China is advancing at a remarkable pace toward overtaking the United States as the world’s foremost passenger aviation market. The country’s growing air travel demand, expanding middle class, and ambitious infrastructure investments have positioned it as a formidable global competitor. Yet despite this striking progress in market size and capacity, China’s aviation sector remains deeply reliant on foreign—particularly American and European—sources for the most sophisticated aircraft technologies. These encompass areas such as avionics, high-efficiency jet engines, composite materials, and advanced airframe design, fields in which Western firms have maintained a decisive technological edge for decades.
Over nearly twenty years, Chinese policymakers, scientists, and engineers have pursued an arduous campaign to reduce that dependence through what Beijing often describes as homegrown innovation. Massive state funding, the establishment of domestic aerospace conglomerates, and the training of local talent have been key components of this long-term strategy aimed at achieving technological self-sufficiency. However, according to U.S. authorities and intelligence assessments, this pursuit of independent capability has not been limited to legitimate commercial research or joint ventures. They allege that it has also involved systematic espionage efforts and the widespread appropriation of foreign intellectual property—activities commonly referred to as industrial or technological theft. These covert operations, critics contend, have significantly accelerated China’s progress in replicating and adapting cutting-edge aviation technologies that would otherwise require far longer to develop domestically.
Responsibility for many of these clandestine intelligence-gathering missions is believed to rest primarily with China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), an organization often described as one of the largest and most complex intelligence agencies in existence. The MSS combines functions roughly comparable to those of both the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, blending domestic counterintelligence with foreign espionage capabilities. Although its internal structure remains opaque to outsiders, analysts estimate that the agency employs a workforce numbering in the hundreds of thousands—a scale that, if accurate, would surpass the combined staffing of its American counterparts. This immense apparatus reflects the strategic importance that China places on information acquisition and technological advancement as essential tools in its rise as a global power and its quest to narrow, and ultimately eliminate, the long-standing aviation technology gap with the West.
Sourse: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-13/how-chinese-spies-stole-us-aviation-secrets
