Global Impact: home-grown C919 passenger jet, first locally built large cruise ship highlight China’s advanced manufacturing progress

Global Impact is a weekly curated newsletter featuring a news topic originating in China with a significant macro impact for our newsreaders around the world

In this edition, we look back at the two major milestones and examines what they mean for China’s efforts to find another economic growth engine, and of course, compete with the United States

Reading Time:5 minutes

Published: 2:00pm, 19 Jun 2023

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In August 2008, China’s first bullet train started running between Beijing and Tianjin. Four months later, the country kicked off the development of its home-grown passenger jet, the C919.

It took three years to build the Beijing-Tianjin high-speed railway, but 15 for the first C919 to make its first commercial flight at the end of last month.

Just over a week later, on June 6, China’s first locally built large cruise ship, the Adora Magic City, left its dock in Shanghai.

Crossing off milestones one after another, Beijing has taken strides in advanced manufacturing as part of efforts to be more self-reliant in high-value-added industrial chains and to try to gain an upper hand in the tech war with the United States – a mission that, in Beijing’s view, it cannot afford to lose as it seeks a new engine to power its economic growth.

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China’s C919 passenger jet completes maiden commercial flight from Shanghai to Beijing

Being self-reliant, though, is not a new thing for China, and the narrow-body C919, built by the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac), was not the country’s first effort to develop its own aircraft.