliability data, and supplier ecosystems can accumulate.
This does not mean China has already caught GE, Safran, Rolls-Royce, or Pratt & Whitney in commercial turbofans. It means the right unit of analysis may be larger than the CJ-1000A alone: the formation of a broader turbine-engine industrial system.
This is great, and I say that as a semiconductor guy with a military background.
What China seems to consistently misunderstand is that jet engines, like semiconductors, are not just engineering problems. They are equal parts art, science, process discipline, institutional memory, and decades of painful trial and error. There are no shortcuts.
By my estimation, the Chinese semiconductor industry is still several generations behind the leaders. The CCP loves to brag about “breakthroughs,” but the hard part is not producing a one-off lab result or a press-release miracle. The hard part is turning that into a repeatable, high-yield manufacturing process at scale.
That is where the magic is. Or, more accurately, where the blood, sweat, ruined wafers, and decades of engineering discipline are.
Older semiconductor technology is perfectly fine for many weapons systems, industrial applications, and basic electronics. But it does not get you where you need to be for advanced data centers, AI, intelligence analysis, or cutting-edge compute. For that world, “good enough” is not good enough.
China can absolutely make progress. But pretending it can skip the generations of accumulated know-how that built the modern semiconductor and jet-engine industries is not strategy. It is propaganda with a spreadsheet.
Also called know how. I wonder how many other industries or subsectors are dependent on this kind of highly specialised accumulated knowledge rendering them “China resilient” so to speak. Also great article btw.
All excellent points and I can second you on the state of Chinese semiconductors. Most laymen get carried away with the Chinese propaganda about their superiority and inevitability. Their “superiority” involves a lot of stealing, lack of business ethics and unfair practices.
You can not imaginehow long I have sought the answer to this question, especially after I learned the question itself is specifically a Xi Jinping obsession.
I think this article is a good example of what happens when somebody learns the conventional story about Chinese engines and then stops updating their priors around 2012. The entire piece is built around a version of the Chinese propulsion story that is increasingly disconnected from where the technical discussion actually is. If you spend time reading materials papers, institute publications, AECC disclosures, conference proceedings and even the better-informed enthusiast discussions, the striking thing is not how often people are still debating whether China can build advanced turbine hardware. The striking thing is how rarely anyone close to the field still debates that question at all. The debate has moved on. The author hasn't.
The article treats jet engines as some uniquely unconquered bastion of tacit Western knowledge and then spends surprisingly little time engaging with the actual technical breadcrumbs that have emerged over the last decade. It's as if DD6 never happened. It's as if DD9 and DD10 don't exist. It's as if the entire discussion around third-generation Chinese SX alloys never occurred. It's as if WS-15 entering service is irrelevant. The author appears fascinated by the historical difficulty of engines while showing remarkably little curiosity about whether the underlying technical bottlenecks have actually been overcome.
The strange thing is that the article correctly identifies where the difficult part of the problem lives and then seems unwilling to follow the implications. Yes, turbine engines are difficult because of the hot section. Exactly. The entire challenge was the hot section. Single-crystal growth. Dendritic segregation control. Directional solidification. Cooling passage manufacture. Thermal barrier coatings. Creep resistance at extreme temperatures. Oxidation resistance. Phase stability in heavily alloyed systems. TCP suppression. Those were the mountains. Those were the technologies that separated the United States from everybody else. If China had failed there, the author's argument would be compelling.
The problem is that the evidence increasingly points the other way.
DD6 alone should have forced a reassessment years ago. DD6 isn't some curiosity. It's a mature indigenous second-generation SX alloy produced by a country that was supposedly incapable of mastering turbine metallurgy. In broad technological terms DD6 belongs in the same family as CMSX-4, PWA1484 and René N5. That's the metallurgy generation associated with engines like the F119. Nobody writing seriously about propulsion would dismiss F119-era metallurgy as unsophisticated. Yet somehow when China achieves an analogous metallurgical generation it gets described as evidence of failure.
What's even stranger is the lack of engagement with DD9 and DD10. This is where the article really starts to look dated. If DD6 was China's second-generation SX moment, DD9/DD10 appear to be China's move into the third-generation Re-bearing world. Higher temperature capability. Better creep resistance. Greater high-temperature strength retention. Improved phase stability. More thermal margin available to engine designers. In other words, exactly the sort of progression one would expect from a country climbing the same turbine-metallurgy ladder that Pratt, GE and Rolls-Royce climbed decades earlier.
This is the point where I think the article completely loses the plot. Once you're discussing DD9/DD10-class systems, you're no longer debating whether China has entered the modern turbine age. You're debating how much maturity remains between Chinese third-generation SX production and Western third-generation SX production. That's a radically different question. The article acts as though China is still trying to reach the starting line when in reality the argument is increasingly about where on the track it sits.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that the author repeatedly invokes tacit knowledge almost as a mystical explanation. Tacit knowledge matters. Manufacturing experience matters. Process control matters. Nobody disputes that. The problem is that tacit knowledge is not a static asset. It accumulates through production. Pratt accumulated it by building engines. GE accumulated it by building engines. Rolls accumulated it by building engines. China is now building engines. Lots of them. Every WS-15 produced generates data. Every blade failure generates data. Every coating failure generates data. Every overhaul generates data. Every rejected casting generates data. Tacit knowledge isn't an inheritance. It's a process.
The article also fails to distinguish adequately between military and commercial propulsion. That's a major mistake. The military problem is fundamentally a hot-section problem. The commercial problem is a hot-section problem plus certification, maintenance economics, service life, fleet support and thousands upon thousands of operational hours. Historically countries solve the military problem first because that's where the hardest science lives. Once you can produce a competitive military hot section, the commercial challenge becomes one of industrialisation and refinement. Difficult? Absolutely. But it's a different category of difficulty.
What I find most unconvincing is the implicit assumption that China has somehow reached the exact point where its progress will stop. We're expected to believe that China mastered SX growth, mastered advanced superalloys, mastered blade casting, mastered coatings, mastered cooled turbine hardware, built a huge propulsion research ecosystem, established indigenous fighter-engine production, fielded WS-15, developed third-generation SX systems and then will somehow spend the next thirty years failing to improve manufacturing maturity. That's an extraordinary claim. The burden of proof should be on the people making it.
And the future trajectory is arguably even more important than the current state. The article barely grapples with what comes after DD9/DD10. DD22 matters because it suggests Chinese planners already regard third-generation systems as normal. Countries that are still struggling with third-generation metallurgy don't spend their time preparing fourth-generation metallurgy. The DD6 → DD9/DD10 → DD22 progression looks exactly like what you would expect from a mature propulsion ecosystem. Second-generation production base. Third-generation production standard. Fourth-generation successor already moving through the pipeline.
In fact, I think there's a serious possibility that meaningful production deployment of fourth-generation Chinese SX systems arrives before equivalent Western deployments become widespread. Not because the United States lacks the science. The United States almost certainly retains extraordinary capability at the frontier. The issue is industrial momentum. The American aerospace sector increasingly finds itself dividing resources across F-35 modernization, B-21 procurement, NGAD uncertainty, naval recapitalization, nuclear modernization and the sustainment burden of a massive legacy force. China is in a very different phase. It is still expanding. Still building. Still scaling. Still increasing fighter output. Still increasing engine output. Still increasing materials-science capacity.
The irony is that the article is strongest when discussing why jet engines were historically difficult and weakest when discussing where the technology is actually going. It reads like someone who learned the lesson of the 1990s and never checked whether the facts changed. The lesson of the 1990s was that China could not build the hot section of a modern fighter engine. The lesson of the 2020s may well be that it can. Once you accept that possibility, the entire argument changes. The debate is no longer about whether China can build advanced engines. The debate becomes how quickly an industrial system with enormous manufacturing depth can close the remaining maturity gap after the core materials-science problem has already been solved. That is a much less comfortable debate for the West than the one the article is trying to have.
How do you account, then, for their lead in hypersonics and rotating destination engines? Their lead in 6th Gen fighters? Maneuverable re-entry vehicles?
You seem to be caught in an us-versus-them attitude. This zero-sum-thinking is 20th century.
Chinese industry does not attempt to produce everything themselves, this would not be competitive. They try to cooperate everywhere, but sanctions force them to build alternatives.
Aerospace engineering content on Substack has been growing quite a bit, covering topics from aircraft design and propulsion to space industry insights and career discussions.
Aerospace engineers typically work across aerodynamics, structures, materials, systems design, testing, and performance optimization — so the field is much broader than just designing aircraft.
I recently came across Hydrasearch, which gives a simple breakdown of what aerospace engineers do in real-world roles, which helps connect a lot of these topics together: https://hydrasearch.com/what-do-aerospace-engineers-do/
Substack is becoming a solid place to follow deeper technical writing if you’re interested in aviation and aerospace beyond surface-level news.
Cool. I also think there is cycles in these things. Chinese industry leaders are the best in the world right now, with the likes of Elon Musk being the anonymous norm rather than the celebrity exception. But within 10-20 years they will be replaced by fearful incompetent brownnoses, managing a declining parasitic rent - like your typical western CEO today.
The failure mode will probably be different there. Here it's plutocracy, the rich have bought the politicians to remove competition. There it's probably going to be the reverse: political power will diffuse nepotically to economic power. Once that membrane gives, political power will bend the rules of competition to protect the incompetent.
The mandarins taking over private business seems to be the stasis mode there, occasionally disrupted by invasions from the steppes, or from the ocean in its latest iteration.
“America is now developing its sixth-generation fighter aircraft, and has two engine prototypes designed around adaptive cycling, where the turbofan ratio changes for efficiency in both high-thrust usage and long-range cruise. This is slated for 2028. China, on the other hand, hasn’t started development yet on its equivalent, and with its WS-19 issues, probably will not until the mid-2030s.”
It's actually the reverse. China has a working prototype they've been actively testing since the end of 2025. Meanwhile their American counterparts have just finished the developmental stage of their engine and are readying a prototype model to actually be built in the next few years.
Chinese models have more or less caught up with the U.S. frontier labs in overall capability and functionality. The frontier labs have a small lead, but the difference is negligle at this point. The rest of your article is sound, but the Chinese have a history of overcoming technical and engineering hurdles to indiginize their supply of critical technology.
Their space program, most notably their space station, is a great example of China doing exactly what this article articulates they can't or are unable to do: create their own incredibly complex technology once pioneered by the west.
Wishful thinking. Yes, it takes longer for China to catch up, so what? The article says they are 10 years behind, well that's not a lot actually. Most airplanes are 30 years old, so what is the efficiency difference 10% or 30% for this 10 year gap? I would suspect somewhere in between, or maybe less. The next question is, how much cheaper will the overall chinese plane be, at let's say 25% less efficient; will it be 10% cheaper or 75% cheaper? This matters a lot, and I suspect we all know it's gonna be on the cheaper end. Airbus ane Boeing won't dissapear, but in time economics always wins. These type of articles, I have seen coming out of Germany for 20 years for all sorts if german industrues; well they're not printing these stories in Germany anymore.
I did read somewhere, some time ago, that China has been able to sell its planes into the African domestic flight market quite successfully. Also, to South America if I remember correctly...
So some commercial success has materialized.
Very interesting to notice that the honesty of the engine building industry (due to flight safety concerns) has rendered it immune to being undermined by China's drive for self-sufficiency and cross the board lower profit margins that have made them such competitive exporters in other market segments.
“The honesty of the engine building due to flight safety concerns” I don’t buy it, the whole 737 Max debacle at Boeing is very relevant here. Safe engines, safe components but put together in a aeroplane with one goal in mind….more profit by taking unacceptable short cuts. The author is trying to make the very questionable case that China cannot build jet engines because jet engines are somehow so unique in the world of science and engineering that their system prevents their success. Such a long article, perhaps to confuse and dissemble. The claim is ridiculous.
I think you make a valid objection. I'm certainly not even remotely an flight enthusiast or engineer, and my comment doesn't push back harder because of it. The protectionist angle is very valid, in terms of the safety orgs having evolved hand in hand with the industry, causing a symbiotic relationship. Boeing's troubles do however reflect positively towards what happens when profit motive take over and assembly gets so sloppy that engine malfunction under operation begins to happen regularly.
I'm definitely not convinced that China will remain constrained for long given the manpower and political will of the government.
When I was a young guy, I reconditioned fixtures to finish grind the root of turbine blades (a sort of Christmas tree shape) for General Electric. I had to hold a 0.0005" tolerance on fixtures that were 3-4 feet across. Only three thousandths total runout was allowed in the final assembly.
The blades and vanes themselves are like works of art, and the investment casting process leaves the internal passages incredibly slick. If you look along the trailing edge, you will see a row of 0.012" holes EDM burned to connect to those internal cooling passages.
That's just one component in an extremely complex assembly, and it is amazing all by itself.
Ok, this is very interesting. I have some questions:
1. You repeatedly say that China has “failed” but then proceed to say that they’re about a decade behind. You also point out that the iteration cycle for jet engines is much slower than the cycle for other industries, like EVs. So is China’s current status really “failure” or just part of the expected slow catch-up progress you’d expect in a long-cycle industry?
2. You mention that China has other opportunities they’re risking, and give examples that Western capital is investing in. The two you give are supersonic commercial airliners and autonomous planes/drones. But supersonic commercial airliners don’t seem like an obvious winning bet: given fuel requirements (baked into the physics) they’re a very commercially risky bet, and there’s not much technology can do to change that. Drones are different; but from what I understand, China is not underinvesting there. If anything, Anduril exists as a response to China’s dominance in drones, batteries and other parts of the low-cost military tech stack. Maybe these just aren’t the best examples, but it feels like Western capital is not winning in this area, we’re playing catch up because our big defense contractors were less efficient than state planning by a communist country!
3. This is really the big one I’m curious about: what happens when/if China succeeds at building excellent, commercially-viable jet engines that are cost- and feature-competitive with those built in the West? Specifically, what happens to the Western companies that compete in this area? It seems like they will immediately lose a big Chinese market, not to mention maintenance revenue. Then they’re likely to lose big parts of the non-Western world. For an industry that’s already operating on small margins, can those industries continue to exist (absent direct industrial policy interventions by Western governments?) Does the Western jet engine industry become financially unsustainable? Most critically: does this strategy potentially weaken the West’s ability to dominate this market and also (through that) in some ways limit the West’s military capacity? That seems like it would be more relevant than “ideology” as a reason China might want to pursue this strategy.
Thanks for the article.
1. Failed is perhaps too strong a word, yeah. I don't think they've failed - they're further than every other country trying to launch their own jet engine program. But they are in a very long catch-up process in a very difficult industry, and they haven't produced asymmetric progress. By Chinese standards, they are failing.
2. Agreed that Boom/Hermeus are unlikely bets that probably will fail. I think there's potentially some interesting IP that can come out of either, but the actual task of building a commercial airframe and a custom engine are nation-state level accomplishments, not VC-funded startups. I think the interesting thing there is rather the capital infrastructure to make long-term, high-risk bets, and the potential spillover effect of the progress they make. I think companies like Boom are there almost primarily to generate demos and proof-of-concepts, so that something potentially viable can be picked up by a company that can scale it.
I personally think that commercial jet engines are a massive time-sink for low ROI, and China would be better off making an array of low-probability bets to find something that can leapfrog the turbofan, redefine the market, and use their advantages in scale and capital. This is how the won so thoroughly in EVs.
3. On Anduril, though, I think the calculus is different. They aren't building the low-end drones for swarming - they're building high-end unmanned tech. Their products aren't particularly cheap, and they're in an entirely new category. It's not clear if the current iterations are what the future needs either. I think Anduril and the like are the DoD's attempt to seed a new generation of defense contractors to succeed the Lockheed/Northrop/RTX model.
I also don't think our defense-industrial complex is failing. Much is made of Chinese quantity, and there is something to it, but high-tech weaponry has asymmetrically higher impact. Also, the US has prepared for drone swarms and missile clouds and so on, and they will continue to. It was fairly natural for the military manufacturing capacity to decline post-Cold War - they had the same budget pressures we do, and cutting defense in peacetime is the best option. It's being rebuilt now, on not-unreasonable timelines. There's also much to be said about training and experience and doctrine, which matters a lot in war, and in which the US is unmatched.
4. I just don't see China entering the commercial market for a very long time. There are so many obstacles to entering, then scaling, then remaining on the cutting edge. I also think you're neglecting the network of trained maintenance personnel and distributed facilities. China will have to build these up all over the world to make it viable for airlines to rely on their tech. For all this, they need to be considerably better than the West, not just at-parity. I think that's a very large ask. We can see how viable this is over the next 5-10 years.
But let's assume that China is determined to be a player in this industry, and they're willing to expend the necessary (state) capital to make this happen. Moreover, they're willing to use the biggest tool at their disposal, which is at some point in the future, to ban/discourage the use of Western jet engines and to mandate that domestic carriers must use primarily domestic engines. (Perhaps not immediately, but sometime in the 2030s when their engines are mature enough to be a viable, if slightly substandard, replacement.)
What then happens to the Western manufacturers who build jet engines?
I asked ChatGPT and the answer is: it's pretty damn bad. If *only* China disappears as a market for Western manufacturers, then in the 2030s and particularly the 2040s, the Western manufacturers survive, but are badly hurt. They not only lose engine sales, but also the future maintenance business where they make their real money. But this assumes that China intends only to supply its own carriers within China, and has zero export sales. If they also come up with a viable product that they can export, then things go from "terrible" to "existential" for the Western manufacturers. There's a real possibility that some will not be financially viable anymore. And who knows what follow-on effects this has on Western military capability.
So if I'm China and I'm capable of planning on multi-decade scales, this would be pretty damn attractive to me. You insulate yourself from the loss of Western products, and also (at some point in the 2040s) might have the option to dominate the manufacture of these critical technologies, the same way they dominated EVs and batteries and solar modules.
PS: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a046e14-f344-83ea-9fea-6319e24d74d2
I'm not following the logic here. Losing the China market isn't a huge deal, as most airline demand is outside of China. The other growing air travel markets -India, SEA, West Africa - are all on the Western ecosystem.
In the other case, you're basically asking "what if China solves a massive engineering problem, producing at-parity engines at lower cost?" Obviously this scenario is bad for the West, and it's definitely the ideal outcome China wants. I just don't think this is realistic. What evidence do we have that this is feasible? All I see is overhyping based on China's previous (quite impressive, mind) success in very different technologies.
"Losing the China market isn't a huge deal, as most airline demand is outside of China"
China represents about 16-18% of the global jet turbine market today, and that number will probably increase to 20-21% in the next two decades. They're the biggest single consumer of jet engines, and the largest projected growth markets.
There are basically four major turbofan manufacturers in an industry with tight margins; pulling nearly 1/4 of the revenue out of that system will produce consolidation. Even though the actual revenue loss will take years to be felt, the valuation of these companies changes the minute it becomes obvious that China is going to make this move. China is their biggest growth market, and without that their future trajectory changes. That can also have downstream effects on their cost of capital.
"I just don't think this is realistic. What evidence do we have that this is feasible?"
We know that China is rapidly gaining experience in advanced materials science across a range of domains, they have the world's largest demand for power turbines, they have the largest supplies of elements like Rhenium (which they now strictly export-control). More critically, they've made it clear that they'll pursue this goal at any cost. Basically I would flip the question around as follows:
Given that we know China has the motivation, the resources, and the skills, *and* they're making slow but steady progress, what evidence do we have that they won't reach near-parity within 15 years?
This entire article is about the various headwinds that make the West's lead in commercial turbofans very hard to contest. Which part of that do you disagree with? You've posed the exact question I set out to answer.
As for expansion: the C919 has a path to domestic success, and the Chinese government can force it to use domestic CJ-1000A's once those are viable. But the export market is a very different equation. The path to EU/US certification is long. And then you need airlines to actively diversify their fleet by buying from a new carrier, involving training a new set of mechanics and engineers. China needs to establish maintenance facilities all around the world as well. They'll also need to prove reliability over the long-term to build the same faith airlines have in the Boeing / Airbus duopoly. Also, the C919 is very far from "indigenized:" it imports most of its components, including the engine. China is a ways off from building all of these internally.
These are all very difficult constraints. I think the mostly likely outcome is the C919 growing domestically but not internationally, and then internationally, starting in smaller African state carriers that are cost sensitive and the beneficiaries of China's Belt and Road investments. These are likely the same countries that bought Soviet airliners. From there, maybe we'll see SEA for non-Western flights. This is the optimistic case for where we are in 2045.
EDIT: Also, not sure where you’re getting the claim about Rhenium from. Chile, Poland, and the US are the three largest rhenium producers. China produces less than the US, actually. See: https://www.metaltechnews.com/story/2025/12/10/tech-metals/rhenium-returns-to-critical-mineral-status/2578.html
Estimated world mine production in 2024 was about 62,000 kilograms, with Chile producing 29,000 kg, the U.S. 9,500 kg, Poland 9,400 kg, China 5,300 kg, and Uzbekistan 5,000 kg, a distribution that underscores how little of the periodic table's third-highest-melting-point metal actually reaches market each year.
The article was great. It convinced me that China has a lot of challenges ahead of it, and they're about ten years behind. It convinced me that there's some risk to the path ahead of them. It did not convince me that they won't succeed. I've been doing a bit of (Internet) research since I read it, to try to understand what the actual technical barriers are and what the trajectory looks like.
So far as I can tell, there are no fundamental technical barriers. China is doing just about everything right. They have all the resources they need, excellent manufacturing stacks, skilled people, a well-supported program with long-term government backing, a captive domestic market to consume the engines they produce (and help drive the learning curve even harder). The problem itself may be fundamentally time consuming to get right, but there's no magical barrier that prevents China from getting there if they want it bad enough. The question is whether it's worth the investment of time and money. But China has already demonstrated that they're willing to allocate the time and money, so it's likely that they'll succeed.
And so the main question I'm trying to untangle from your article is your conclusion. Specifically: is China being stupid? Are they pursuing a bad bet here, mis-allocating capital because of ideology? Or are they instead pursuing a time-consuming, high-risk and massive-reward bet that will ultimately give them a huge commercial and military advantage, and leave the West materially less capable of competing in a critical field of advanced technology? To answer that, I'm suggesting you have to think about more than the short-term return on capital. I am concerned that China is making a smart, rational evaluation -- just using different parameters, and on a longer time horizon than we're used to thinking about here in the West. And that eventually we (or our kids) will regret that our society didn't plan things on those same time horizons.
ETA: To put a slightly finer point on this: China seems to have taken the lesson that if it simply approaches industrial planning on a timeline that is longer than the timelines used by Western capital allocators, it can essentially bankrupt competing Western industry in specific areas and then dominate those industries. It's successfully done this in several industries and seems to be in the process of doing it with cars. But turbofans are much more significant than cars; if China is able to repeat this trick and gut the Western turbofan manufacturers, the implications are very significant going forward.
PPS The danger with Internet research is that sometimes you get wrong answers: Rhenium came from Google's AI answer, which sucks.
Why would Boeing and airbus switch to Chinese engines if they are only on par with the western engines? Do they also not want to be beholden to a non-western country. Moreover, one needs a significant reason to add another engine supplier and it’s hard to believe Chinese jet engines in the 2030’a would offer much cost savings since there labor costs are rising fast.
I think maybe this is more of an answer than a question. Also I think making broad statements about labor costs two decades out is fraught these days.
The issue capitalism raises here is China spends massive state sponsored sums of capital, builds a competitive offering then to recapture ROI exports those engines and planes and takes market share.
That’s a serious antitrust issue.
How exactly would a bolt from the blue with a prepositioned drone swarm occur without being detected by the US? Could you spell out the details here? China . . . builds drones that can swim underwater in the Pacific before rising and attacking by air? Somehow manages to disperse a ton of drones to the US without detection by US intelligence?
So small drones (that can't carry more than a tiny amount of explosives) will all simultaneously hit our military planes and . . . that would knock out all our planes? Are our planes that fragile?
Are they made of balsa wood or something?
And so many would be launched without being detected?
Evidently you also have extremely little confidence in our SIGINT.
Not to mention that there is pretty much no way the PRC can prepare to launch an actual war without our intelligence picking up on it.
Also, a decade behind??
I remember flying commercially a decade ago. Went pretty well.
What I am saying is that the key isn’t “are Chinese engines as good as Western engines” but rather “are they good enough to be commercially viable”.
Well, Western airplane manufacturers (Airbus and Boeing) just won't use Chinese engines. So China would have to deliver a commercially viable plane. But according to the author, they are nowhere close to meeting the safety standards of the US and EU. And considering that people value their lives, how many people would be willing to risk riding on an airline flying a Chinese airplane if they have alternatives?
China has as much as 18% of the global airline market. So assuming they export zero planes they will still be the largest market in the world, and the one with the most expected growth. I can’t speak to the airframe issues, but this does not seem like a permanent condition. They’re not switching to domestic airframes or turbines tomorrow.
Horses gave way to the ICE. It seems at least possible that one day, all the brilliant expertise may be made redundant by a revolutionary technology.
I read something quite recently that stated they have a high bypass, large jet engine to challenge the GE units diluting testing.
That statement is rather meaningless. I could also have such an engine “to challenge the GE units” but it might be crap.
The engines for narrow body (CJ-1000A) have 6000+hrs ground and flight testing, expecting to get certificate of complains very soon. Equivalent to Leap-1c on performance with 2-7% lower fuel consumption, production expected to start in 2027.
The wide body variant (CJ-2000) has demonstrated 35.2Tonne thrust at high altitude and expects production 2030-2032
Excellent piece. I would only add that China’s progress should not be judged only through the CJ-1000A as a single commercial turbofan program.
The broader question is whether China’s “two engines” industrial base is taking shape. Aero engines and heavy-duty gas turbines share a large technical substrate: superalloys, single-crystal blades, turbine disks, combustors, thermal barrier coatings, control systems, full-engine testing, and long-run operating data.
That is why China’s recent heavy gas turbine commercialization matters. It suggests the learning process is moving beyond papers, prototypes, and isolated demonstrations into real operating environments where process knowledge, reliability data, and supplier ecosystems can accumulate.
This does not mean China has already caught GE, Safran, Rolls-Royce, or Pratt & Whitney in commercial turbofans. It means the right unit of analysis may be larger than the CJ-1000A alone: the formation of a broader turbine-engine industrial system.
Those stocks in the gas turbine space are definitely worth owning that's for sure.
This is great, and I say that as a semiconductor guy with a military background.
What China seems to consistently misunderstand is that jet engines, like semiconductors, are not just engineering problems. They are equal parts art, science, process discipline, institutional memory, and decades of painful trial and error. There are no shortcuts.
By my estimation, the Chinese semiconductor industry is still several generations behind the leaders. The CCP loves to brag about “breakthroughs,” but the hard part is not producing a one-off lab result or a press-release miracle. The hard part is turning that into a repeatable, high-yield manufacturing process at scale.
That is where the magic is. Or, more accurately, where the blood, sweat, ruined wafers, and decades of engineering discipline are.
Older semiconductor technology is perfectly fine for many weapons systems, industrial applications, and basic electronics. But it does not get you where you need to be for advanced data centers, AI, intelligence analysis, or cutting-edge compute. For that world, “good enough” is not good enough.
China can absolutely make progress. But pretending it can skip the generations of accumulated know-how that built the modern semiconductor and jet-engine industries is not strategy. It is propaganda with a spreadsheet.
Also called know how. I wonder how many other industries or subsectors are dependent on this kind of highly specialised accumulated knowledge rendering them “China resilient” so to speak. Also great article btw.
All excellent points and I can second you on the state of Chinese semiconductors. Most laymen get carried away with the Chinese propaganda about their superiority and inevitability. Their “superiority” involves a lot of stealing, lack of business ethics and unfair practices.
You can not imaginehow long I have sought the answer to this question, especially after I learned the question itself is specifically a Xi Jinping obsession.
Wonderful effort, deeply appreciated.
This brought back memories from working at GE:FMEA, MTBF,MTTR. All the logistics to make it and support it
Great article and I mostly concur and affirm your analysis as I have responded to a few commenters below. Thanks to @TheOldSalt for restocking.
Nice!
I think this article is a good example of what happens when somebody learns the conventional story about Chinese engines and then stops updating their priors around 2012. The entire piece is built around a version of the Chinese propulsion story that is increasingly disconnected from where the technical discussion actually is. If you spend time reading materials papers, institute publications, AECC disclosures, conference proceedings and even the better-informed enthusiast discussions, the striking thing is not how often people are still debating whether China can build advanced turbine hardware. The striking thing is how rarely anyone close to the field still debates that question at all. The debate has moved on. The author hasn't.
The article treats jet engines as some uniquely unconquered bastion of tacit Western knowledge and then spends surprisingly little time engaging with the actual technical breadcrumbs that have emerged over the last decade. It's as if DD6 never happened. It's as if DD9 and DD10 don't exist. It's as if the entire discussion around third-generation Chinese SX alloys never occurred. It's as if WS-15 entering service is irrelevant. The author appears fascinated by the historical difficulty of engines while showing remarkably little curiosity about whether the underlying technical bottlenecks have actually been overcome.
The strange thing is that the article correctly identifies where the difficult part of the problem lives and then seems unwilling to follow the implications. Yes, turbine engines are difficult because of the hot section. Exactly. The entire challenge was the hot section. Single-crystal growth. Dendritic segregation control. Directional solidification. Cooling passage manufacture. Thermal barrier coatings. Creep resistance at extreme temperatures. Oxidation resistance. Phase stability in heavily alloyed systems. TCP suppression. Those were the mountains. Those were the technologies that separated the United States from everybody else. If China had failed there, the author's argument would be compelling.
The problem is that the evidence increasingly points the other way.
DD6 alone should have forced a reassessment years ago. DD6 isn't some curiosity. It's a mature indigenous second-generation SX alloy produced by a country that was supposedly incapable of mastering turbine metallurgy. In broad technological terms DD6 belongs in the same family as CMSX-4, PWA1484 and René N5. That's the metallurgy generation associated with engines like the F119. Nobody writing seriously about propulsion would dismiss F119-era metallurgy as unsophisticated. Yet somehow when China achieves an analogous metallurgical generation it gets described as evidence of failure.
What's even stranger is the lack of engagement with DD9 and DD10. This is where the article really starts to look dated. If DD6 was China's second-generation SX moment, DD9/DD10 appear to be China's move into the third-generation Re-bearing world. Higher temperature capability. Better creep resistance. Greater high-temperature strength retention. Improved phase stability. More thermal margin available to engine designers. In other words, exactly the sort of progression one would expect from a country climbing the same turbine-metallurgy ladder that Pratt, GE and Rolls-Royce climbed decades earlier.
This is the point where I think the article completely loses the plot. Once you're discussing DD9/DD10-class systems, you're no longer debating whether China has entered the modern turbine age. You're debating how much maturity remains between Chinese third-generation SX production and Western third-generation SX production. That's a radically different question. The article acts as though China is still trying to reach the starting line when in reality the argument is increasingly about where on the track it sits.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that the author repeatedly invokes tacit knowledge almost as a mystical explanation. Tacit knowledge matters. Manufacturing experience matters. Process control matters. Nobody disputes that. The problem is that tacit knowledge is not a static asset. It accumulates through production. Pratt accumulated it by building engines. GE accumulated it by building engines. Rolls accumulated it by building engines. China is now building engines. Lots of them. Every WS-15 produced generates data. Every blade failure generates data. Every coating failure generates data. Every overhaul generates data. Every rejected casting generates data. Tacit knowledge isn't an inheritance. It's a process.
The article also fails to distinguish adequately between military and commercial propulsion. That's a major mistake. The military problem is fundamentally a hot-section problem. The commercial problem is a hot-section problem plus certification, maintenance economics, service life, fleet support and thousands upon thousands of operational hours. Historically countries solve the military problem first because that's where the hardest science lives. Once you can produce a competitive military hot section, the commercial challenge becomes one of industrialisation and refinement. Difficult? Absolutely. But it's a different category of difficulty.
What I find most unconvincing is the implicit assumption that China has somehow reached the exact point where its progress will stop. We're expected to believe that China mastered SX growth, mastered advanced superalloys, mastered blade casting, mastered coatings, mastered cooled turbine hardware, built a huge propulsion research ecosystem, established indigenous fighter-engine production, fielded WS-15, developed third-generation SX systems and then will somehow spend the next thirty years failing to improve manufacturing maturity. That's an extraordinary claim. The burden of proof should be on the people making it.
And the future trajectory is arguably even more important than the current state. The article barely grapples with what comes after DD9/DD10. DD22 matters because it suggests Chinese planners already regard third-generation systems as normal. Countries that are still struggling with third-generation metallurgy don't spend their time preparing fourth-generation metallurgy. The DD6 → DD9/DD10 → DD22 progression looks exactly like what you would expect from a mature propulsion ecosystem. Second-generation production base. Third-generation production standard. Fourth-generation successor already moving through the pipeline.
In fact, I think there's a serious possibility that meaningful production deployment of fourth-generation Chinese SX systems arrives before equivalent Western deployments become widespread. Not because the United States lacks the science. The United States almost certainly retains extraordinary capability at the frontier. The issue is industrial momentum. The American aerospace sector increasingly finds itself dividing resources across F-35 modernization, B-21 procurement, NGAD uncertainty, naval recapitalization, nuclear modernization and the sustainment burden of a massive legacy force. China is in a very different phase. It is still expanding. Still building. Still scaling. Still increasing fighter output. Still increasing engine output. Still increasing materials-science capacity.
The irony is that the article is strongest when discussing why jet engines were historically difficult and weakest when discussing where the technology is actually going. It reads like someone who learned the lesson of the 1990s and never checked whether the facts changed. The lesson of the 1990s was that China could not build the hot section of a modern fighter engine. The lesson of the 2020s may well be that it can. Once you accept that possibility, the entire argument changes. The debate is no longer about whether China can build advanced engines. The debate becomes how quickly an industrial system with enormous manufacturing depth can close the remaining maturity gap after the core materials-science problem has already been solved. That is a much less comfortable debate for the West than the one the article is trying to have.
How do you account, then, for their lead in hypersonics and rotating destination engines? Their lead in 6th Gen fighters? Maneuverable re-entry vehicles?
You seem out of touch.
I think essentially they compensate for less super-duper engines with much better avionics.
Not likely
You seem to be caught in an us-versus-them attitude. This zero-sum-thinking is 20th century.
Chinese industry does not attempt to produce everything themselves, this would not be competitive. They try to cooperate everywhere, but sanctions force them to build alternatives.
Aerospace engineering content on Substack has been growing quite a bit, covering topics from aircraft design and propulsion to space industry insights and career discussions.
Aerospace engineers typically work across aerodynamics, structures, materials, systems design, testing, and performance optimization — so the field is much broader than just designing aircraft.
I recently came across Hydrasearch, which gives a simple breakdown of what aerospace engineers do in real-world roles, which helps connect a lot of these topics together: https://hydrasearch.com/what-do-aerospace-engineers-do/
Substack is becoming a solid place to follow deeper technical writing if you’re interested in aviation and aerospace beyond surface-level news.
Cool. I also think there is cycles in these things. Chinese industry leaders are the best in the world right now, with the likes of Elon Musk being the anonymous norm rather than the celebrity exception. But within 10-20 years they will be replaced by fearful incompetent brownnoses, managing a declining parasitic rent - like your typical western CEO today.
The failure mode will probably be different there. Here it's plutocracy, the rich have bought the politicians to remove competition. There it's probably going to be the reverse: political power will diffuse nepotically to economic power. Once that membrane gives, political power will bend the rules of competition to protect the incompetent.
The mandarins taking over private business seems to be the stasis mode there, occasionally disrupted by invasions from the steppes, or from the ocean in its latest iteration.
Two Things:
First,
“America is now developing its sixth-generation fighter aircraft, and has two engine prototypes designed around adaptive cycling, where the turbofan ratio changes for efficiency in both high-thrust usage and long-range cruise. This is slated for 2028. China, on the other hand, hasn’t started development yet on its equivalent, and with its WS-19 issues, probably will not until the mid-2030s.”
https://clashreport.com/defense/articles/china-nears-adaptive-engine-breakthrough-with-variable-cycle-jet-engine-elvnlpzcrxq
It's actually the reverse. China has a working prototype they've been actively testing since the end of 2025. Meanwhile their American counterparts have just finished the developmental stage of their engine and are readying a prototype model to actually be built in the next few years.
And Second,
“China’s (AI) models are about a year behind “
https://licensing.visualcapitalist.com/product/visualizing-u-s-vs-chinese-ai-model-performance/
Chinese models have more or less caught up with the U.S. frontier labs in overall capability and functionality. The frontier labs have a small lead, but the difference is negligle at this point. The rest of your article is sound, but the Chinese have a history of overcoming technical and engineering hurdles to indiginize their supply of critical technology.
Their space program, most notably their space station, is a great example of China doing exactly what this article articulates they can't or are unable to do: create their own incredibly complex technology once pioneered by the west.
Wishful thinking. Yes, it takes longer for China to catch up, so what? The article says they are 10 years behind, well that's not a lot actually. Most airplanes are 30 years old, so what is the efficiency difference 10% or 30% for this 10 year gap? I would suspect somewhere in between, or maybe less. The next question is, how much cheaper will the overall chinese plane be, at let's say 25% less efficient; will it be 10% cheaper or 75% cheaper? This matters a lot, and I suspect we all know it's gonna be on the cheaper end. Airbus ane Boeing won't dissapear, but in time economics always wins. These type of articles, I have seen coming out of Germany for 20 years for all sorts if german industrues; well they're not printing these stories in Germany anymore.
Great article and very informative.
I did read somewhere, some time ago, that China has been able to sell its planes into the African domestic flight market quite successfully. Also, to South America if I remember correctly...
So some commercial success has materialized.
Very interesting to notice that the honesty of the engine building industry (due to flight safety concerns) has rendered it immune to being undermined by China's drive for self-sufficiency and cross the board lower profit margins that have made them such competitive exporters in other market segments.
“The honesty of the engine building due to flight safety concerns” I don’t buy it, the whole 737 Max debacle at Boeing is very relevant here. Safe engines, safe components but put together in a aeroplane with one goal in mind….more profit by taking unacceptable short cuts. The author is trying to make the very questionable case that China cannot build jet engines because jet engines are somehow so unique in the world of science and engineering that their system prevents their success. Such a long article, perhaps to confuse and dissemble. The claim is ridiculous.
I think you make a valid objection. I'm certainly not even remotely an flight enthusiast or engineer, and my comment doesn't push back harder because of it. The protectionist angle is very valid, in terms of the safety orgs having evolved hand in hand with the industry, causing a symbiotic relationship. Boeing's troubles do however reflect positively towards what happens when profit motive take over and assembly gets so sloppy that engine malfunction under operation begins to happen regularly.
I'm definitely not convinced that China will remain constrained for long given the manpower and political will of the government.