China’s Engineering by Theft

Foreign Policy had an article on the first Chinese aircraft carrier already being obsolete.  With major weapon systems that is not unusual.  The development time is so long, the new technologies are making the current systems obsolete by the time they get to the field.  That part is not new and the aircraft carrier was not a good example because the second and third aircraft carriers had catapults and better designs than the first one.  They are moving pretty fast in this area, but they are so far behind it will take awhile to show that much progress.

What makes this interesting to me is the problems that come from stealing technology, something I spent some time on in my 2nd Edition of the Chinese Information War.  Most of the examples were already debated in the building of the Chinese aircraft industry, built on stolen technologies and “shared” joint ventures with other countries.  These agreements were forced by Chinese laws and not the business interests of those companies.  One company executive I quoted said his company would never give over this kind of technology even though they shared working space and built engines in China.  He worked with PLA officers who were the designers so it kind of makes you wonder how dual use fits in to this kind of technology exchange.

In the aircraft industry, Chinese engineers soon became dependent on the technology they were stealing to make progress.  They had no reason to innovate or improve the products because when they came to a roadblock, they stole or acquired the solution from somebody who had already done that.   It doesn’t make good engineers, though the Chinese have many of those now.  It reminded me of the Russians stealing designs for military aircraft in the 80’s and 90’s.  Those aircraft looked good until you got close up or compared their performance against similar aircraft made somewhere else.  It took two generations to start building something that was comparable, sometimes even better, than  world producers.  Eventually, both countries have to stop stealing and start innovating, and they are in that transition zone today.  But it kind of makes you wonder why they still feel it necessary to steal technology rather than invent it.  They file millions of patents every year so they must not be stealing everything.  Maybe they just don’t know how to quit.