Ah yes, the Comac C919, 8 years late and counting, and brought to you by the company whose sole previous model still has trouble landing on wet runways:
Repost:
> Funny thing to mention, I think 95% of industrial espionage effort yields zero if not negative benefit. The problem is that you are always stealing a "cat in a bag" For machinery, rarely there is anything like a "secret sauce:" Soon after the fall of USSR, Chinese defence companies flocked to Russia buying every defence tech possible. Russian companies had a funny way to troll Chicoms: they will not sell them a simple, mid-tier equipment, but only the top notch, and most complicated one, with which even they themselves had problem dealing.
> For example, Soyuz transferred tech for their super expensive, small volume manufactured R179 engine. Yes, that was Soviet response to F135 class engines. The showstopper was its very high temperature turbine made with monocrystaline blades grown in situ within (!) a ceramic fibre reinforcing mesh.
> Even with all blueprints, tooling, documentation of manufacturing processes, and working samples on their hands, Chinese only made like 10 working engines. That state program to copy R179 continues to this day as I know.
> And I think they spent way more money on it in 25 years, than if they were to create a thing from scratch. That is something obvious to every experienced engineer, but not to bureaucrats from Chinese three letter agencies who are convinced that they are just an inch away from some "secret trick" that will magically make everything work.
My main point is that such big, state bureaucracy driven initiatives to make a Chinese analogue of some expensive widget often end up spending many times more resources that developing it from scratch in China with Chinese engineers, and often end up with inferior final product, than if it was an own original development.
different kinds of bottlenecks. I’m assuming one set is more easily transferrable than the other.
It's like back in those days where HP/SGI/IBM had their own version of 'C' compilers and it was a nightmare to port from one platform to another. Especially when they used non standard behavior (e.g. dereferencing null returns 0) and use it as part of their core logic.
You REALLY need to know your stuff to make things work. Source code alone isn't enough.
I have no doubt their airplane will ultimately be successful.
But it seems that for one reason or other, technology theft is attractive enough to be a primary method of "innovating" in some places.
It's really a matter of degrees. People copy anything they see that seems like a good idea (better than the idea they previously had). It's just a matter of how much original effort is put in vs how much detail from the other party's effort is acquired and used to fast-track the development.
In complex projects like this, just seeing provides limited benefit. But in other simpler cases, just see another's working model can convey enough information for the newcomer to quickly come up to speed and compete.
get the overall point, but not sure this is a good example.
Samuel Slater had evaded British law against emigration of textile workers in order to seek his fortune in America. Considered the father of the United States textile industry, he eventually built several successful cotton mills in New England and established the town of Slatersville, Rhode Island."
https://www.thoughtco.com/richard-arkwright-water-frame-1991...
See also Japanese cars from the 1970s versus the 1990s to today.
In the 60 and early 70ies, Made in Japan guitars, specially copies of Gibson and Fender guitars where not well regarded.
But they started to greatly improve, and by the late 70ies and 80ies they were equal if not better than their originals (specially Fender which was not well managed by CBS at the time).
In the copy department you still have brands like Burny/Fernandez or Tokai, and also brands that outgrew the simple copy business with genuine models such as Ibanez, Yamaha or Takamine (a few lawsuits may have helped them develop in that direction).
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...
Answer: yes.
Refactoring other people's code is often harder than coming up with your own, and this is when you have the corresponding ability. Just receiving source code/ design without know-how to actually implement anything might even be worse in the long run.
Do you have source for that?
> They even managed to beat competitors and export their trains to Turkey and Argentina..
This does not necessary mean their trains are better than anyone's else.
Please note that they forced the technology transfer from Siemens. That is one of the key issues with today's China.
What happened with Siemens is tragic because they wanted so hard to get a foothold in the Chinese market, they agreed to the technology transfer. In the long term, they helped start a competitor that now beats them in other foreign markets.
Like the sibling post says, the tragedy is that they got both companies to give up their tech because each thought the winner would get a monopoly over the entire domestic market for at least a decade or so.