To the (flagged) comments about China stealing research: I’ll abstract from lack of evidence. Just stealing isn’t enough. Russia, I believe, ended up admitting stealing research on the Space Shuttle, and despite that their own project never really materialised. Even. You steal, that lets you catch up, not overtake. So even if China is helping themselves (again, I don’t know), they still have to innovate and improve.…
The stone cold fact is that China has n-times engineers than USA, mostly working for the same American companies who outsourced their RnD, and engineering decades ago, and working on mostly the same things. It strikes me every time hearing such argument from people completely oblivious to the above fact.
Life is rarely that simple - there are also sociological/societal causes plus the required surrounding infrastructure.
China has made dramatic leaps in technological capability but they still can't make a good competitive jet engine and they've been pouring resources into that for literally decades.
Even if you have the plans (and realistically they probably do) just the metallurgy alone is an absolute nightmare.
There are a handful of countries that can do it reasonably well and only a couple of companies that can do it approaching the state of the art.
General Electric and Rolls Royce (with P&W following behind) - there are a few other smaller companies and CFM International which is GE and one of the smaller companies, Safran (used to be Snecma).
That is just one area - in the long term who knows but in the mid-term China will do well to achieve equivalency in a number of areas (and in fairness they know this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025)