I can remember a horror story of Chinese copy of R179 engine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17677936

Repost:

> Funny thing to mention, I think 95% of industrial espionage effort yields zero if not negative benefit. The problem is that you are always stealing a "cat in a bag" For machinery, rarely there is anything like a "secret sauce:" Soon after the fall of USSR, Chinese defence companies flocked to Russia buying every defence tech possible. Russian companies had a funny way to troll Chicoms: they will not sell them a simple, mid-tier equipment, but only the top notch, and most complicated one, with which even they themselves had problem dealing.

> For example, Soyuz transferred tech for their super expensive, small volume manufactured R179 engine. Yes, that was Soviet response to F135 class engines. The showstopper was its very high temperature turbine made with monocrystaline blades grown in situ within (!) a ceramic fibre reinforcing mesh.

> Even with all blueprints, tooling, documentation of manufacturing processes, and working samples on their hands, Chinese only made like 10 working engines. That state program to copy R179 continues to this day as I know.

> And I think they spent way more money on it in 25 years, than if they were to create a thing from scratch. That is something obvious to every experienced engineer, but not to bureaucrats from Chinese three letter agencies who are convinced that they are just an inch away from some "secret trick" that will magically make everything work.

My main point is that such big, state bureaucracy driven initiatives to make a Chinese analogue of some expensive widget often end up spending many times more resources that developing it from scratch in China with Chinese engineers, and often end up with inferior final product, than if it was an own original development.

While I have no specific knowledge on even jet engines, from general engineering principles, who says you cannot have 2 groups of people, one working on your own design, the other working on reverse-engineering / replicating others' works? For critical projects like this, it's not hard to imagine a State Actor throwing at least this much resources (including human resources of course) at this. One benefit I can think of is that reverse engineering can shine light on some tough problems during the "forward engineering", like "can this be done at all", and "what is the major concern / bottleneck when designing a particular component". Even if you don't figure out the whole thing, the process can still be useful, especially when you don't already have all the know-how.

The first thing that you learn when you go into the aviation industry, is that the shortcut is the longest way to get from A to B.

stealing jet engine/materials science data and software data are different kettle of fish.

different kinds of bottlenecks. I’m assuming one set is more easily transferrable than the other.

For material science, replication is an issue because of differences in machines etc. Very little standardization.

It's like back in those days where HP/SGI/IBM had their own version of 'C' compilers and it was a nightmare to port from one platform to another. Especially when they used non standard behavior (e.g. dereferencing null returns 0) and use it as part of their core logic.

You REALLY need to know your stuff to make things work. Source code alone isn't enough.

This applies to many software projects as well :).

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.

Are the trains better e. g. compared to TGV or Shinkansen? I doubt that. Or just cheaper? Sure, cheaper is also a form of "better".

Please note that they forced the technology transfer from Siemens. That is one of the key issues with today's China.

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.

But will China be able to make the next leap on their own? It's one thing to copy but another to come up with the design on the first place.

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.

And going even farther back, the British industrial revolution was built on producing cheap copies of Indian textiles.

And the label "Made in Germany" was once created by the British to protect their own manufacturing from cheap clones from Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany

... using machines that british people invented.

get the overall point, but not sure this is a good example.

US copied british factories by industrial espionage to bootstrap their own industry and eventually became the bigger industrial producer...

"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."

https://www.thoughtco.com/richard-arkwright-water-frame-1991...

I think that is specifically the point. The copycats automate and improve, then dominate.

Well, they were cheaper because the industrial revolution was basically the British inventing the textile industry.

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.

Same thing with electric guitars.

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).

Once upon a time German and Japanese manufacturers were laughed at as mere copies too.

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.

I'm still hoping the UK's space strategy (satellites and SABRE excepted) is about playing the extremely long game.

I'm sure this kind of thinking contributed to American drone companies getting their asses handed to them by DJI

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.

5G patents by country…

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...

Answer: yes.

You shouldn't treat China as a single entity. The question should be whether the Chinese people can come up with the design.

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.

Didn't you see the news they are making a 1000Kph train?

> Now their trains are better than anyone else's

Do you have source for that?

> They even managed to beat competitors and export their trains to Turkey and Argentina..

This does not necessary mean their trains are better than anyone's else.

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.