> To my knowledge, the production technology for leading edge Western fighters hasn’t been sold to any non-Western country.
It won’t be long before the Chinese will be able to devise their own production technology without the help of the West.
Their political ideology is thoroughly morally bankrupt, but the Chinese are no fools. They have a bloody-minded cleverness that is one day going to bump into the West really, really hard.
And they can do stuff really quickly when they need to.
Dumb example: did you know that nearly all of those little hook assemblies that hold brassieres together are made in China? As are nearly all zippers, and nearly all buttons, and nearly all sewing needles?
Sure, those are only small goods — but the Chinese didn’t used to dominate small goods. This is all relatively new.
I wonder how long it will be before they make most of the bullets in the world? Cheap? I can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t.
The hi-tech stuff? I’d say they are already well on their way.
Well, what we've seen so far is that everything they make that's any good, they've imported the production line from the West. Another problem is that there's no real evidence the Chinese are able to come with completely new stuff on their own. In this respect, they're like the Taiwanese, the Japanese and the Koreans. There's a lot of incremental improvements, but nothing that is a generational leap vis-a-vis the existing state of the art. I'm sure the Chinese will eventually make fine cars, and so on. But truly revolutionary technology (and science) is likely to be the province of the West for a while yet.
Oh. . .and engines, I forgot to mention engines (they aren’t even close on that essential part either).
“I wonder how long it will be before they make most of the bullets in the world?”
Don’t know about best, but they still use lead, while we, for Green reasons, use tunstun - imported from China...