For the last hundred years or so, for a country to be militarily powerful it must be able to produce four key vehicles from domestic designs: cars, planes, ship

For the last hundred years or so, for a country to be militarily powerful it must be able to produce four key vehicles from domestic designs: cars, planes, ships, and launch vehicles. However, it's threatening to focus this capacity on military production, so all countries with powerful militaries also happen to have massive civilian industries that produce those four as well. If you can produce these four vehicle classes you can build tanks, fighters, bombers, transport aircraft, battleships, aircraft carriers, and missiles, and ICBMs. The civilian industries for those four classes build expertise, education programs, finance, and all the other wonderful things that create the environment for high-class military production programs. If you don't have a large domestic capacity for those four classes of vehicles, the military struggles and this sets the foreign policy posture for a country -- as the military is one of the tools of diplomacy. It's useful to look at a counter example, Brazil -- long wanting to be a major regional power. But it has only the most minimal domestic auto, plane, ship and space industries and most of its heavy military equipment is imported. This means that if Brazil were to ever get in a protracted war with...well anybody, it can only last as long as it has inventory. Contrast this with a NATO power, who has factories to endlessly churn out tanks, planes, ships, and missiles. And has the domestic capacity to scale up by simply taking over existing domestic infrastructure and turning a factory that makes axles for trucks into one that makes barrels for tanks. These countries also have the domestic intellectual capacity to design improvements, new generations, and seek efficiencies in later generations. They can often source most of the materials to build the materiel themselves, and can, factorio-like, crank out vehicles of all classes faster than domestic training programs can push recruits through a cursory training pipeline to drive them. These countries will eventually win most wars against countries that do not have this industrial capacity because they can treat their equipment as expendable. Whereas Brazil can't engage in actions that deplete its inventory. The Chinese government understands this, and has all of the foundational heavy industries in place to build a war factorio, but not yet the expertise. It has raw materials, smelters, metallurgy, chemists, on up the value chain. But it still struggles quality at volume needed to build domestic engines, avionics, sonar, etc. It has a large and capable electronics industry, but is behind state-of-the-art in semiconductors (but catching up). It has a fully capable and high-end software industry, including state-of-the-art work in AI/ML. This airframe, even if there's still foreign sources bits and pieces in it, is a demonstration, a feeling-out, of native domestic production capacity and understanding where it lacks capacity. I have no doubt those areas will become major national pushes (or already are) over the next 5-10 years enabling China to achieve a NATO-like capacity and no longer be a Brazil-like.