There are reasons they might not, and that is that the rest of the world also has time and money. China is not infinite.
Catching up is definitely a lot easier and yes it does take time, but it's not a given. They've been trying to catch up with jet engines for almost as long as the west or Russia have been working on them, certainly would have out-spent the Russians by a wide margin on the effort. So far unable to match western or even Russian designs. Although maybe in just the past few months they might have finally got something which is at least good enough, just spending a lot of money for a long time doesn't guarantee results.
The Chinese have been seriously trying to catch up in turbofan engines only since 1986. They are now far enough ahead as to be very comparable to the Russians.
They are nowhere even near to having spent as much as the Russians in resources. You forget that the economy of the USSR was a massive powerhouse, that allocated absolutely massive incestments in military technology.
The Chinese, on the other hand, acrually aren't incesting as much money on these technologies as one would think. The only company (SOE) that has any stake in jet engines is Shenyang, and despite also making whole aircraft, drones and so on, they have 15 000 employees for the whole operation.
Comparatively, Pratt and Whitney, which does only engines and nothing else, and is one of four companies capable of making modern turbofan engines, has more than twice the employees as Shenyang, which designs and manufactures multiple different aircraft. Boeing has ten times as many employees as Shenyang.
As far as outinvesting the Russians, we can compare again the number of employees. The most advanced Russian engines are produced by UEC Saturn, which only makes engines, and by itself has 21 000 employees.
That's again more than Shenyang, which doesn't only make engines.
So no, it's patently false that the Chinese are deploying more resources with less results.
No they have been seriously trying before then, it's just that they had failed and were somewhat covered by USSR. Even if we take that date, 40 years and countless actual engines to study and they're not even there yet!
> They are nowhere even near to having spent as much as the Russians in resources. You forget that the economy of the USSR was a massive powerhouse, that allocated absolutely massive incestments in military technology.
China is far bigger than USSR ever was, and has been for a while, it also has massive military investments and has always had far more people it could China is absolutely massive in terms of population it can bring to task. So I doubt this. USSR had a pretty large GDP by the end of it yes, but just looking at that is the same mistake as just looking at China's GDP now -- it was not always that large.
> The Chinese, on the other hand, acrually aren't incesting as much money on these technologies as one would think. [etc]
Well I don't think anybody actually knows what exactly they are investing other than they've clearly wanted competitive engines for 60-70 years. But either way this matches what I say about the noise coming from China not really matching the results coming from them, in terms of innovation and developing new technology.
Nope, before the Sino-Soviet split and shortly thereafter there was zero serious effort to build jet engines. They were producing Soviet designs under license and working on that until the mid 80s.
China never, ever, ever had anywhere near the engineering resources of the Soviet Union. To suggest as much is insanity. They arrived to that level somewhere before 2010.
China already has competitive engines. They can and do simply buy Russian engines. Domestic engine development is a nice-to-have, and not a huge priority. This is obviously reflected in the low budgets and the low number of employees in these programs. This is public information.
> Nope, before the Sino-Soviet split and shortly thereafter there was zero serious effort to build jet engines.
Nope, the WP-1A was built in 1958. Just because they were incapable of designing their own competitive jet engine does not mean they were not attempting to.
> China never, ever, ever had anywhere near the engineering resources of the Soviet Union. To suggest as much is insanity. They arrived to that level somewhere before 2010.
You mean somewhere after? Totally disagree. Clearly there were not good or well run resources like the soviets, but they had the money and the manpower earlier than that. If you're just looking at GDP overlap that is misleading because it does not account for more people in China, or the relative advantage it gets from much stronger computing power and ability to copy more advanced designs. Also you're taking the GDP from the height of the USSR, which is not representative of its economic power for those same 70 years it was designing engines.
> China already has competitive engines. They can and do simply buy Russian engines.
Not the most advanced ones.
> Domestic engine development is a nice-to-have, and not a huge priority. This is obviously reflected in the low budgets and the low number of employees in these programs. This is public information.
That shows how much you know. It is a huge priority for them and it has been for a long time.
In 1958 the Chinese built the WP-5/PF-1 the WP-1A, which was a license built version of the Soviet VK-1 and descendants.
The first Chinese-designed jet engine was the WP-14, and the project started in the mid 80s.
China did not have enough engineers to rival the USSR until after the fall.
> That shows how much you know. It is a huge priority for them and it has been for a long time.
It really hasn't. Defence in general is not a big priority of the Chinese state. Even within defence, producing new airframes is a much bigger than domestic engines.
> Not the most advanced ones.
Incorrect. The most advanced Russian engine in mass production is the AL-31F series, which is sold to China. Further developments intended for production, the AL-41F, are not in mass production.
Catching up is definitely a lot easier and yes it does take time, but it's not a given. They've been trying to catch up with jet engines for almost as long as the west or Russia have been working on them, certainly would have out-spent the Russians by a wide margin on the effort. So far unable to match western or even Russian designs. Although maybe in just the past few months they might have finally got something which is at least good enough, just spending a lot of money for a long time doesn't guarantee results.