>a few years ago that china got good enough at metals to make good pen tips: IMO this anecdote has been severely misinterpreted by western media. The narrative

>a few years ago that china got good enough at metals to make good pen tips: IMO this anecdote has been severely misinterpreted by western media. The narrative seems to be lol China only learned to make ball point pen recently, when really it was Premier LiKeQiang politicized importance of precision manufacturing for national security, and 2 years later Chinese industry developed tungsten carbide manufacturing capabilities for advanced munitions. There was no economically sensible reason for domestic ballpoint manufacturing, the entire market dominated by Japan and Swiss was only worth 20M. Zero rationale for Chinese industry to coordinate tons of resources for this project outside of national security. The TLDR should be China is scarily efficient at pursing national security goals. That said metallurgy for engines is hard. My impressions from following Chinese aviation and semiconductor development is that engines are harder. At least on the military front there has been a lot of movement in domestic turbofans this year, they're sufficiently performant, and exceeds in some categories that it looks like they will be replacing Russian engines going forward.