This is a strange article. I did not find anything that is a blocker for China. China is a relative new comer to jet engines and this technology is tightly guarded by incumbents and needs time to mature.

If China can master nuclear, space, chips, it seems a bit stretch to say they it is the Jer engines where they fail.

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While I think the scale of American decline is overstated, I think there is a degree of Hemingway's law of motion.

A desired task that requires the most skilled makes those skilled people in demand. If a power has significantly more resources then they have more to offer those most skilled people.

It isn't at all disputed that there are a huge number of scientific discoveries that have occurred in The USA by people born outside the USA. That shows the draw of that power, but it is a relative draw. As the ratio becomes smaller the draw is less.

Advances like this are a feedback mechanism, being ahead gives you more resources to stay ahead.

If you consider the average contribution of advances to be a relatively steady force advancing a nation, yet a nation is in decline, it stands to reason that the decline is in another area and is being mitigated by the advances.

If the force propping things up goes somewhere else the change can be quite swift because the force of the decline becomes suddenly much more apparent.

I don't see the world going full Mad Max, but I can certainly see a sudden shift to the USA being considered no different to the UK,Japan, or Germany.

A lot of claims in the article.

IDK if the WS-15 failed or is "two decades" behind. I think we just don't know, but we do know that it is that they have achieved the ability to deliver, in mass, third-generation single-crystal nickel-based superalloys. That's a strong proof point.

As for commercial, China can/has grant a sizable portion of the C919 to domestic engine producers ( I think AECC has this contract ) that allows for a lot of capital and practice.

I would not be shocked if China demonstrates highly competitive engines in the late 2020, maybe with a few setbacks and iterations. I would also not be shocked if they started demonstrating engines with some characteristics slightly better than the Western manufactures in that time period (or maybe a little later).

I work in the aviation industry. This was a good read. The article hinted at the oligopolies that exist in aviation and in practice the industry is incredibly conservative and slow to change (particularly commercial aviation). While new technology is developed all the time, the extreme regulatory oversight combined with so much of the industry relying on long-standing relationships makes it difficult for any new entrant to come into the market. There is also a lot of domain specific knowledge that seems difficult to easily transfer.

You can read about China's modern carrier-based, stealth fighter here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35

There is a section about its engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35#Engines

The first engine they used for the J-35 was the RD-33 (designed/built in Russia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_RD-33#RD-93 - It was not efficient enough for the J-35 and generated black smoke trails. China decided to design & build a China-based engine.

This is the engine for the early J-35 prototype, WS-13 built in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-13

This is the production engine for J-35, the WS-19: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_WS-19

China has built 50+ J-35 aircraft, and is scaling up production to support their domestic military, and also export orders to other militaries (including Pakistan, and possibly Russia).

You can see videos of the J-35 aircraft here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdCNAUjuRI