John Minnich

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268 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

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Unhedged · The Economics Show: China wanted western tech. Now, the tables have turned. · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

Boeing is over a century old.

Airbus is a half century old company that builds on 50 plus years prior to that of the development of aircraft manufacturing capabilities.

China, for all intents and purposes, in the early 2000s began from scratch.

They'd had efforts at developing a homegrown airliner going back to the late part of the Mao era.

And there'd been efforts at developing sort of jointly with other American aircraft producers in the 80s and 1990s.

But the C-919 was really the first of its kind in terms of an effort to develop a homegrown large commercial aircraft.

And these are incredibly complex machines.

After advanced semiconductors and some of the tools used to make them, a large commercial aircraft and the key high-value components in them, like jet engines and avionics systems, are probably the most complex technical systems human beings have ever developed.

So in any world, it was going to be difficult for China to develop these things.

And China naturally set unrealistic goals for itself.

The idea that they were going to go from zero to 100 in a decade and a half was never going to happen given the complexity of developing these kinds of systems.

So it just takes time.

They're really, really complex pieces of technology.

Nonetheless, through the process of developing the C919, China has learned a tremendous amount, both about the development of specific systems from its foreign partners, but also about the broader process of actually integrating all of these into a finished product.

Airbus and Boeing have both formed various kinds of partnerships, primarily Airbus, less so Boeing, largely because Boeing for so long was the clear market leader.

So Boeing had less incentive to engage in broad-based technology transfer in exchange for market access because it dominated the Chinese market already.

But Airbus, when it was trying to take market share away from Boeing in the 1990s and in the 2000s,

did form various partnerships, whether they were formal joint ventures in every case, I'm not entirely sure, but they did things like set up their first final assembly line outside of Europe in Tianjin.

They set up R&D centers.

I mean, they did a lot to try to chip away at Boeing's dominant market position, a lot that involved

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