Outside In | Boeing’s woes fuel Washington’s fears of the age of the made-in-China plane

The worldwide grounding of the 737 MAX 8 jet is giving the US a chance to fixate on another Chinese sector: aviation. To trade hawks, China’s C919 project is a sore reminder of the way Beijing is using state subsidies, and US tech, to compete

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A prototype of the C919 plane takes off in Shanghai on December 28, 2018. Boeing’s crisis has turned the spotlight on another flashpoint of the trade war: the development of Chinese aviation. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 2:30am, 16 Mar 2019Updated: 3:47pm, 16 Mar 2019

Boeing’s crisis over the global grounding of its 737 MAX 8 jet, following plane crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, has set the scene for the next dreadful twist of the United States’ trade war with China, and worsened the almost-existential threat Washington feels from Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” strategy.

At a point when the dispute over Chinese tech giant Huawei and the security challenge it poses still has far to run, the planemaker’s crisis has turned the spotlight on a second flashpoint: the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) and its decade-long quest to build a commercial aircraft that can go head to head with Boeing and Airbus.

China’s first home-grown passenger jetliner, the C919, is due to go into service in 2021, after years of delay, and it is a poster child for everything the present US administration hates about China’s ascent.

The C919 was clearly conceived as a contender to break the duopoly of Airbus and Boeing in commercial aviation, and has been developed with the help of generous, imprecisely understood state subsidies.

In China’s bid to play catch-up in aviation, the C919 is the project of a plethora of joint ventures with – and technology transfers from – US aerospace companies. With a capacity of about 170, the jet is intended as a workhorse of the huge short-haul aviation market, and as a direct competitor to the Airbus A320neo and the Boeing 737 MAX 8.

So the MAX 8 crisis could hardly have come at a better time for the C919. But it could hardly have come at a worse time with regard to the trade war, adding fuel to Washington’s complaints about Beijing’s industrial policy and allegations of a wide range of unfair trade practices.

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.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}Outside In | Boeing’s woes fuel Washington’s fears of the age of the made-in-China plane

Outside In | Boeing’s woes fuel Washington’s fears of the age of the made-in-China plane