While answering one of Asif's posts in another thread, I realized that a large part of China's recent defense success can be laid to a subtle military-industrial strategy China has adopted: production-line reverse-engineering.
When China imports a defense item (e.g. a Su-27) from abroad, it tries not only to learn how to manufacture said product, but, also, how to build a product line capable of manufacturing and even innovating/inventing future products in that category (a 4th-gen/5th-gen fighter assembly line).
Now that strategy is bearing fruit--most clearly in the cases of the J-15 and the J-20/31. But even aspects of the Chinese defense industry not directly touched by product imports--say the Type 052D and Type 095 programs--are impacted by this sort of thinking. In both those cases, China benefited from seeing how other nations built shipborne radar and quiet submarine subsystems, and was able to improve its own programs without copying anything.
This is something no other major arms importer has tried to do over the last twenty years.
This is quite good for China, because China has a PPP ratio--free capital, raw materials, and labor costs are all cheaper, which means that eventually, equivalent domestic R&D-->manufacturing firms can produce the same or even better than imports for a given cost of input. All it takes is R&D bureaus and manufacturing firms that operate to global defense industry standards, of which China is possibly only a few years away from building.
This is the advantage that let the Soviets keep up with the West in certain aspects of military hardware for a third of a century. This sort of improvement is a lot longer-lasting for a military than just having the latest and greatest toy, and the PLA's best-kept secret.
When China imports a defense item (e.g. a Su-27) from abroad, it tries not only to learn how to manufacture said product, but, also, how to build a product line capable of manufacturing and even innovating/inventing future products in that category (a 4th-gen/5th-gen fighter assembly line).
Now that strategy is bearing fruit--most clearly in the cases of the J-15 and the J-20/31. But even aspects of the Chinese defense industry not directly touched by product imports--say the Type 052D and Type 095 programs--are impacted by this sort of thinking. In both those cases, China benefited from seeing how other nations built shipborne radar and quiet submarine subsystems, and was able to improve its own programs without copying anything.
This is something no other major arms importer has tried to do over the last twenty years.
This is quite good for China, because China has a PPP ratio--free capital, raw materials, and labor costs are all cheaper, which means that eventually, equivalent domestic R&D-->manufacturing firms can produce the same or even better than imports for a given cost of input. All it takes is R&D bureaus and manufacturing firms that operate to global defense industry standards, of which China is possibly only a few years away from building.
This is the advantage that let the Soviets keep up with the West in certain aspects of military hardware for a third of a century. This sort of improvement is a lot longer-lasting for a military than just having the latest and greatest toy, and the PLA's best-kept secret.