And no, nobody steals as much as the Chinese, and we are not going by their social or economic model
Hmmm please Google the echelon program and the industrial espionage that the west did for nearly 4+ decades.
Hell the American and British Missle program and NASA has been built off the Germans and the V2
And btw the Lavi r&d was bought and paid for by the chinese in the form of a ToT from which they build.
The j11 junk spawned an entire aerospace mil industrial complex from engines to software to radar.
Their UAV industry is again second to only America.
Yes the first couple of generations will be sub-par. But the Japanese in the 70s and 80s and Koreans in the 90s and 2000s were the same. Look at them now.
They will soon have 24 odd j20s a year coming off the production line ( can they afford such an expensive plane in large numbers is a different story)
Stealing and reverse engineering aero vehicles is not so easy. Just look at the the sheer time it took to reverse engineer the copyhawk. It needs a baseline tech and r&d infra to first obsorb it.
The chinese (huawei) are rumoured to have built their 5G tech by hacking a Canadian company. Now they are rolling it out across their client states faster and cheaper than anybody else on the planet. The impact on their own domestic tech enabled economy is going to be astronomical not to mention their global geopolitical leverage.
Backed by their proficiency in AI, Quantum computing and semiconductor is going to have serious implications on their Mil Industrial complex going forward when data centric warfare is going to be the norm. The control the global supply chain where even US SOCOM is now realising that their comms could be compromised because so much of their kit has china sourced parts
If we look down on the chinese then doom on us. That's exactly what we did in 62.
And btw in India we have legitimate legal access to tech - type 209 submarine tech - what happened to the production line after the 5 built ? What about the Marut and Jaguar program. Only because of the LCA have we finally dipped out established a baseline in aerospace hardware and software but we are already behind the curve.
Hell even in the private sector - Tatas sat on fiat and mercedes TOT for decades with no evolution. Mahindras etc etc. Look at Jio - the best they can do is blatent rip offs of watsapp and zoom and them get funded by Google and Facebook. Zero drive to build IP.
We as a people need to get out of our reactive defensive bullshit and actually do something. Let's stop this mindless mental masturbation