Material sciences needed for modern jet engine blades are a closely guarded secret, and thanks to not manufacturing them in china, those secrets have managed to remain not stolen.
It is not the pen, it is the pen tip. Ballpoint pen tips are microscopic tungsten carbide ball held inside ultra-thin steel sockets. So you need cutting tolerances precise to 0.001 millimeters. If the socket is a fraction of a micron too loose, the ink leaks. Too tight, and the pen won't write.
I am 47 and ballpoint pens have visibly improved since the 1990s, at least the cheap ones (never had an expensive one). The risk of accidental staining is by now basically zero, it used to be high enough that you avoided putting a pen into your shirt pocket even for an hour.
They do. The micro-precision subculture required to (in order):
1. Powder prep your tungsten carbide
2. Form said powder
3. Thermally prepare the resulting slurry using a vacuum forming furnace
4. Finish it with diamond lap grinders, lapping machines and polishing machines
5. Clean it ultrasonically, with solvent, rinse, then dry them.
6. Have the metrology required to test thousands of micron-scale balls a day (a world-beating skill in itself)
7. Build a QA lab that can assure the quality of said balls statistically (you can test them all).
8. And then integrate them via socket assembly
are not just hereditary, but proprietary. And assuming a competitor does manage to achieve the basic ISO 3290 and ASTM F2094 standards, you still need tacit knowledge. Stuff like sintering temperature curves, proper powder grain distribution, polishing chemistry, proper statistical rejection thresholds and a whole lot more.
And that is just the ball. Not the socket, or the ink channels. Making a perfectly spherical 0.5 mm ± 0.0001 mm tungsten carbide ball requires the same techniques used in building micromotors, medical devices, and semiconductor subcomponent manufacturing. Techniques such as high-volume sorting, advanced powder metallurgy, controlled sintering, and precision machines that operate 24-hour shifts without drifting. All operated by modern process engineers who are the spiritual (or actual?) descendants of Swiss watchmakers or the glassmakers of Murano.
China's ballpoint pen quality as a reflection of manufacturing quality:
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China's inability to produce a complete, high-quality ballpoint pen came to widespread attention in 2015, when Prime Minister Li Keqiang singled out the products at a seminar in Beijing, noting that his writing was "rough" when he used Chinese-made ballpoint pens. For Li, China's failure to manufacture a complete ballpoint pen was indicative of the Chinese economy's weaknesses. "That's the real situation facing us," Li said at the time. "We cannot make ballpoint pens with a smooth writing function."
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You fell for a meme that was tired years ago already (your link is from 2017, after all). The article itself notes, “Relatively low-value items, like ballpoint pens, have not been a priority”, so obviously this says little about higher-priority military and industrial areas to which the CCP devotes greater effort.
Have you been to urban China anytime after that 2017 article? The country is now as developed as anywhere else, indeed it feels like it is gradually overtaking other developed countries. The comparison to the Soviet Union feels ridiculous to anyone with a firsthand experience of the country.
It's not even that. You can have all the designs you need, but you also need a bunch of downstream tech to get from drawings to production. This is something that centrally planned economies struggle with. You can't 5-year-plan your way to jet-engines if you haven't previously 5-year-planned for all the auxiliary infrastructure needed to support that.
We already know this was an issue with the soviets, back when they had the plans for us jet engines (for fighter planes), but couldn't replicate them. Same for stealth, hell even some of their rocketry. And the soviets had plenty of auxiliary systems already in place, during the cold war. As someone said above, they could do quantity, they could do limited high-quality, but couldn't do both at the same time.
There are things that work with 5-year plans: railroads, road infra, buildings, etc. And there are things that are not that easy, and take multiple decades from when the order comes to having it realised. Something that's not immediately obvious for western folks is that when you mix central planning with authoritarian governments, you will get a huge number of pain points along the way, where orders come downwards towards the ones executing them, and overreporting/missrepresentations/lies go upwards. It's like the longest game of telephone, where you start from the top, demanding x y z, get reports that you're on your way of getting 3x, 3y, 3z and in reality you have some of x, none of y, and z looks like z but it's actually three x's in a trench coat.
Isn't China currently among the leaders of material science with lots of top 10 universities located in China? [0] (in rankings that do not incorporate prestige but actual scientific output)
its difficult to see from the lens of software and information technology, and open source academia, but physical science is often discovered via experimentation and cant just be brute forced. usually it disseminates as it is adopted into industrial process and is then copied. a lot of scientific discoveries are made due to impulsive-creative intuition
for example:
- until the end of ww1 the haber bosch process was confined to germany
All I know is that they produce a lot of engineers, while the US produces a lot gender studies majors. I rarely say it, but I do not foresee much that they won't be leaving us sharply behind on soon, other than poverty and homelessness, which we have pretty well covered.
There are about as many gender study majors in the U.S. per year as there are aviation engineering majors. That is one small niche of engineering majors that includes all of gender study.
I guess I can relax and stop worrying that we're falling behind a bit. But I do wonder what the numbers really are, and just how many engineers we produce compared to China, of course, without qualifying everyone that learned Visual Basic as an engineer, unless, of course, that's where they're actually getting their own numbers from.
I see you're getting downvotes, but my intuition strongly aligns with yours. Many of the top minds/academics in (North) America are from overseas, and most of the time that's India and China. And it's been this way for a long time, and it basically makes sense from a numbers perspective. Note that I say this without a particular bias for or against.
So when many of the top minds, publishing most of the top papers in your country got educated in USA but will most likely return to their country of origin - that needs to be factored in to the calculation (especially if tensions increase). At the end of the day I think it's arrogant and wrongheaded to pretend that the USA has dominance in R&D, against China in particular.
Thanks for that, and you directly hit the point that most fear to express. Also, you mention India, which strategically, is probably the one critical nation that without, American stands little chance of keeping pace with China. The tariff nonsense and other blunders, have squandered that opportunity though, with many billions now dedicated to stable cooperation with China and a pivot away from the US. What I think many do not see are the repercussions that have yet to show. Forward looking, I see a bleak future. And as an American patriot, I think we're being outdone, in too many ways. On the abstract, I think if we were to nix all the corruption, (and maybe put nootropics in the water supply), we might have a chance, but competing with a highly disciplined collective-oriented society in 2026 onward, I think is a predictable loss with our current paradigm. But at least we have fighting cages on the white house lawn, nu? Our MMA guys can just beat up the Chinese engineers, and anyone who questions our greatness, I guess.
Even in our "productivity at any cost" society, sometimes people still study things that they find interesting. That's probably a good thing, in the long run.
Scale matters, and there are aftereffects on the society as a whole.
Historically, societies which produced a lot of ideologically minded professionals (such as clergy), tended towards implementing that ideology top-down. I am on board with Turchin's theory of elite overproduction here, and gender studies is modern equivalent of catechism.
To choose a less ideological example: personally, I love Egyptology, but I would be a strict opponent of producing as many Egyptologists as aerospace engineers. Chances are that the superfluous graduates would push for an Egyptocentric department in every public institution and half of private ones.
There are three times as many religion and philosophy majors as ethnic and gender studies majors. If you are worried about ideologically minded professionals, there are bigger fish to fry.
I think your understanding of the numbers is multiple orders of magnitude off. Looking at a recent year (2024) in the US, the total number of "Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender, and Group Studies" majors graduated 11961, whereas "Engineering" was 193,458 and "Engineering/Engineering-related Technologies/Technicians" was 83,665.
> DD6 is a second-generation nickel-based single-crystal superalloy developed by the institute with fully independent intellectual property. Its chief engineer, Li Jiarong, said the alloy’s performance matches or exceeds that of comparable second-generation superalloys used in Europe and the United States, at a lower production cost.
US manufacturers have already developed sixth-generation SC superalloys and most Western airlines are on engines with third- and fourth-generation materials.
The technology behind single crystal superalloys is relatively well understood, the problem is getting the process reliable enough to be economical in an industry that requires tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to develop through trial and error. The TFA's point is that unlike EVs or semiconductors, the turbofan industry is between a rock and a hard place that China's other successful industries weren't.
Can Chinese companies order just the blades from RR or P&W?
I've watched their manufacturing video recently and shocked how much of it was hand labour - it's not something I'd associate with precision. My partner said they must know better tho lol.
But those companies have no commercial interest in supporting a Chinese manufacturer that just wants the blades even without export controls, when they can make much higher margins selling whole engines that must be maintained using their parts (in practice variants of the engines destined for COMAC also omit some of the IP that finds its way onto Airbus and Boeing because you can help a customer too much...)
Fun story: it is not just jet engines - it is only recently that china was able to actually make indigenous ballpoint pens https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114