A China-made car is very much like a bowl of hot soup, first you have your main ingredients like...I kid! I kid! (refer to first review)

China has come a long way from the old days of communism to be the free market powerhouse that it is today. In those days, China had a desolate economy that left its people suffering and in serious risk of financial collapse. In the last 30 years since China opened up its doors to the free market enterprise, it has accelerated rapidly both in terms of economic development and technological / engineering sophistication.

Take the local aviation industry for example. In pre-1976 China, the industry could barely operate and maintain the country’s Air Force in a militarily significant posture. But 30 years later the People’s Liberation Army Air Force has become one of the most well-equipped and numerically superior aviation outfits in Asia.

An example that puts China’s engineering capability in perspective is the production of their J-11 fighter jets. This aircraft started out originally as dumbed-down export versions of the Cold War-era Su-27s from Russia.

Where Russia kept the technologically superior models for themselves, they were all too happy to sell regiments of the export models to China.

Now what Russia and the rest of the world (namely the U.S.) didn’t expect was that China would actually pore through every little detail of their shiny new Su-27s to reverse-engineer the aircraft from the ground up. What China came up with seven years later not only left the Russians and Western world with gaping mouths, it also gave the world a glimpse of what China’s engineers were really capable of.

The new aircraft had more than 70% of its components produced domestically. Ironing out most if not all of the aircraft’s original faults and replacing most of the aircraft’s steel surfaces with composite (carbon fibre) materials that made it much lighter and stronger.