The End of the Runway for Boeing in China

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Last Updated on: 18th April 2025, 12:56 am

A COMAC C919 rolls to the end of the runway at Shanghai Pudong, a clean-lined aircraft shimmering in the haze as ground crews finish their checks. In the background, a row of pristine Boeing 737 MAX aircraft sit unused, tails high, their future uncertain. The scene is an imagined one, but it’s reflective of reality: China is changing course, and one of the largest aerospace shifts in modern history is underway. Reports indicate that Beijing has instructed its domestic airlines to stop ordering U.S.-built passenger aircraft. The move is not simply an act of retaliation or trade war chess—it’s a signpost for a deeper transformation in industrial strategy, technological sovereignty, and geopolitical signaling.

The gravitational pull of China’s aviation market is well understood by insiders. In 2019, Chinese airlines carried over 660 million passengers, representing more than a trillion revenue passenger kilometers annually. The pandemic cratered that growth curve, but the rebound was swift. Today, passenger-kilometer totals are nearing pre-pandemic levels, with industry expectations of doubling by 2030, although I’m skeptical of that given the continued dominance of high-speed rail and Tencent Meeting (the Chinese alternative to Zoom). When Boeing or Airbus plan production lines, they do so with one eye on Toulouse and Everett, and the other fixed on Beijing.

For decades, China’s air fleets have been filled with Boeing and Airbus metal. The split was once relatively even, with Boeing holding the advantage in narrow-body workhorses and long-haul widebodies alike. ​Over the past decade, Boeing’s relationship with Chinese airlines has experienced a significant decline. Between 2015 and 2020, Boeing delivered 668 aircraft to Chinese customers, reflecting a robust partnership. However, from 2020 through March 2025, deliveries plummeted to just 109 aircraft. This downturn is attributed to a combination of factors, including the global grounding of the 737 MAX following two fatal crashes, escalating U.S.-China trade tensions, and China’s increasing investment in its domestic aerospace industry.

Europe’s Airbus built an assembly line in Tianjin in 2009, deepened its political relationships, and has increasingly become the go-to supplier. Boeing, meanwhile, has seen its position erode not just due to politics but performance—and that matters.

There’s also the emergence of China’s COMAC as a credible manufacturer. The ARJ21 was a slow, clunky, underperforming regional jet built with dated technology and endless delays. But it served its purpose as a systems integration testbed, and it taught COMAC and its suppliers how to build, certify, and support a commercial airliner. That experience paved the way for the C919, China’s first real attempt at challenging the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 head-on. The aircraft uses modern avionics and Western engines, but it is designed, assembled, and delivered under Chinese control. More importantly, it’s being pushed into the fleet not as a speculative startup venture, but with the full weight of the Chinese state behind it.

At the same time, Boeing has been disassembling the institutional knowledge and engineering culture that once made it the world’s most respected airplane manufacturer. Its embrace of the Jack Welch school of quarterly capitalism from General Electric—cutting R&D, gutting engineering oversight, offshoring everything it could, prioritizing stock buybacks—has been well documented. The 737 MAX crisis wasn’t a one-off error. It was a systemic failure, the inevitable result of decades of eroding technical competence in favor of financial optimization. I have written about the substitution of engineers with finance MBAs, the rise of offshoring for supplier risk dilution rather than integration quality, and the near-total loss of executive leadership that understood the physics of flight. Boeing didn’t lose China. It gave it away.

There’s more. While Airbus capitalized on the vacuum, delivering hundreds of A320neo-family jets and securing long-term relationships, China has been working toward something even more consequential: not just supplier diversification, but supplier replacement. The orders for 300 C919s by China’s Big Three airlines are not just a vote of confidence—they are a domestic industrial policy in action. COMAC is ramping production capacity to 150–200 units per year by the end of the decade. That’s a credible share of China’s expected single-aisle fleet expansion, and a strategic firewall against geopolitical shocks. China doesn’t want to be held hostage to U.S. export policy or EU regulatory leverage. It wants to own the full stack of its own aviation future. And as a reminder, turbine metals are mostly processed in China, and it’s just put export licenses on them targeted at the USA and hence Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The implications go far beyond fleet planning. The global aerospace sector relies on tight regulatory harmonization, overlapping supply chains, and decades of accumulated interoperability. COMAC’s current products use CFM engines and Western avionics, but the trend is toward domestic substitution where possible. In parallel, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) is working to establish its own certification regime that will rival the FAA or EASA—not just for internal purposes, but for export into Belt and Road countries with aligned regulatory standards. This is how parallel systems emerge: not through confrontation, but through quiet, persistent divergence.

And here’s the part that too few in Washington or Chicago seem to grasp: this isn’t a tantrum. It’s a transition. China is not rejecting Boeing as a company. It’s rejecting a model—a model of industrial dependency, of outsourced accountability, of financialized engineering. Airbus should not be resting easy. It may be the preferred Western supplier today, but its future status is conditional. COMAC’s widebody program, the CR929, has been bumpy, especially after Russia’s withdrawal. But the ambition remains. China is not interested in winning on price alone. It wants the prestige, leverage, and supply chain sovereignty that come from fielding a full domestic aviation stack.

This realignment isn’t purely about China either. It sends shockwaves through the entire global aviation system. Boeing’s declining relevance in the world’s most important growth market puts its long-term production planning at risk. Suppliers who depend on Boeing for orders are being squeezed. And smaller states that used to play Boeing and Airbus off one another may soon find they have a third axis in COMAC—one that comes with financing, infrastructure packages, and political ties. India, Turkey, and other regional powers are watching closely. Aviation is one of the last high-tech sectors with massive barriers to entry. China is demonstrating how to scale those walls.

And Trump’s tariffs hit Boeing hard. The 25% markup on imported aluminum, so essential to airframes, when the USA imports most of their supply of the metal, means Boeing is both losing customers and seeing increasing costs. This isn’t a good combination from a survival perspective.

In late 2024, China’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) granted type certification to the RX4E, a four-seat electric aircraft developed by the Liaoning General Aviation Academy. This marked the first time an electric aircraft received such certification under China’s CCAR-23 regulations, which govern airworthiness for normal category aircraft. In fact, it’s the first commercial electric airplane certified to carry passengers globally. The RX4E, powered by a 70 kWh lithium battery and capable of a 1.5-hour flight time, is designed for applications like pilot training, sightseeing, and aerial photography. This certification signifies China’s commitment to advancing electric aviation technology and integrating it into its broader transportation infrastructure. China has also certified an evtol from eHang for passenger flights, which while mostly a dead end flex, is still more than the west has done. It’s also rapidly expanding production of sustainable aviation fuel.

All of this raises hard questions for the United States. The pivot to quarterly earnings as the primary metric of corporate health has gutted its industrial base across sectors, from semiconductors to power transformers to commercial aircraft. Boeing could have remained a globally dominant aerospace manufacturer, but instead financially engineered its way to failing aircraft and exclusion from the biggest growing market in the world. Meanwhile, China built plants, trained engineers, certified aircraft, and now fields its own jets, while keeping most of its citizens on the ground in low-carbon, high-speed rail. It’s a lesson in what happens when a nation-state takes industry, climate change and transportation seriously.

The future of aviation is becoming multipolar. Boeing, once a synonym for safe, efficient, and globally interoperable air travel, is now a full stop in one of the most critical markets on Earth and a question mark elsewhere. Airbus is the near-term winner, but it plays under the long shadow of strategic substitution. COMAC isn’t ready to compete globally yet—but it doesn’t have to. It only has to dominate at home, and in doing so, redefine what the next era of aviation looks like.