China Is Not "Ten-Feet Tall!"

Profile photo for HistorianX HistorianX · Follow Former Scholar in History and PhilosophyUpdated Apr 26 Is China capable of building fighter jets that are as advanced as America's F-22 or F-35 stealth fighters? As someone who has worked with the Chinese and Chinese engineers, my answer is categorical no. Some of the answers given here are just hogwash - Chinese jets are crashing left and right, and Chinese jets have never seen active combat, it's hilarious to even think about calling these jets effective. So the reason why I'm saying China can never catch up, is because even other western nations are having trouble matching the US in its industrial capacities. China is a long way from having the type of corporate governance, engineering discipline and logistic sophistication to pull this off. There are a few reasons: Think Conway's law - a company's product is reflective of its communication structure, and vice versa. It is totally true of American, German and Japanese companies, the Chinese will be no different. If you have worked in a Chinese company as an executive, you'd understand that decisions are made not based on data or facts or analyses, but on politics. And politics are mostly determined by bloodline and conformity. Chinese companies decide what to do based on ruling families’ (and often times the CCP’s) wishes and commands. You can survive with one bad decision but you can't survive a hundred. You can do the math there. In fact, this problem applies not just to Chinese military engineering, but also applies directly to the PLA itself - the whole organization is not run by an elected, informed civilian government, but by the political commissars who overpower civilian and military management, and reports directly to the politburo and the chairman of the CCP. Imagine how often they fuck up there - the answer is, A LOT, and it’s not like the US where people do post-mortem analysis to figure out what went wrong, in China, of the million fuckups that happen each year, every single one is silenced by the politburo directly or indirectly. Component engineering vs. system engineering. These two vastly different, many cultures like the Japanese and the Germans excel at engineering components, but can't do shit when it comes to designing systems. System engineering is almost an exclusively American/Anglo discipline, and is dominated by the English speaking countries. There is a reason for it. That reason is flattened organization and separation of powers. Also, the advance in scientific reasoning and data driven engineering techniques require organizations that are receptive to data and changes. The Chinese I'm sorry to say, are perhaps the least organized and least open culture there is on the planet. Their engineering industries are just utterly horrible. Capital and talent flight. A lot of people who praise China are people who don't understand Chinese culture, history or economy. China is an economy and country lead by people who don't care much about it, the elites have been embezzling money and leaving for US, EU, AUS, UK and Canada for decades. And this trend is continuing. How are you supposed to catch up when your best talent is leaving and your capital is drying up? Labor intensive mentality. This is what drives good talent out of China. Engineers in china work overtime to the point that they die in front of their desks. Engineers in the US are highly specialized and familiar with automation that they work comfortably normal hours and are well respected for their expertise. Stark differences, you can't bridge bad methods and bad organization culture by working longer. Chinese opaqueness. This is something very few non-Chinese would understand. The Chinese do the exact opposite that Americans do - the latter usually advertise the sure things and not mention experimental features; the former is one that pretends experimental features are working. This is why a lot of people get fooled by Chinese prosperity, very few of what you see on the news is remotely accurate. And quite unfortunately, china is a country where people are content with this sort of culture, if books and newspapers say one thing, they'd believe it. Not exactly a culture that can advance in technology meaningfully. The Chinese love touting how many papers and how many patents they have in key technological areas, yeah, if patents and papers amount to technological advancement, then IBM would rule the world. Don't forget that the first papers on stealth and radar cross section reduction were published in the Soviet Union. China is now becoming more closed and more insulated from the rest the world, its best case scenario is to become Russia today in two decades. I doubt the Chinese would even be as self reliant and as effective as the Russians in twenty years. Fraud - I don't think this needs elaboration. China has more fraud than actual substance. Military culture - unlike most “western” (including Middle East and Eastern Europe) militaries, the China has a completely different military culture since antiquity. Military is where the poorest go to get fed. It is a bloated freelancer workforce for the government. Not only does the PLA not seen real modern warfare ever, its last real serious military conflict was with Vietnam where tens of thousands of malnourished, poorly-trained peasants charged at, shot and stabbed each other - wasn’t by any definition a modern war. So what has the PLA been up to? The last largest mobilizations were the lockdown of Wuhan at the beginning of Covid, where they dragged people to medial facilities and rumored to have burnt people alive; The other was the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang region (East Turkistan). I think you can do the math there, a military that is most often used as a riot police force, is not exactly one that can fight at all. Not to mention much of the military budget is squandered on stupid shit like running their own hotels, brothels, karaoke bars, etc for the higher ups and PLA officers - this I had first hand experience witnessing, it was ridiculous. Not to mention that the PLA is perhaps the largest drug-smuggling operation in China. In essence, the PLA functions more like the Russian underworld than like an actual military. Let’s be frank, the Russian and the Italian mafia aren’t built for joint military operations, neither is the PLA. You can’t design good weapons for the context if you have zero experience with the context of modern warfare… What we’ve seen China build so far tells us they can’t engineer anything on their own - I’m adding this part to the answer because some will question my approach at answering this from a more methodological and philosophical point of view. Well here it is, if you look at the J-31, it is a laughable piece of junk from an engineering design point of view. First of all, why does this plane even have a half-covered canopy in which pilot cannot see what’s behind the plane? Well we know why the F-35 does - because of VTOL lift fan for F-35B variant. So why does J-31 have the same? Literally no other 4.5- or 5th gen plane has this. Secondly, despite having similar shapes as F-35, the J-31 has very sharp edges, not to mention the two engine not-very-stealthy engine exhausts. The whole design of J-31 screams “I copied someone’s homework”, and funny enough, they copied someone’s homework from more than two decades ago! Don’t even get me started on that boxy flying coffin known as J-20, or the new carriers they’re rolling out - many of the “design decisions” don’t make sense, because these were designs copied from other planes and ships! From an engineer’s point of view, when you look at a country’s military-industrial complex rolling out shoddy copycat designs like this, it is just painfully obvious that the whole industry cannot think creatively, let alone originally. If they can’t even get a 20-plus-year-old design right today, what makes you think they can engineer a comparable contemporary in 20–30 years? If you want to look back in history, after WWII it only took the Japanese and the Germans around 20 years to rebuild industrial capacity and to catch up to the Americans technologically. Even for countries like South Korea and Taiwan that developed after WWII, the transition out of low-end manufacturing and into some sort of engineering design took around 20 years or so. Not to mention a country like Israel, just astonishing how fast it propelled itself to first-tier defense engineering. China had access to way more modern tech and opportunities to leapfrog everybody than all these countries in the past, but after 30 years, with the largest pool of hot money in the world slushing around, and this is all that China had to show to the world? It points to a severe cultural problem, and it’s something that a country cannot get itself out of, unfortunately. The truth is that China's engineering capabilities lag behind South Korea and Taiwan. And my experience is that these two countries’ engineering industries are already quite behind compared to the US. With China's economy in the shitters and an idiot at the helm calling call the shots, catch up? How? Russian engineering is sloppy but practical. Indian engineering is still developing but they have way better corporate governance than China. There's no point wasting time worrying about China catching up, the only thing China had going for itself is its size. If it had the population of Japan or Brazil, China would be completely irrelevant today. This goes back to what I was saying about systems engineering - just because you copied someone’s design of the system, doesn’t mean you can copy all the knowledge that the hundreds if not thousands of relationships between components. One little change and the system could fail, that’s what makes systems design hard. You can copy the design but you can’t copy the team, the organization and the culture that produced the design. China repeatedly talks about having the most advanced designs of something despite NEVER designing anything like it in the past and never actually employed these weapons in combat - yeah this is like drafting someone who has the build of Jordan or LeBron but never actually played basketball. Seriously? Why are we falling for this? 373.2K views View 2,198 upvotes View 50 shares