http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/04/china-gets-into.html
Looks like China is getting into the aircraft business. Apparently they expect to start selling aircraft by 2020. I'm not sure what I think of this. The objective factors are against it, but I never count the Chinese out. China's industrial infrastructure and human resources are entirely against it. They are good at lots of cheap stuff with relatively low quality standards, but right now they don't even make a car that would stand up against a Honda. The quality standards that are required of an aircraft make a car look like a cub scout whittling project. Honda took 10 years to get a prototype for a 2 + 5 private jet. And a small jet like that is tinker toys compared to a full airliner, and the HondaJet is in very, very limited production.
It looks like China has a fuselage but no wing, so they've got the easy part started. I think it's telling that they don't have a wing yet. That's the key to the whole project. The fuselage is just an aluminum tube in comparison. They also have a ton of work to do in fatigue life assessment, which is a black art that has to be learned the hard way, and Boeing isn't helping them there.
Every single part has to be tested and a maintenance cycle established and documented. For millions of individual parts. And any change in any part forces a reevaluation for that part and anything nearby.
Much will be made of the fact that they've been making parts for Boeing and Airbus. That's irrelevant. Boeing is smart enough to teach the Chinese as little as possible and hold back the important stuff, and manufacturing from plans isn't designing from scratch by a long shot. At this point they know what the machines look like and that's about it. The 2020 date is smoke. They'll probably pull it off eventually, but it's going to take longer and it will depend very strongly on how the rest of china's economy goes over the next 10 years.
The biggest challenge for China is that in 12 years Boeing will be in full production of the 787 with its ultralight composite structures and high efficiency engines, and looking at rolling out the next generation. China will be lucky to be producing a 757 clone by then. For this to work, they'll have to sell these things for below cost to compete and get market share and keep playing catchup for a few product cycles. That's a horrifically expensive proposition. Again, it all depends on if their economy can handle that kind of negative cash flow. I'll watch with great interest.
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