OPINION:
The 2024 Zhuhai Air Show was quite the coming-out party for China’s defense and aviation industries. It presented an array of new aircraft, directed-energy weapons, the HQ-19 Anti-Ballistic Missile system and models of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and an unmanned surface vessel warship.
Beijing’s aviation industry drew the most attention, however, introducing China’s latest Stealth aircraft, the J-35A, a new catapult-launched fighter, the J-15T, an electronic warfare version of the J-15D, and China’s first serious commercial airliners, the C-919 and C-929.
Those aircraft and the J-20 variants and unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, featured in the show reflect the foreign technology acquired for their designs and construction.
Skeptics have noted the foreign influences of the designs and that the U.S. had been producing stealth aircraft for over 30 years. That is all true, but Zhuhai has taught us that Western aircraft will no longer dominate China’s domestic airliner market, and Western arms and military aircraft will soon face stiffer competition in international military sales. It should have also taught the West that its technological edge has eroded.
China also marketed its latest helicopters, unmanned cargo aircraft and long-endurance UAVs, such as the CH-7, and teased the world with talk of a sixth-generation fighter project and new hypersonic weapons.
All should be seen as the result of China’s massive investment in educating hundreds if not thousands of aviation, electronic, mechanical and computer engineers, scientists and plant managers since Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world in the 1980s. He had risen to power over an impoverished nation with an all-but-destroyed scientific research community and disrupted industrial and academic infrastructure.
Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution had sent thousands of university professors, scientists and factory managers to reeducation camps while authorizing his Red Guards to destroy the laboratories and libraries that housed counterrevolutionary ideas and studies of Western scientific thought.
For 16 years, there was little if any scientific education and research. Estimates of the human cost vary, but the most conservative suggest that up to 40% of China’s scientists and academics died in those camps. Coming on top of the millions that died of starvation under Mao’s Great Leap Forward, it was a wound that nearly destroyed China itself. Not even the military’s protected industrial and scientific base was enough to overcome the ill effects.
When Deng rose to power years after Mao’s death, he inherited that. He instituted the reforms that opened China to the world. Thousands of China’s most promising youth studied in the West, gaining knowledge of agricultural, aviation, civil, electrical and mechanical engineering, and environmental and community planning.
Western corporations invested in China, providing employment to China’s growing class of educated people. Western factories introduced manufacturing processes and technologies three to five generations ahead of China’s, which still used machine tools from the 1930s and ’40s. The most important of these were the airframe, information technology and machine tool factories introduced in the late ’90s.
China’s unquenchable quest for knowledge was primarily fed by legal means. Starting in the late 1980s, Beijing asked its students abroad to copy publicly available research papers on aircraft, ships and submarine designs, systems and technology, and those concerning basic scientific research. The cyberespionage campaign came later, shortly before or after 2000.
Those favoring China’s trade and engagement with the regime made excuses for China’s intellectual property theft, accepting the explanation that their legal system was catching up but would institute protections when it was ready. Most China “experts” continued to accept that excuse well into the late 2010s. The lack of consequences for its actions encouraged China’s bad actors to continue, with the blessing of the Communist Party.
The Chinese aviation industry’s growth and expansion capacity are impressive, but they have not achieved this alone. Western commercial aircraft manufacturers outsourced some of their component production to China to save costs and trained Chinese engineers and floor managers in the related manufacturing processes. They didn’t realize they were selling their competitive advantage or were too shortsighted to care. Regardless, those skills are as important to China’s aviation industry advances as any knowledge stolen by espionage.
Modern weapon and aircraft, particularly warplane manufacturing, is a complex undertaking that integrates electronics, mechanical, hydraulic and digital technologies. Aircraft avionics have also become technology-dependent and compatible with the plane’s other systems.
Gathering or developing the data and designs for weapons, airframes and systems is the first stage of the development process. One needs engineers, programmers, researchers, scientists, skilled workers and competent plant management to produce the plane. Also, modern and future unmanned systems require various levels artificial intelligence, a technology heavily dependent on advanced programming and computer engineers as well as scientists. It is clear that China has developed the human capital to do so, and its days of reverse engineering foreign systems are over.
Therein lies one of the many lessons this latest Zhuhai Air Show teaches us. The presented Chinese aircraft reflect Beijing’s 30-plus-year commitment to advancing its aviation industry. The aircraft designs may reflect open source, cyberespionage and intellectual property theft. Still, their construction marks China’s aircraft industry’s significant progress to this point. More importantly, it suggests there are more advances to come. For example, the West’s continued dominance of the global commercial aircraft industry can no longer be assumed.
China appears to have overcome its engine shortcomings, and its domestic avionics and computer industries are nearly on a par with those of the West. Beijing is also investing heavily in AI and directed energy weapons, suggesting future developments of concern. It is apparent China intends to challenge Western air, ground and naval superiority at some future date. The West ignores that intention at its peril.
• Carl O. Schuster is a former director of operations at the U.S. Pacific Command Joint Intelligence Center.
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