> Everything they do must either be a lie or just stolen American technology
as an aviation enthusiast for 30+ years this claim , while deliberately blunt, is not far from the truth -- the truth being that half of their hardware was stolen Russian design, too.
Let's consider : The KJ-600, the J-31, J-10, H-6, Z-20, J-7, J-15, J-11.
If it isn't a direct shape-to-shape knockoff like the J-31 it's either a licensed reproduction from Russia or something derived from a reverse engineering effort like the Su-33 prototype they got from Ukraine. Similar story with their Ghost Bat knockoffs.
There are very few novel designs. I'm not faulting the methodology -- the shape of the thing w.r.t. aircraft is half (if not more) of the struggle.
It's a tremendous advantage to start from a known good shape and go from there. If I were the boss I would do exactly the same thing when trying to bootstrap an aerospace industry.
>as if there's something inherently special about Americans that no one else has.
the US has proven numerous times that this is exactly the case.
Of course China has copied foreign technologies, I didn't say they haven't. My point is that you guys love to hang on to that as an excuse to dismiss everything from China even when they're obviously plenty capable of doing R&D in many fields, even with it having gotten its start off "stolen" IP.
America "stole" plenty of rocket technology from Germany, yet it's well understood that they eventually innovated on it and made it their own. But somehow whenever China's involved, you guys come out with your unsubtle bigotry.