alt Hacker NewsThis is a strange article. I did not find anything that is a blocker for China. China is a relative new comer to jet engines and this technology is tightly guarded by incumbents and needs time to mature.
If China can master nuclear, space, chips, it seems a bit stretch to say they it is the Jer engines where they fail.
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I even thought that the example of automobiles proved the jet engine analogy wrong.
Sure, automobiles aren’t as complex as a jet engine, but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.
Something like 10 years ago we were laughing at videos of Chinese cars spectacularly failing crash tests, and now China is selling to very heavily regulated markets.
Same deal with things like high speed rail.
It seems the author started from a desiserd conclusion, and strung together fact(oid)s to support it without any understanding of them, sometimes making huge mistakes.
For example the monocrystalline blades, which are touted as some holy grain, were in production engines on both sides of the iron curtain by the 70s. China has mastered this technology by the 2010s at the latest.
As for airliner engines, I looked up both the LEAP and the PW1000 and their 'hot' part - the turbines - have fairly conservative specs, roughly on par with these aforementioned 70s US/Soviet fighter engines. This is the technology tha's more or less shared between military and civilian engines.
The big Western advantage comes from manufacturing the bypass fan - the composite blades and the high-speed gearbox connecting them to the jet 'core' are technologies that the West has a huge lead on and that's why the reason comparable Russian and Chinese engines don't exist.
But strictly speaking, that's not really directly related to the tech in the turbine 'cores' which most people refer to when speaking about jets and not a peep is made about this in the article.
Material sciences needed for modern jet engine blades are a closely guarded secret, and thanks to not manufacturing them in china, those secrets have managed to remain not stolen.
Fun story: it is not just jet engines - it is only recently that china was able to actually make indigenous ballpoint pens https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114
Material engineering is the well known blocker for China, same with semiconductors. They basically have to replicate 50 years of trial and error that is well kept under lock in key in the west.
China hasn’t mastered chips either yet in the same way it hasn’t mastered jet turbines: they can do cheap (high yields, low maintenance costs per hour of use), they can do high performance, they can’t do both yet at the same time.