It will be the same story for jet engines, Chinese improvement is very rapid. It was the same story for every rising power so far, there is no real reason that China will never be able to build a jet engine, and no reason that they will never be able to run a fab (and indeed, they are accelerating quite fast).

They have started to deploy the WS-10 Taihang engine for their J-10 fighter, but the performance of this engine is markedly worse than comparable Western engines. Military grade engines are hard!

Even the US relied on foreign jet engines for a time, although you won't hear about it a lot - for example, an absolutely huge amount of engineers were hired from AVRO in Canada after the development of the superior Iroquois engine (which had by quite a margin the highest nominal thrust as well as the highest) as well as other Orenda engines, and their work was absolutely instrumental to the US becoming superior to the USSR in jet engine technology. I don't know if this is publicly available information, so you might have to trust me on it, but I guarantee you even the US had a 20+ year period where it had to steal engineers and tech in order to jumpstart it's lead, which is exactly what we are seeing with China.

So say they iron out the kinks in the WS-15 (though odds are they'll settle for the WS-10). They then have a roughly 1990s era engine, when the US will be deploying Adaptive Cycle Engines etc.

As far as adaptive cycle engines, China is also already researching them. They also have a lead in supersonic combustion as of today.

This view is rampant throughout this thread and I keep wondering why South Korea is omitted. I thought SK semiconductor tech was comparable the US and Taiwan?

But beyond SK I cannot think of any other countries with competitive fabs.

Also only a tangent but I really believe that deal where TSMC is going to put a N7 fab in the USA is either going to get restructured into something way smaller or never ever going to happen.

2015.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/tu/facts/

(PS. This took less than 30 seconds to find and confirm).

(PS. This took me most of a minute of reading the link you provided).

Russia invented and built and then sold to the USA the RD-180 rocket engines that are used for the first stage of the American Atlas V launch vehicle.

Which the USA will no doubt "reverse engineer" soon :)

The OP needs to get out more often.

SpaceX, a privately-held American company, is the only source of innovation in rocketry at the present time. Their reusable launch platform plays in its own league; everything else is steam power, Falcon is internal combustion.

That's just a fact. Unlike insisting that China, Russia, India are incapable of innovation more generally, which is risible.

My vague impression, in fact, is that jet turbines are quite a bit more difficult to manufacture than rocket engines, even if the latter are thought of as 'higher tech'.

I'm fairly certain we'll discover, in the next ten years, that China is quite capable of making cutting-edge computer chips, and just hadn't gotten around to it yet.

I've never shared my countrymen's obsession with insisting on being 'the greatest'. This country is great in its own right, along many dimensions; it is, in fact, right at the cutting edge for medicine and CPUs; denigrating the work of other nations only detracts from this.

My impression is that “real” rocket engines include a jet engine just to pump fuel. They have many other pieces as well.

Not that a modern high-bypass turbofan is simple, but don’t discount the complexity of rocket science.