4 Strategic Technological Sectors Where China Is Catching Up With the West.
Aeronautics, Nuclear, Internet, Space ... What's next?
Launched in a crazy technological race to overtake America in the future, Xi Jinping's China can already boast of some major achievements in highly strategic fields. Here are 4 of which Xi Jinping is not a little proud.
1. Aeronautics with the first Made in China airliner
The advent of the “new era” promised by President Xi Jinping has become a reality in the aerospace industry. In less than 15 years, China has succeeded in setting up an almost complete civil aviation industry. The country has produced the first medium-haul jumbo jet made in China - the Comac C919 - with performance comparable to that of the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737, the two workhorses of air transport.
This success was completed at the end of September 2022, when China's civil aviation authorities granted the C919 certification, the last step before the first deliveries are made by the end of 2022, and commercial flights begin in 2023.
China has thus joined the very closed club of competitive airliner manufacturers until then limited to the United States and Europe. However, the long march of Chinese aviation is far from over, and it will be a long time before Comac and its made-in-China aircraft can challenge the de facto duopoly of Airbus and Boeing in international markets.
At best, Comac expects to produce no more than 150 C919s per year by the end of the decade. It would be hard-pressed to meet the needs of the Chinese market alone, which is estimated at 8,700 new aircraft by 2040. Comac will have to expand its product range if it is to succeed in the global market.
Airlines expect an aircraft manufacturer to be able to offer them a complete range of aircraft. Comac does have a regional jet - the ARJ21 - taken over from Avic, as well as a long-haul jumbo jet - the C929 - under development with Russia. But the former is not competitive and the latter is still only a paper aircraft whose future is jeopardized by Western sanctions against Russia.
Finally, to compete with the Americans and Europeans, China still lacks a competitive civil aircraft engine. The C919 is powered by Franco-American engines (the Leap engine from Safran and GE). China's ambition is to achieve this. But as with the C919, whose certification is years behind schedule, the road ahead may be much longer than expected. And by then, Western engine manufacturers will probably have already launched a new generation of more fuel-efficient and less polluting aircraft engines.
2. China becomes the new nuclear power stronghold
In China, the exceptional heat wave of the summer of 2022 has only made it more obvious: the energy mix of the world's second-largest economy, which relies mainly on coal and hydroelectric power, is both vulnerable and extremely polluting. Aware of its shortcomings, the country is now placing much of its hope in civil nuclear power.
China was a latecomer to the nuclear industry - the first nuclear reactor did not come into service until 1991 - but it is now the leading proponent. Its 54 operational reactors place it only third in the world, behind the United States and France, according to the latest report of the World Nuclear Association.
But China's momentum is undeniable: the number of power plants has increased tenfold in twenty years, three of the six reactors activated in 2021 are Chinese, and two more were activated in the first half of 2022. Above all, China is innovating at a frantic pace. The first 100% Chinese reactor was connected to the grid in 2020. Since then, the country has increased the number of experiments, notably with "small modular reactors" (SMRs), small modular reactors that are deemed safer and are being demonstrated in regions with little infrastructure.
At the end of 2021, Beijing also commissioned the very first fourth-generation reactor demonstrator, capable of burning uranium and plutonium and thus "completing" the fuel cycle. Finally, the country is trying to resurrect molten salt and thorium reactors (a resource it has in abundance), a technology that no longer requires water for cooling and that would make it possible to set up power plants in arid desert areas to supply the country's east.
3. Chinese e-retailers are now playing on equal terms with Amazon
At the World Retail Expo held every January in New York, two stands - the largest - have been facing each other for several years: Amazon's and Chinese Alibaba's. And for good reason: in 2022, according to eMarketer, online commerce represented about 55% of retail trade in China. Despite Amazon, the share is only 15% in the US and 13% in Europe.
Ten years ago, America and China were only at 5%. In a decade, the former Middle Kingdom has switched from physical stores to the Internet.
Two groups dominate the market: Alibaba, with its Tmall site, and Tencent with JD.com. In China, everything is done on mobile, purchases, and payments with the Alipay and WeChatPay applications. As in many sectors, Western retail champions have been acquired by Chinese players.
As a sign of the times, the leader of the large food stores that was Sun Art, controlled by the French Auchan, has been sold to Alibaba. Carrefour and the British Tesco have left. Alibaba has built a hybrid model that mixes in-store orders and deliveries with a myriad of two-wheelers. If specialists like Ikea remain present, the pioneers of the hypermarket have not succeeded in their breakthrough.
The Chinese have successfully skipped a generation of commerce, and Alibaba and JD.com are now attacking the European market.
4. China has become NASA's first rival in the space race
“Look at this photograph. It should help us determine if we really want to be serious. China is a very aggressive competitor.” Accompanied by an image captured by China's Zhurong rover on Mars, the phrase was tossed out before the U.S. Congress in the spring of 2021 by Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson.
In a decade, China has established itself as the number one adversary of the United States in space.
The Chinese space agency began by making its Long March 5 heavy launcher more reliable, to join the ranks of the great space powers. Victim of a failure during its second flight, in 2017, the rocket made its return at the end of 2019. It has not experienced any more failures. Beijing has since unfolded a program set like clockwork.
In 2019, China became the first to land a probe and a rover on the far side of the Moon. At the end of 2020, it was the third nation, after the USSR and the United States, to carry out an operation of sampling and robotic return of lunar samples. In May 2021, it struck even harder by landing its first rover on Mars. A feat that only the United States had succeeded, Russians and Europeans have broken their teeth on the soil of the red planet.
At the same time, Beijing launched the assembly of its station in low orbit and realized the first prolonged stay of a crew, with the first extravehicular exit, in November 2021. In the background, China is preparing for the manned conquest of the Moon, in partnership with Russia, which has found there a locomotive to still exist in the space conquest.
China aims at a first mission with a crew by 2030, before the installation of a permanent human presence on the surface of our satellite during the next decade. It remains to be seen whether it will precede the United States, whose Artemis program is accumulating delays.
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