Defence & security, explained.

Suspiciously Lego-like model of the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning. (Photo by the author.)

Suspiciously Lego-like model of the Chinese aircraft carrier Fujian. (Photo by the author)

A wonky memento and a China metaphor

A scale model kit offers an insight into Chinese manufacturing.

Sam Roggeveen

10 December 20242 min read

A friend who knows my interest in Chinese maritime power gave me a scale model kit of China’s new aircraft carrier, Fujian, for my birthday. It’s made of interlocking plastic bricks which you have to put together, guided by an instruction manual. Sound familiar? It should, but this kit was not made or designed in Denmark. Let’s not toy around with words: anyone who has played with Lego will immediately identify this is as an obvious copy.

Which makes it an instructive metaphor, in that it tracks China’s actual military-industrial progress. China’s big military modernisation drive began more than 30 years ago, when it bought lots of foreign equipment, mostly Russian. It progressed, a few years later, to building licensed and then unlicensed copies of those weapons.

Copying and reverse engineering offer a legally questionable shortcut to military prowess. But it still requires real skill to build “the machines that make the machines”. And although my model is a copy, it is very good copy. In fact, I found the build quality indistinguishable from Lego.

Copying and reverse engineering are only the mid-point in China’s military-industrial evolution.

The little planes that you see on the deck of the model carrier in the photo above tell a similar story. They are meant to represent China’s J-15 shipborne fighter, a design copied from the Soviet-era Su-33, which China acquired from Ukraine after the Soviet collapse. They used it to create a home-built version that operated as China’s first shipborne fighter.

But copying and reverse engineering are only the mid-point in China’s military-industrial evolution. China has used the recent Zhuhai air show to unveil the J-15T, a new derivative of the existing J-15 design. While the J-15T still looks the same as its Soviet/Ukrainian progenitor, under the skin it is an almost fully Chinese product, with local engines, avionics and weapons. China has gone from copying to adaptation.

After the adaptation stage comes an entirely home-built product, and at the same air show, China unveiled the J-35A stealth fighter. A ship-launch version of this jet will in future deploy alongside the J-15T on China’s aircraft carriers, and eventually may replace it entirely.

The lesson for toy-lovers is that, like their weapons makers, Chinese manufacturers have ambitions far beyond mere copies of Lego. And on the evidence of this kit, they seem ready to make that leap.

Which brings me to a final observation about the model. Perhaps more impressive than the “hard” engineering of the bricks is the “soft” engineering, which is to say, the instructions. The booklet showing users how to build the aircraft carrier was, like Lego instructions (and Ikea, for that matter), composed solely of diagrams. That avoids the problem of embarrassing mis-translation of language, but as everyone who has put together a Poang chair or Billy bookcase knows, visual instructions are hard to get right. For this product, they were flawless.

About the author

Sam Roggeveen

Sam Roggeveen is Program Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (Opens in new window), published by La Trobe University Press in 2023.

Topics

Defence & security China