The past few years have offered a tough run of bad news for the passenger airliner division of iconic U.S. aerospace leader Boeing. Still, by 2049, if China has its way, it will displace Boeing as one of the leading producers of passenger airliners if it hasn’t yet forced its demise.
Despite China’s current heavy dependence on Boeing-made airliners, its contempt for the company that has for decades fought for positive U.S.–China relations was demonstrated on May 20, when China’s Ministry of Commerce sanctioned Boeing’s Defense, Space and Security unit for arms sales to Taiwan for a second time.
China’s ability to force Boeing’s demise depends largely on the aircraft maker’s ability to overcome its current production and management challenges and to sustain its long history of innovation and strategic risk-taking to remain generations ahead of China’s airline sector.
However, Boeing isn’t just facing a mere commercial challenge from China.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not encumbered by markets and shareholder obligations, so it can devote the resources necessary to build the world’s dominant aerospace sector—a prize that will be crucial to achieving the Party’s far greater ambition of global political, economic, and military hegemony.
Economic hegemony is the eventual goal of CCP leader Xi Jinping’s economic mantra of “new productive forces” to achieve breakthroughs in innovation, technology, and organization, allowing China to create ever greater economic power, including dominating the global aerospace sector.
Political-military hegemony is being pursued by the CCP in league with Russia, Iran, and North Korea, aiding Russia’s war in Ukraine and perhaps soon in Europe, aiding Iran’s arming of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis to destroy Israel and turning North Korea into a global nuclear threat.
When the Chinese regime begins its active war against Taiwan, its People’s Liberation Army will use a large proportion of the 4,000 Boeing and Airbus airliners in Chinese airlines to transport troops and material to destroy Taiwan’s democracy.
But regarding China’s more narrow challenge to Boeing, a May 13 article in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) offered a cryptic unsourced statement: “China has already begun work on the C939, a new widebody plane and the third in its series of home-grown airliners.”
Other Chinese sources indicate the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) C939 will be a 400-plus passenger widebody airliner that will emerge in 2039. It is intended to compete with the Boeing 777, the innovative market-dominating twin-turbofan successor to the historic four-engine Boeing 747.
The C939 will complement the expected 280-passenger Comac C929, formerly a co-development program with Russia. Comac expects it to emerge by 2030 to compete with the similarly sized Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 airliners.
However, unreported by the SCMP or by Western aviation journalists who essentially repeated the SCMP report was Comac’s starker challenge to both Boeing and Airbus, revealed in a PowerPoint slide posted on the Chinese internet, apparently from a Comac briefing given at the Shanghai International Commercial Airshow on Nov. 23–25, 2023.
This slide, titled “Progression of Commercial Airliner Design,” indicates that by 2039, Comac expects that it will only have one foreign competitor, meaning that it expects that either Boeing or Airbus won’t be a competitive airline maker.
This slide further indicates that by 2049, Comac expects that “China will dominate” the global airliner market and that in the following decades, “China leads.”
By 2049, Comac expects its C949 to emerge. This airliner could feature a double deck like the current largest airliner in service, the Airbus A380, and have three aisle decks, meaning a very wide fuselage.
Also, according to the slide, by 2049, Comac expects to be designing supersonic airliners, which in the United States is now led by the developing Mach 1.7 (1,300 mph) speed four-engine Overture airliner of the Boom Technology Corp., although in 2018, Boeing revealed a concept for a Mach 5 (3,800 mph) hypersonic speed airliner.
Comac’s slide also notes that after 2049, it expects to offer space-based commercial transport platforms capable of low-Earth-orbit speeds of 17,000 mph.
While the slide doesn’t specify, these platforms could use rocket power, hybrid scramjet rockets, or a version of the British Sabre air-breathing rocket-powered engine.
In 2024, it is easy to scoff at Comac’s grandiose ambitions, as its espionage-linked C919 single-aisle airliner, intended to compete with the Boeing 737 and Airbus A321, took 15 years to enter Chinese airline service.
The C919 is also comically dependent on U.S. and European technology for major components and has yet to achieve certification outside China, as it is being forced on Chinese airlines.
But it’s that domestic Chinese airliner market that has captured Boeing and Airbus, propelling decades of political effort in the United States and Europe in order to curry favor with the CCP and defend “stable” relations with China, as it has spent decades gathering its global threat.
A Sept. 19, 2023, Boeing press release states, “China will account for 20% of the world’s airplane demand through 2042 … China will need 8,560 new commercial airplanes through 2042 … China’s commercial airliner fleet will more than double to nearly 9,600 jets over the next 20 years.”
The CCP will work to ensure that Boeing and Airbus fight for their market share. Not only could it use those airliners as weapons, but it will also seek to obtain as much technology as possible from both companies to enable the planned progression of highly subsidized airliners to capture greater global market share in an attempt to weaken both Boeing and Airbus.
However, as the CCP and Comac seek to dominate markets for large subsonic airliners, they will invest enormous capital in developing and marketing supersonic and low-Earth-orbit traveling airliners to further displace Boeing and Airbus.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the United States and Europe halted airline sales and airline support services to Russia.
China’s military-economic support for Russia, Iran, and North Korea justifies a halt in airline sales to China—especially when it is Boeing and Airbus-made airliners that will directly assist the invasion of the democracy in Taiwan.
But now that Comac is making clear that it’s China’s goal to displace Boeing and Airbus as aerospace market leaders, it simply makes no sense to wait for a CCP invasion of Taiwan to halt airline and support service sales to China.
Ending that support now not only will degrade China’s invasion potential, but also could help Boeing and Airbus remain market leaders far ahead of Comac, possibly denying the prize the CCP requires for global hegemony.
