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.

Source from al-Arabiya: https://english.alarabiya.net/variety/2017/01/14/At-last-Chi...

The point (no pun intended) is that China was beginning to crack the processes for making the precision machine tools that make machine tools.

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.

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)

[0] https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/

Seems they have figured out the single crystal blade tech https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-crystal-...

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.

recently? and you posted an almost 10yo article?

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