Boeing Ban Threatens To Backfire for Beijing

BY JAMES T. AREDDY

A Chinese halt on Boeing

aircraft purchases, if sustained, risks backfiring on China’s homegrown plane maker Comac before the upstart is globally competitive.

In a rapidly collapsing U.S.China relationship, with skyhigh tariffs that threaten to wipe out most bilateral trade, spillover into the aviation sector could spell major problems for both economies.

Aircraft makers view China as the largest future commercial aviation market, and for years Boeing was the top U.S. industrial exporter to the country. To offer its airlines an alternative supplier, China’s government has invested tens of billions of dollars into Shanghai-based aircraft maker Comac to produce domestic equivalents of commercial planes from Boeing and Europe’s Airbus.

Now, China’s airlines have been told to withhold new orders for Boeing aircraft and seek approval before taking delivery on plane orders, people familiar with the situation told The Wall Street Journal this week. But Comac is in no position to fill order books quickly, and if anyone benefits from the U.S.-China spat it will likely be Airbus.

Moreover, by inserting aircraft into the trade war with the U.S., Beijing is inadvertently exposing a vulnerability, highlighting American power over Comac. The company’s leading commercial aircraft model, the C919, is airworthy because of critical technology from U.S. companies including GE Aerospace, Honeywell International and RTX.

President Trump has significant power to block American companies from supplying Comac, and the Journal reported in 2020 that his first administration had considered doing so. Washington has repeatedly cited national-security considerations to prohibit supplying China other technology.

China pitches the narrowbody C919 as its answer to the Boeing 737 MAX and Airbus A320neo. In reality, only around 16 C919’s are flying commercially, all domestically in China. Comac has marketed the C919 internationally, such as at an air show in Singapore last year, but hasn’t announced foreign deliveries.

“Unlike many other industries, the commercial aerospace industry did not become dependent on low-cost manufacturing in China,” Bank of America analyst Ronald J. Epstein said in a report this week that cast doubt on the idea Beijing could hold the line very long against Boeing.

For a 2020 report on the C919, Center for Strategic and International Studies senior adviser Scott Kennedy noted that of the 82 primary suppliers for the C919 only 14 were Chinese and half of those were foreign joint ventures. Kennedy said while China has more domestic suppliers now, “it’s still a plane that depends on Western technologies.”