[ivell]

This 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.

[seanmcdirmid]

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.

[russli1993]

CJ1000A is being certified by 2028. It is equivalent to LEAP engines on fuel burn. WS15 and WS19 are all shipping today and have thrust to weight ratio above 10. CJ2000 is a 35-ton trust, genx fuel burn class engine, on track for 2030.

[seanmcdirmid]

Like all of high performance Chinese engines, the CJ1000A won’t be commercially viable if it has to be overhauled for every 100 hours of flight time. There is a reason China still imports most of the jet turbines it uses.

Once China figures out how to have both at the same time, they will basically take over the worldwide market, let alone their domestic market.

[FpUser]

>"50 years of trial and error that is well kept under lock in key in the west."

Bollocks. Russia does that as well, single crystal turbine blades in particular so the west is not the sole gatekeeper here. Given the circumstances Russia might as well share the tech for some things in return

[Scramblejams]

I doubt that very much. 20ish years ago I read about the Indians being very upset that the engines in the Sukhoi fighters they bought weren't even making it to the promised (very modest) 300 operating hours between overhauls. That's far less than Western engines routinely achieve. And with the hollowing out of the Russian industrial base that's occurred since then, I'd be surprised if it's gotten any better in the intervening years.

[seanmcdirmid]

Cheap AND high performance. There is a reason Russian passenger jets are often engined with western jet turbines even though Russia makes their own.

[vkazanov]

One more factor: Similar to how this works in semiconductors, some things are just too expensive to build without having an economy of scale.

[tptacek]

Does Russia do it at comparable yield at the same quality level? India can do single crystal turbine blades too, but at a small scale.

[elzbardico]

Russia is a backwards mongol empire. This is the official narrative on HN, don't you dare suggesting otherwise.

[stogot]

“ well kept under lock in key in the west”

You’re joking. These have been put on network drives since early 2000s and CCP has hacked and exfil them

[htrp]

the people who do a good chunk of materials science research have last names like wang, li , zhang

you don't exactly need to hack a network drive when you can just hire the guy who came up with it

[thaumasiotes]

> have last names like wang, li , zhang

It's not clear to me whether you already knew that those three names in particular are idiomatic in China as the names of 'random' people. 张三，李四，王五.

(Traditionally 李 was the most common surname in China. Last I heard it had been overtaken by 王.)

I don't know who random guys One and Two are.

[AussieWog93]

Then where are the jet engines?

[Cthulhu_]

Turns out knowledge alone isn't enough. I mean the knowledge of how to build a nuke, a microprocessor, or a rocket that can go to Mars is public information, yet building them remains elusive for a lot of countries.

[one33seven]

It's not actually public knowledge how to build modern, small still capable microprocessors, afaik.

[seanmcdirmid]

It turns out that they’ve really been able to keep the material sciences data under wraps. It is also really hard to reverse engineer from end products. Same with the C919.

[dboreham]

So like...bone china then?

[Grombobulous]

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.

[labcomputer]

HSR is just a willingness to say "fuck you" to people who want to hold up progress by refusing to sell land for any price, or who sue to stop a more environmentally-friendly transportation on the grounds of... <checks notes>... environmental impact.

Say what you will, but I don't consider eminent domain to be some kind of mystical technology that only wizards possess.

For automobiles, China didn't compete with the West on its own turf in heavily regulated markets. They embraced EVs from the beginning. Complex auto regulations can't save Europe because EVs are an end-run around all of the complexity of building an economical, low-polluting engine.

Indeed, Europe is talking about relaxing some of its environmental regulations for petrol cars, now that those regulations are more of a barrier to home companies than foreign ones.

[Grombobulous]

China is winning contracts to build out HSR in other countries. It’s not just about land sovereignty within China. CRRC has won construction contracts in multiple countries in Europe and Asia. When you build more high speed rail miles than the rest of the world combined, you tend to know what you’re doing.

I will point out, the #3 top selling vehicle in the UK is a Chinese SUV with a gasoline engine (Jaecoo 7).

I think the idea that China just can’t make a reasonably competitive ICE vehicle is another outdated notion about China.

[queenkjuul]

CRRC is, iirc, now the largest rolling stock manufacturer on earth, selling trains to countries all over the world.

Don't need eminent domain to do that.

Also, eminent domain is used routinely in the US, like for Texas' most recent highway expansions. And highways require a lot more land than rails. I don't buy that eminent domain is the real reason here.

[torginus]

Very surprisingly it's never mentioned that car turbos have very similar requirements - spin at 10K+ RPM at 10000K+ for or tens of thousands of hours with little expected maintenance.

They are often made of superalloys, yet regular cars, down to econoboxes costing 20-30k or less have them, and are made by the millions.

[ReptileMan]

If you figure a way for airplane to stop on a cloud in mid flight to wait for a tow vehicle I have a Nobel award for you in whatever field you want.

[queenkjuul]

If you enforced aircraft-grade maintenance and inspection regimes for automobiles, i bet you'd practically never need a tow truck

[moi2388]

Do blimps count?

[SecretDreams]

> but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants.

I'm not sure China is known for their ICE designs. Like Korea, I suspect China partially pushed hard for EV specifically because the complexity in a battery + motor system is meaningfully simpler than the ICE equivalent and there's relatively little overlap in many facets outside of some first principles.

Jet engines are like ICE, but with a very reliability threshold. ICE is already complicated, but OEMs will accept a certain deviation on reliability if they need to because occurence might be low and severity is manageable. Not so in jet engine design. A single failure is a big deal.

[toast0]

Chinese automakers do (or did) make ICE and hybrid cars, too.

I suspect it's wouldn't have been good strategy to try to build those cars for the US, CA or EU markets. An ICE engine is relatively straightforward, but hitting emissions and fuel efficiency targets is complex. [1] And the future of ICE cars, especially in those markets, is limited... why build out emissions expertise, when you can get your foot in the door with EVs?

[1] I recently bought a 1981 VW Vanagon which I try to maintain. That's a perfect time period to see how emissions control forces engine design. My engine has fuel injection and EGR, but a few years back has the same engine block with a carburetor; california emissions uses the same engine, but adds electronic ignition and an o2 sensor in the exhaust for closed loop injection control. A couple years later and they added water cooling. Every so often emissions and efficiency standards got harder to meet and you have to do more stuff.

[userbinator]

Chinese automakers do (or did) make ICE and hybrid cars, too.

Mainly copies of Japanese and US designs.

[coredog64]

My Great Wall SUV had a Mitsubishi engine and a GM computer.

[coldtea]

So? Japanese cars and motorcycles were derided for being cheap copies of European and US designs initially too.

[Grombobulous]

The Jaecoo 7 is the #3 top selling car in the UK right now and it has an ICE powertrain.

Low reliability and safety issues kills car brands. Consumers really don’t like it.

Sure, jet engines are on a very different level of reliability standards, but it seems to me that the concepts are all the same: highly regulated market of low-margin complex heavy machinery where it’s difficult to be a new entrant in the market.

[leonidasrup]

China pushed EVs for multiple reasons:

1. Geopolitical risk of oil dependence. Domestic Chinese EVs are not dependent on imported oil. Oil imports would be at risk in case of a Taiwan conflict.

2. China already had established battery manufacturing. EVs are essentially batteries on wheels. For example the BYD Company (formerly named Shenzhen BYD Battery Company Limited) manufactured batteries long before manufacturing cars.

[roysting]

I agree. They built the J-20, including the engines with several variants. When you look at the whole landscape, it is clearly deliberate and strategic prioritization and sequencing that was the limiting factor.

It doesn’t even take a lot to understand that. It’s the same tried method they’ve been applying for decades now; information gathering, rapid prototyping cycles, quality threshold goals, led by overcapacity dominance. It’s really not much different than agile and “hyperscaling”, accepting massive losses for a long period because the objective is shifting core dynamics.

Ironically, in the US it was used to crush competition and innovation and parasitize the society while on the global scale, China is increasing competition and/or breaking up the monopoly of the parasitic cabal that controls the West and long the world.

[mc32]

High speed rail technology is not a secret. We in the US just don’t have the will. Auto technology in China was acquired via tech transfers. In order to open mfg in China foreign concerns were forced into partnerships with local companies; moreover there was an effort to obtain foreign trade secrets. Metallurgy for jet fans isn’t one of the technologies the west has tried to partner with China. At this time the UK, the US and Russia hold the lead in that technology -maybe France has some too.

[margalabargala]

Tech transfers caught China up, but they then innovated on top of that. They are certainly capable of doing so, they just don't see the need when they can simply use someone else's tech.

[queenkjuul]

Year the article very much ignores that Geely actually can produce a competent modern combustion engine. Their latest model for use in hybrid drivetrains broke the record for thermal efficiency in a consumer combustion engine.

It also treats EV motors as "commodity brushless motors" completely glossing over the actual engineering behind modern EV motors.

Twenty five years ago a Chinese supercomputer was laughable. Today they build them. Ten years ago Chinese cars were laughable, now they're sold worldwide. Ten years ago people laughed at the "metro to nowhere," now it's the core of a new central business district.

The fact that domestic Chinese engines have entered military service, to me, is a pretty strong indicator that given another decade or two, they'll be building some of the most competitive jet engines on earth.

[torginus]

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.

[null_shift]

As someone in the industry it is amusing to watch HN do some cursory googling and then make definitive statements with confidence.

[dmitrygr]

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

[OneDonOne]

It is not the pen, it is the pen tip. Ballpoint pen tips are microscopic tungsten carbide ball held inside ultra-thin steel sockets. So you need cutting tolerances precise to 0.001 millimeters. If the socket is a fraction of a micron too loose, the ink leaks. Too tight, and the pen won't write.

Source from al-Arabiya: https://english.alarabiya.net/variety/2017/01/14/At-last-Chi...

The point (no pun intended) is that China was beginning to crack the processes for making the precision machine tools that make machine tools.

[dingaling]

The ballpoint pen was invented in 1938. It doesn't rely on any arcane manufacturing technology.

[inglor_cz]

I am 47 and ballpoint pens have visibly improved since the 1990s, at least the cheap ones (never had an expensive one). The risk of accidental staining is by now basically zero, it used to be high enough that you avoided putting a pen into your shirt pocket even for an hour.

[mwigdahl]

Hence the fading away of the "nerd with pocket protector" stereotype...

[OneDonOne]

They do. The micro-precision subculture required to (in order):

1. Powder prep your tungsten carbide

2. Form said powder

3. Thermally prepare the resulting slurry using a vacuum forming furnace

4. Finish it with diamond lap grinders, lapping machines and polishing machines

5. Clean it ultrasonically, with solvent, rinse, then dry them.

6. Have the metrology required to test thousands of micron-scale balls a day (a world-beating skill in itself)

7. Build a QA lab that can assure the quality of said balls statistically (you can test them all).

8. And then integrate them via socket assembly

are not just hereditary, but proprietary. And assuming a competitor does manage to achieve the basic ISO 3290 and ASTM F2094 standards, you still need tacit knowledge. Stuff like sintering temperature curves, proper powder grain distribution, polishing chemistry, proper statistical rejection thresholds and a whole lot more.

And that is just the ball. Not the socket, or the ink channels. Making a perfectly spherical 0.5 mm ± 0.0001 mm tungsten carbide ball requires the same techniques used in building micromotors, medical devices, and semiconductor subcomponent manufacturing. Techniques such as high-volume sorting, advanced powder metallurgy, controlled sintering, and precision machines that operate 24-hour shifts without drifting. All operated by modern process engineers who are the spiritual (or actual?) descendants of Swiss watchmakers or the glassmakers of Murano.

[margalabargala]

They are not microscopic! I can easily see the balls in the tips of ballpoint pens.

[OneDonOne]

The ball is not microscopic, but the tolerances required to make the ball spherical and fit into the socket are.

[margalabargala]

Exactly, so this sentence is incorrect:

> Ballpoint pen tips are microscopic tungsten carbide ball held inside ultra-thin steel sockets

[OneDonOne]

Yes indeed, you are correct. My mistake.

[jurgenburgen]

The BBC article even mentions that they are milliscopic, not microscopic.

> 2.3-millimetre

[leonidasrup]

China's ballpoint pen quality as a reflection of manufacturing quality:

" China's inability to produce a complete, high-quality ballpoint pen came to widespread attention in 2015, when Prime Minister Li Keqiang singled out the products at a seminar in Beijing, noting that his writing was "rough" when he used Chinese-made ballpoint pens. For Li, China's failure to manufacture a complete ballpoint pen was indicative of the Chinese economy's weaknesses. "That's the real situation facing us," Li said at the time. "We cannot make ballpoint pens with a smooth writing function." "

https://www.smh.com.au/world/finally-china-manufactures-a-ba...

[TFNA]

You fell for a meme that was tired years ago already (your link is from 2017, after all). The article itself notes, “Relatively low-value items, like ballpoint pens, have not been a priority”, so obviously this says little about higher-priority military and industrial areas to which the CCP devotes greater effort.

[margalabargala]

Ball point pens are surprisingly high precision items. Making a good ball point pen is not easy.

[8note]

is it really a tired meme?

its a clear prioritzation choice from the government, and that prioritization is itself a technology

notably this same prioritization mode resulted in the soviet union failing to produce quality of life improvements for its citizens.

the failure is that the CCP is unable to prioritize making simple useful stuff

[TFNA]

Have you been to urban China anytime after that 2017 article? The country is now as developed as anywhere else, indeed it feels like it is gradually overtaking other developed countries. The comparison to the Soviet Union feels ridiculous to anyone with a firsthand experience of the country.

[jurgenburgen]

The political push in the US to cling to legacy fossil fuel technologies feels to me more Soviet-like if anything.

[cpursley]

Not really, the Soviets pushed all sorts of new transportation and energy generation ideas, not to mention nuclear.

[BigTTYGothGF]

What country do you live in, and are they currently capable of making ballpoints?

[NitpickLawyer]

It's not even that. You can have all the designs you need, but you also need a bunch of downstream tech to get from drawings to production. This is something that centrally planned economies struggle with. You can't 5-year-plan your way to jet-engines if you haven't previously 5-year-planned for all the auxiliary infrastructure needed to support that.

We already know this was an issue with the soviets, back when they had the plans for us jet engines (for fighter planes), but couldn't replicate them. Same for stealth, hell even some of their rocketry. And the soviets had plenty of auxiliary systems already in place, during the cold war. As someone said above, they could do quantity, they could do limited high-quality, but couldn't do both at the same time.

There are things that work with 5-year plans: railroads, road infra, buildings, etc. And there are things that are not that easy, and take multiple decades from when the order comes to having it realised. Something that's not immediately obvious for western folks is that when you mix central planning with authoritarian governments, you will get a huge number of pain points along the way, where orders come downwards towards the ones executing them, and overreporting/missrepresentations/lies go upwards. It's like the longest game of telephone, where you start from the top, demanding x y z, get reports that you're on your way of getting 3x, 3y, 3z and in reality you have some of x, none of y, and z looks like z but it's actually three x's in a trench coat.

[selimthegrim]

This is of course exemplified by the joke - what's the famous Soviet machine that cuts wood into two pieces? One that cuts wood into three pieces.

[azan_]

Isn't China currently among the leaders of material science with lots of top 10 universities located in China? [0] (in rankings that do not incorporate prestige but actual scientific output)

[0] https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/

[DaedalusII]

its difficult to see from the lens of software and information technology, and open source academia, but physical science is often discovered via experimentation and cant just be brute forced. usually it disseminates as it is adopted into industrial process and is then copied. a lot of scientific discoveries are made due to impulsive-creative intuition

for example: - until the end of ww1 the haber bosch process was confined to germany

- jet engine turbine blades today

- most historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire , medieval napalm that nobody has been able to replicate even now

[wmf]

Quantity isn't quality.

[azan_]

Isn't having universities in global top10 actual quality?

[SecretDreams]

Where are the jet engines?

[litbear2022]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Y-20#Specifications_(Y...

[azan_]

In the making I'm sure. It's really naive to think that jet engine is challenge that won't be overcome.

[queenkjuul]

In the J-20Bs

[eth0up]

All I know is that they produce a lot of engineers, while the US produces a lot gender studies majors. I rarely say it, but I do not foresee much that they won't be leaving us sharply behind on soon, other than poverty and homelessness, which we have pretty well covered.

[bluGill]

There are about as many gender study majors in the U.S. per year as there are aviation engineering majors. That is one small niche of engineering majors that includes all of gender study.

[eth0up]

I guess I can relax and stop worrying that we're falling behind a bit. But I do wonder what the numbers really are, and just how many engineers we produce compared to China, of course, without qualifying everyone that learned Visual Basic as an engineer, unless, of course, that's where they're actually getting their own numbers from.

[switchbak]

I see you're getting downvotes, but my intuition strongly aligns with yours. Many of the top minds/academics in (North) America are from overseas, and most of the time that's India and China. And it's been this way for a long time, and it basically makes sense from a numbers perspective. Note that I say this without a particular bias for or against.

So when many of the top minds, publishing most of the top papers in your country got educated in USA but will most likely return to their country of origin - that needs to be factored in to the calculation (especially if tensions increase). At the end of the day I think it's arrogant and wrongheaded to pretend that the USA has dominance in R&D, against China in particular.

[inglor_cz]

That's actually pretty bad. The rest of the world is very willing to spend money on American aerospace products and services.

Is it willing to buy gender theory from you for similar amounts of money? If not, the production of specialized majors should not be 1:1.

[amanaplanacanal]

Even in our "productivity at any cost" society, sometimes people still study things that they find interesting. That's probably a good thing, in the long run.

[user_of_the_wek]

Do you think its zero sum? We could just put all the gender studies students into engineering and expect them to thrive there?

[amanaplanacanal]

I think your understanding of the numbers is multiple orders of magnitude off. Looking at a recent year (2024) in the US, the total number of "Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender, and Group Studies" majors graduated 11961, whereas "Engineering" was 193,458 and "Engineering/Engineering-related Technologies/Technicians" was 83,665.

From: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/SummaryTables/report/360?templateI...

[ivell]

Seems they have figured out the single crystal blade tech https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-crystal-...

[akiselev]

From the article:

> DD6 is a second-generation nickel-based single-crystal superalloy developed by the institute with fully independent intellectual property. Its chief engineer, Li Jiarong, said the alloy’s performance matches or exceeds that of comparable second-generation superalloys used in Europe and the United States, at a lower production cost.

US manufacturers have already developed sixth-generation SC superalloys and most Western airlines are on engines with third- and fourth-generation materials.

The technology behind single crystal superalloys is relatively well understood, the problem is getting the process reliable enough to be economical in an industry that requires tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to develop through trial and error. The TFA's point is that unlike EVs or semiconductors, the turbofan industry is between a rock and a hard place that China's other successful industries weren't.

[IHateAcronyms]

TFA = The Featured Article/The F**ing Article

[kergonath]

The word is "fucking". We’re grown-ups, we can use grown-up words.

[dzhiurgis]

Can Chinese companies order just the blades from RR or P&W?

I've watched their manufacturing video recently and shocked how much of it was hand labour - it's not something I'd associate with precision. My partner said they must know better tho lol.

[kevin_thibedeau]

The RR video showing manual assembly of wax molds is a low volume development line. It isn't their main production process.

[tedd4u]

I've seen that video. Guaranteed they wouldn't have put the slightest bit of information in there if they thought would help the competition.

[notahacker]

They can order engines from RR or P&W

But those companies have no commercial interest in supporting a Chinese manufacturer that just wants the blades even without export controls, when they can make much higher margins selling whole engines that must be maintained using their parts (in practice variants of the engines destined for COMAC also omit some of the IP that finds its way onto Airbus and Boeing because you can help a customer too much...)

[didntknowyou]

recently? and you posted an almost 10yo article?

[dmitrygr]

yes, compared to the length of time ballpoint pens have existed (88 years -- since 1938), this is very recent - only 9 years ago