Agree with you on the Chinese needing to up their game on jet engine technology.
Your comment concerning bombers highlights the pluses and minuses of using Antonov. On the plus side, Antonov is a world leader (if not THE world leader) in building very big, multiengine things that fly and carry really heavy, outsized loads. On the minus side, those big things are not bombers and are ...well, I guess some of them (smaller multiengine cargo turboprops and the STOL jet cargo transports) are combat aircraft.
However. at the moment, Antonov appears to have a lot of surplus engineering capacity according to the article and Freeper comments. So maybe they will form the foundation of a development team headed up by different engineers; ones who do have experience designing big combat aircraft. Tupolev? Sukhoi?
Maybe Russia and China will flip R&D roles and China will develop and Russia will adopt: Chinese exterior, Russian interior.
Just watch out for the backdoors in the chips.
Antonov today is a decaying mostly empty property. It mostly stopped functioning in 1990s developing exactly two and a half types since that time. Two of them in cooperation with Russian companies and the programs were a sort of Russian welfare policy to keep Antonov afloat.
Today it is almost over. The value is in patents and plans from the old times.