Stating of the obvious... everyone in this forum know of what you have stated down. The only thing that you have pointed out on the Su-27 reverse engineering is that IT IS NOT REVERSE ENGINEERED! The PLA had the blueprint and technical assistance from the Russian, it is called LICENSE BUILD! So common sense has it, this is not a reverse engineered product.
The first few batches of J-11 are all using Russian kits with domestical contents coming in in later batches (all in the contract). The main reason for the Chinese to do that was because of the following,
1) Lack of experience in designing and building modern fighters
2) Lack of very advance manufacturing bases.
3) Lack of knowledge in this term
4) Speed of getting their airforce up to standard.
And after they receive all these technical knowhow and stuff like that, they began to radically improve on the J-11, using advance domestical radar, soon using own domestically designed and produced engines, own missiles and weapons and also using more composite material to reduce weigh of the fighter.
And to a nation - who cares about what others called when reverse engineering, especially when it came to weapons. But if you are going to clone something civilians that are being patented, you will get sue for it, and that is what patentship are for (to prevent direct copies of the product).
And how to this thing works? Very easy, someone (say, BAe or Airbus) patented hundreds of thousands of design and manufacturing process on A320. China wanted to reverse engineered it, and could reverse engineered it. Then came out with exactly the same design as the A320. What next? Sell it to international market? Airbus will bring the chinese company to court, force them to pay royalty or pull out their products from the market.
The European consortium is very powerful in this, they might even stop or ban airline operating the cloned A320 from entering their airports or airspace for that matter. So the only airlines who dare to purchase this product are the domestic airlines in China... which btw was making huge losses each year.
So what is cheaper for China to do? Buy A320 as per normal and forgoes all these crap about royalties and stuff like that, at least their international airlines could fly freely.
And what is more? C919 or this stuffs are coming out too. So why do you want to risk getting sued or things like that for cloning something that you could actually produced domestically?
Second, China's manufacturing bases and strenght plus technical know how was already not like... say... 50 years ago. They could stand on their own, without need of cloning aircrafts and ships... plus if really wanted to, they could... look at some of their rocket launchers, their Humvee lookalike and the such.
Plus... cloning of enemy's weapons would never hurt CHina or Soviet Union or whatever countries or nations in history. People are doing it for centuries. What will hurt China was that she was thrown into a needless arm race that would deplete all of her treasury and money... and the country will split into small little fractions.
