China managed to quite quickly absorb the technology transfer from Alstom/Siemens to build high-speed trains. Now their trains are better than anyone else's and they have more high-speed rails than any other country. They even managed to beat competitors and export their trains to Turkey and Argentina...
I have no doubt their airplane will ultimately be successful.
They can go slightly faster with a top speed of 350km/h instead of 320km/h but one could argue that is marginal improvement.
What happened with Siemens is tragic because they wanted so hard to get a foothold in the Chinese market, they agreed to the technology transfer. In the long term, they helped start a competitor that now beats them in other foreign markets.
Well, it was also a tech transfer from Kawasaki (makers of Shinkansen trains), unless you think they bungled the technology, it's very possible these trains at least match the quality of Siemens and Kawasaki trains. You can see the specs and pictures on Wikipedia and decide for yourself.
Like the sibling post says, the tragedy is that they got both companies to give up their tech because each thought the winner would get a monopoly over the entire domestic market for at least a decade or so.
The Swiss watchmaking industry was once largely focused on producing cheap copies of English and French watches. Today Swiss watchmakers are renowned for quality and innovation.
"On December 20, 1790, water-powered machinery for spinning and carding cotton was set in motion in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Based on the designs of English inventor Richard Arkwright, a mill was built by Samuel Slater on the Blackstone River. The Slater mill was the first American factory to successfully produce cotton yarn with water-powered machines. Slater was a recent English immigrant who apprenticed Arkwright's partner, Jebediah Strutt.
Samuel Slater had evaded British law against emigration of textile workers in order to seek his fortune in America. Considered the father of the United States textile industry, he eventually built several successful cotton mills in New England and established the town of Slatersville, Rhode Island."
In the 1980s, electronics that said "Made in Japan" were well-regarded (still are today), but in the 1950s it was the opposite: they were seen as cheap. This was actually a joke in the movie Back to the Future.
See also Japanese cars from the 1970s versus the 1990s to today.
In the 60 and early 70ies, Made in Japan guitars, specially copies of Gibson and Fender guitars where not well regarded.
But they started to greatly improve, and by the late 70ies and 80ies they were equal if not better than their originals (specially Fender which was not well managed by CBS at the time).
In the copy department you still have brands like Burny/Fernandez or Tokai, and also brands that outgrew the simple copy business with genuine models such as Ibanez, Yamaha or Takamine (a few lawsuits may have helped them develop in that direction).
There's a lot to be said for letting someone else spend billions perfecting a design and then just copying it. If you can do it quickly and make improvements you'll maintain second place very cheaply, which let's you spend the rest of your resources on more useful things.
It's intriguing to see that during the last 3 decades, China has made so much progress, and from a historical perspective, I think China will make its own plane, just like how they made their own cars and trains, I do think they have the ability to reverse engineer the plane related stuff,sooner or later, but innorvaton is another thing, it totally make sense to me that China wants to copycat all the high tech stuff, and also, the counter massure that US took is totally reasonable. From the human species' point of view, it is fascinating.
If you look at the top computer systems and networking conferences, you'll see an increasing fraction of the research is from the top Chinese universities. The best Chinese students used to go abroad for their PhD studies. In the last five years or so, this has significantly changed, and Chinese home-grown research is just as innovative as US or European research. I've no reason to believe that aerospace will be any different, except that the lead times are probably quite a bit longer.
Given time, resources, and education, certainly Chinese people can come up with functional solutions to any problem. The same is true for people of practically any other country.
But it seems that for one reason or other, technology theft is attractive enough to be a primary method of "innovating" in some places.
It's really a matter of degrees. People copy anything they see that seems like a good idea (better than the idea they previously had). It's just a matter of how much original effort is put in vs how much detail from the other party's effort is acquired and used to fast-track the development.
In complex projects like this, just seeing provides limited benefit. But in other simpler cases, just see another's working model can convey enough information for the newcomer to quickly come up to speed and compete.
You know, I have nothing against China building things from scratch on their own. I'm sure there are engineers in China who disdain all these espionage efforts and want to do their own original works, but are forced to "make use" of the information.
i don’t disagree with your point, but the level of difficulty in building an airliner and a (even high speed) train is much higher than most people realize.
I don't think so, and if they are, I don't think it will be through hacking.
Refactoring other people's code is often harder than coming up with your own, and this is when you have the corresponding ability. Just receiving source code/ design without know-how to actually implement anything might even be worse in the long run.
I have no doubt their airplane will ultimately be successful.