The Yun-20, or Transport-20, is a huge, multi-function airfreighter which can perform various long-distance air transportation tasks targeting cargo and passengers, Xinhua learnt on Saturday.

The successful maiden flight of Yun-20 is significant in promoting China’s economic and national defense buildup as well as bettering its emergency handling such as disaster relief and humanitarian aid.

The giant aircraft will continue to undergo experiments and test flights as scheduled.

This comes amid concerns over China’s focus on aerospace development. With the unveiling of a stealth fighter, according to Bloomberg, the new freight plane is extending China’s military modernization program:

China achieved a military milestone when its fighter jet landed on its new aircraft carrier in November, extending a modernization bid that’s recorded advances in submarines, cyber warfare and in outer space.

The aircraft tests underscore China’s progress in military modernization, which has been accompanied by a doubling of the defense budget in six years. China, the biggest spender on defense after the U.S., has become increasingly assertive in the region as President Barack Obama executes a strategic shift toward Asia and tensions rise with Japan and other nations over territorial disputes.

China’s defense spending, estimated at 670 billion yuan ($108 billion) in 2012, has more than doubled since 2006, tracking a rise in nominal gross domestic product to 47.2 trillion yuan from 21.6 trillion yuan.

Read more about aviation in China, via CDT.

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According to the plan, the nation will guide the localization of aircraft, engines and airborne equipment, and encourage research and development of domestic regional aircraft and general aviation aircraft.

The plan also calls for making the airports in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou into large-size international airport hubs, as well as nurturing the gateway airports in Kunming in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province and Urumqi in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The CAAC’s plan also includes reforming the use of the country’s airspace, which commercial pilots have blamed for delayed flights and the increase in passenger ‘air rage’. Bloomberg reports:

A more than 90-fold surge in China’s economy in the past two decades has fueled demand for flights. The State Council’s plan is based on guidelines released in July last year that were the first China has issued for the domestic aviation industry. Chinese carriers will need 5,260 new planes worth $670 billion through 2031, according to Boeing Co. (BA) forecasts.

“The government is sending a clear message that aviation is very important,” said Li Lei, a Beijing-based analyst at China Minzu Securities Co. “But the current problems such as airspace restrictions or airport slot limits won’t change overnight.”

Although the plan outlines the aims for civil aircraft, China’s recent show of military power by landing a fighter jet and unveiling a stealth fighter has prompted both welcome and worry. China’s aerospace ties to the military have raised issues for American regulators, according to The New York Times:

Washington is trying to figure out what to do about China’s deal-making broadly. “Many of these transactions raise important security issues for our country,” said Michael R. Wessel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was created by Congress to monitor the bilateral relationship. “China’s interest in promoting these investments isn’t necessarily consistent with our own interests, and it’s appropriate to thoroughly examine the transactions.”

“There has always been an obvious cross-fertilization of ideas, expertise and money between the civilian and military,” said Martin Craigs, a longtime aerospace executive in Asia who is now the chairman of the Aerospace Forum Asia, a nonprofit group in Hong Kong. He added that Chinese companies had been actively hiring senior American and European aerospace engineers, so national security concerns could be quelled some by hiring the right people.

Western companies and their advisers say that they are acutely aware that technology transfers could help China strengthen its military and develop more competitive civil airplanes, and are taking precautions to protect trade secrets and national security. “You transfer the part that is most easily reverse engineered, or easily dissected,” said a lawyer with detailed knowledge of these transactions.

But many in the aerospace sector are more skeptical that the West can avoid losing control of technology. “The mentality is, they’re going to find a way to get there anyway, and we may as well get there with them,” Mr. Harbison of the CAPA-Center for Aviation said.

Read more about aviation in China, via CDT.

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You highlight the dramatic improvement of China’s airlines as one area of particular success. Are there specific lessons of the airline experience that could be applied elsewhere?

I argue that the experience of China’s very fast-growing airlines is a microcosm of China’s high-end commercial aspirations generally. They’re state-owned enterprises becoming increasingly exposed to commercial competition; they have been shrewd and surprisingly non-defensive in opening themselves to outside improvement and international standard-setting; and they’re buoyed by the overall continued growth of the economy. But they also have to pay their way, in what is worldwide a difficult industry. So they show ways in which “Chinese characteristics” are unusual, and also how they fit global patterns.

As I think is evident in my book, I am impressed by and respectful of the international figures — largely but not exclusively American — who have decided to devote major portions of their working lives to improving the safety, reliability, and efficiency of the Chinese air-travel system. When I asked them about the lessons they would draw, their conclusions were never startling but seemed worth underscoring. They said that they were able to make more of these “governance” breakthroughs because they never presented it in a belittling or publicly embarrassing fashion for their Chinese counterparts; because they quite evidently enjoyed China and their Chinese counterparts; and — an interesting specific point — because they were always careful to say that they were conveying ‘international’ rather than strictly ‘American’ practices and techniques.

No doubt it helped that, unlike some other arenas of foreign-Chinese interaction, this was no sort of zero-sum situation. That is, when foreigners were helping the Chinese make their air operations safer, neither side was posing a “competitive threat” to the other

Last month in Wired, Fallows wrote an essay which explained why the success of China’s aviation industry will determine the future course of the country’s economy as a whole:

Even in China there are only so many dams to be built, high-speed railroad lines to be laid, brand-new cities to be populated. China has proven that you can move people en masse from rural poverty to urban factory life in a single generation, by embracing the role of outsourcing workhouse of the world. But Chinese economists fear that this may turn into a low-wage trap that will keep the country from creating the kind of large professional, high-end entrepreneurial, and upper-middle classes that the US has long enjoyed.

Thus the Chinese determination, spelled out in its 12th Five-Year Plan to “move up the value chain.” Can it succeed? Will the next Apples, Facebooks, and Googles arise in China? How much do the current Pfizers, GEs, and Boeings have to fear?

The answer will be found in apex industries, those clusters of businesses whose vitality signals the presence of surrounding networks of high-value skills, technologies, and operational competencies. Wildlife biologists look for healthy populations of amphibians—newts, frogs—to indicate the broader health of a wetland environment. Similarly, economic analysts can look to the status of pharmaceutical industries (which reflect a strong research culture), university complexes (whose ability to draw and hold the world’s talent reflects the attractiveness of a society), and venture capital and info-tech industries (which depend on openness) to judge overall economic vitality. And in China they should be looking at aerospace.

Read more by and about James Fallows via CDT, including a preview of China Airborne.

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U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney in Santa Ana imposed a 188-month prison term on Dongfan “Greg” Chung, 73, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Orange.

Carney declared that he could not “put a price tag” on national security and sought to send a signal to China to “stop sending your spies here,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

Chung, who worked at Boeing’s Huntington Beach plant, denied being a spy and said he was gathering documents for a book, not for espionage. His attorneys argued that much of the material was already available on the public record.

…Whether loyalty to his homeland or financial gain was Chung’s motive remained unclear. The case is one of a number of prosecutions that have shed light on alleged Chinese efforts to gain access to U.S. technology and research through espionage.

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Airbus is in the late stages of negotiations to build an assembly line for its A320 passenger plane in China, a landmark deal that would significantly lift its prospects for business there.

Producing European planes in China would open a new front in the battle between Airbus and Boeing for the world’s next great aviation market, as well as underscore the growing role of state enterprises in the global economy.

Four Chinese cities are vying for the plant, which would produce up to four A320′s a month, in cooperation with Chinese state-owned aerospace manufacturers, industry experts said. The A320 is a short-haul jet that serves primarily domestic routes, which are booming across China.

On the short list for the project, these experts said, are Tianjin, a port near Beijing; Xian, an aircraft-manufacturing center in north-central China; Shanghai, the site of a McDonnell Douglas assembly plant that has closed; and Zhuhai, a port near Hong Kong.

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