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The C919 is very similar to a North American aircraft. It was developed in tandem with Bombardier's C-Series (Now known as the Airbus A220). They leverage suppl

• lumost 6y ago
  There was a general claim from the late 80s to 90s that the invisible hand of the market would eventually move Americans to higher paying fields while allowing low wage international competition in manufacturing. As of 2020 the US has not seen these new jobs materialize outside the upper 5% of wage earners in the economy. The trend also shows that the US is losing the capability to manufacture high-end products such as iphones, planes ( 737-max), and trains. The manufacturing jobs which are returning tend to be making the same things that were made 3 decades ago with both inferior wages and quality to what those workers did previously (see American Factory). While lifting billions of people out of poverty in China and the developed world is a laudable achievement, and the realization of competitive international products was nigh inevitable - the elimination of domestic manufacturing in the US was largely the result of policy choices which enabled businesses to move out of US environmental and labor regulations while still selling into the US market.
  • ardy42 6y ago
    > There was a general claim from the late 80s to 90s that the invisible hand of the market would eventually move Americans to higher paying fields while allowing low wage international competition in manufacturing. Yeah, that was super short sighted. It boggles the mind that anyone could have believed that replacing many of the core productive bits of the economy with fluff like management (and ownership), finance, and hospitality would lead to anything but weakness. It's not like people in other countries are going to do most of the actual productive work and continue to let Americans lord over them indefinitely. Under that plan, America would just seem to climb until everyone else realizes there's no there there anymore, and then it will fall to a 3rd world economy who's main advantage is people there will be desperate enough to work for low wages for the new wealthy countries. Of course, some Americans will experience wealth over their lifetimes as that happens, but they're basically getting fat and happy by eating their family's seed corn.
    • free_rms 6y ago
      > It boggles the mind that anyone could have believed that replacing many of the core productive bits of the economy with fluff like management (and ownership), finance, and hospitality would lead to anything but weakness. When the decision is largely made by the managerial and financier classes... All of the "smartest people in the room" come through economics educations based on pat 2-line graphs and ricardian tables that make extremely grand claims about the world, and they all come out thinking the same way. They're not trying to be crooked, they're repeating what they were taught.
      • onepointsixC 6y ago
        It's mind-blowing how wrong they have been and yet continue to be turned to for major policy decisions and thought.
        • free_rms 6y ago
          Who else you going to turn to? Someone who was drummed out of the club for questioning things that everyone knows?
        • whimsicalism 6y ago
          They haven't been universally "wrong" - just wrong for large segments of the population. Equities in America (which are majority owned by the wealthiest top 1%) have done great and the wealth of those at the top has multiplied several times over. Given that a quarter of all political contributions are donated by the wealthiest top 0.01% (no, not a typo - and 84% of politicians take more from the top 0.01% than all donors giving less than $200), it is entirely unsurprising to me that our policy reflects their priorities.
    • fallingfrog 6y ago
      I think crushing organized labor was higher on their priority list than maintaining America’s industrial capacity.
    • infinite_beam 6y ago
  • aardvarkr 6y ago
    So do you know anything about what you’re talking about? Assembling iPhones is trivial. If that’s your idea of high end manufacture then I have news for you.
    • sudosysgen 6y ago
      Assembly != Manufacture. The US is not able to produce the screens or processors for a modern smartphone. Those are far from trivial.
    • mkr-hn 6y ago
      This would be a good place to share that news. Right now all I see is a low-effort dismissal in response to a comment that might be flawed, but at least has some effort behind it.
    • objclxt 6y ago
      > Assembling iPhones is trivial I think it might be you who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Many startups have tried to enter the consumer electronics space because they thought assembly would be “trivial”, only to find that once the first EVT samples start coming back from China it is anything but trivial. The tolerances on an iPhone are some of the best around. People don’t always appreciate just how strict the tolerances are for hardware assembly until they’ve tried to do it themselves.
      • birdyrooster 6y ago
        Not to mention the scale of the operation allows them to fit parts with varying tolerances together in a way that causes the best fitment when put together while having less waste.
    • babesh 6y ago
      The problem seems to be that there was a loss of focus on high end manufacturing in the US. Germany and northern Italy are the counter examples but even those countries were not immune to globalization. Also, it may be that globalization is coming for them next but that they are higher up the hierarchy. There seems to be a reawakening towards manufacturing in the US with electric cars and rockets. It’s not just Tesla and SpaceX. It’s Rivian, Rocket Lab, Virgin Galactic, etc... I hope it strengthens.
  • bmitc 6y ago
    > the elimination of domestic manufacturing in the US was largely the result of policy choices which enabled businesses to move out of US environmental and labor regulations while still selling into the US market. In other words, greed.
  • dehrmann 6y ago
    > planes (737-max) Huh? That plane had a design issue, not a manufacturing issue. While the loss of life was tragic, it also wasn't a major design blunder; it's the sort of thing you can fix with a new sensor and a software update. On the other hand, the 787 shows that the US can build planes. > trains Bombardier still makes trains in North America, and Alsom builds some trains in the US. I actually agree with your point, but tech manufacturing moving to East Asia is the bigger story. There's also an argument that the jobs didn't materialize because the workers weren't educated enough for better paying jobs and were too expensive for manufacturing jobs.
  • markus_zhang 6y ago
    I think the degeneration of the salary condition of the working class (including engineers) has two reasons: 1) The decline of Soviet Union. Since the largest opponent is gone, elites of US did not need to suck up the working class as they did not need that many manufactoring power any more, and they could finally throw the working class under the bus because they didn't need to virtual signal their "higher living standard of the working class". 2) The rise of competitive investment banking, including predative M&A and other "unethical" stuffs that blue blood bankers did not do (much) during the 50s and 60s.
  • roenxi 6y ago
    We can't overlook that the 80s and 90s were 30 years ago and a lot happens in 30 years. The entire political zeitgeist of the US for the last 30 years has not been a focus on building wealth or general prosperity. The government has official policies and occasionally rhetoric that excessive savings are a problem. Furthermore, speaking for my observations of the West, most of the political focus has been on progressing redistributive and environmental policy. Resisted every step of the way by people screaming that the policies are economic disasters. Mining and manufacturing is simply not easy in the West and doing what China does would be flat out illegal - so it isn't so strange if the States starts falling behind. There have been a lot of changes in the US for the last 30 years. Are there any that can honestly be said to have been pro-free-market, or even experimentally proven to be good ideas? China has been running constant experiments with free market policies in places like Shenzhen and has been building engines of manufacturing wealth and prosperity. Running experiments with an open mind is a great way to figure out what works.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • op03 6y ago
      Both the US and China are good at running experiments. How they handle larger and larger experiments that fail is where both blunder.
    • xxpor 6y ago
      >Furthermore, speaking for my observations of the West, most of the political focus has been on progressing redistributive and environmental policy. I have literally no idea where you're getting this from, at least from the US's perspective. The EPA has been gutted by the GWB and Trump admins, and the courts blocked anything serious the Obama admin tried to do. There was "welfare reform" in the 90s which reduced redistribution. Taxes on the wealthy have fallen a bunch. The bankruptcy reform in the mid 2000s was a disaster.
  • phkahler 6y ago
    >> There was a general claim from the late 80s to 90s that the invisible hand of the market would eventually move Americans to higher paying fields while allowing low wage international competition in manufacturing. A friend of mine was in business school in the 90s. She told me all that low end production was going to be outsourced to lower cost places, and that the US would be mostly management. I was stunned that not just a person, but a school could be so stupid. What, did they think the Chinese could make shit but would never learn how to manage things or design them? Worse yet, they can now do design, production, logistics, and the US no longer knows how to make a lot of things. I've even read that Krugman now sees that as a mistake. Way to go, followers of Jack Welch.
    • mncharity 6y ago
      "We'll export the factories, but keep all the manufacturing expertise here", is not something you'll often hear, from a manufacturing engineer. I once asked a Harvard Business School professor, how such nonsense could have been believed - did no one ask? He replied, I taught that... "the ideas were in the air". I've wondered, whether the concern for foreign propaganda, targeting US communities disconnected from reality by group-think, is perhaps misguided, in its focus on populists. Sure, sometimes you target propaganda at troops. But the usual and higher-leverage target for deception, is leadership.
• chaostheory 6y ago
  Here are some reasons. I'm not familiar enough with aircraft to argue either way though "Is China’s ARJ21 Just A MD-80 Copy Or Is It The Beginning Of China’s Rise In Commercial Aviation?" "The ARJ21 is partially built on specs from the old MD80, thanks to the presence of U.S. manufacturers in China. McDonnell Douglas was operating an MD80 manufacturing facility in Shaghai prior to its merger with Boeing, thanks to a lucrative deal inked in the early 90s. During this time period, presses and other parts were shipped from the United States to the Douglas facility. This gave the Chinese access to Western technology. Once Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, production of the MD80 ceased, marking the end of an era. After abandoning the final MD80 and MD90 assembly lines in China after about 30 frames, Aviation Industrial Company inherited McDonnell Douglas tooling." "It did not take long before China was announcing it’s “new” regional airliner project, unveiling a design that was eerily similar to the MD80 design. COMAC officials in Shanghai vehemently defend the ARJ21 as an original design. However, despite COMAC’s protests to the contrary, it is commonly accepted that the ARJ21 is fundamentally a redesign of the DC9. " https://www.avgeekery.com/is-chinas-arj21-just-a-md-80-copy-or-is-it-the-beginning-of-chinas-rise-in-commercial-aviation/ https://www.avgeekery.com/is-chinas-arj21-just-a-md-80-copy-...
  • nine_k 6y ago
    This is normal. Everyone learns by copying. Look at this as at completing a tutorial. What's interesting is the possible next steps building upon the experience gained.
    • chaostheory 6y ago
      The big question is can they since Xi has come to power? imo Xi is regressing China back to Mao style centralization. Centralization has big costs such as severely stunting creativity.
      • nine_k 6y ago
        Here's the chance for the US manufacturing to catch up!
• deleted 6y ago
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• cardiffspaceman 6y ago
  The FA is simply announcing that an airline has started service with some ARJ21's, nothing to do with C919. The ARJ21 has been in use in other airlines since 2016. I'm certain that China would have done something like these jets regardless of whether other manufacturers had declined, or if they helped, or whatever. Just as the Soviets/Russians have been making jets and just as in that case it said nothing about Boeing or Airbus.
• Hnrobert42 6y ago
  Especially if that void can be filled with extremely cheap research, namely wholesale theft by the Chinese government.