[Tallguy]

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.

Ever look around a US college campus to see how many asians are in the Engineering & Mathematics departments? I'd be a little bit careful making a broad statement about creativeness. All that China needs to do is train AND keep the talent and they too will be cutting edge.

Besides, how do we know that the Chinese are not already working on "game changing" technology? If I want to defeat an F22, probably the least effective way to go about it is to try to build a better version of it & hope that you can match the pilot training. Any failure in that chain-of-events and you've just chucked 10's of Billions of dollars down a rathole.

[Toidylop]

just don't know how much the Chinese know... but the Brit seem to find a cheap way to detect stealth aircraft with "cheap" cellphone technology !

[PIF]

Saw a stat a while back that the US turns out about 60,000 engineers a year to China’s 600,000.