After Trump’s historic visit to China from May 13 to 15, marking nine years since an American president last set foot in Beijing, he returned home with what he described as consequential talks for trade and peace. Among the outcomes was an intended purchase of 200 Boeing jets by President Xi, predominantly the 737 narrowbody and the 777 widebody, with an option to extend to 750. For a country that has spent twenty years and billions of dollars trying to build its own commercial aircraft industry, buying American jets at scale is not just a trade concession. It is an admission.
The aircraft China just agreed to buy is precisely the one it has spent two decades trying to replace.
The Duopoly Built to Last
As it stands, commercial aviation is one of the most durable duopolies in any industry – dominated by American manufacturer Boeing and pan-European manufacturer Airbus. Together, they virtually supply every commercial and cargo aircraft operating today, a dominance that solidified after major players like McDonnell Douglas exited the market in the early 2000s under the weight of safety concerns and ferocious competition.
That dominance is not simply a byproduct of engineering superiority. It is structural, accumulated over fifty years. Building a commercial jetliner requires mastery of thousands of components across a complicated global supply chain, decades of regulatory trust-building with aviation authorities, and production volumes large enough to drive unit costs to competitive levels. This is why new entrants face a closed loop: airlines won’t order aircraft that aren’t certified, regulators won’t certify aircraft without operational history, and manufacturers can’t build operational history without orders. Boeing and Airbus have spent fifty years perfecting that loop, which is why every year they operate, the barriers get higher.
China’s state-owned COMAC entered this market in 2008 with the C919, targeting the same narrowbody segment occupied by the Airbus A320neo and Boeing 737 MAX. China had already broken Western dominance in electric vehicles, electronics, solar panels and high-speed rail. The C919 was meant to do the same for commercial aviation, introducing a genuine third competitor to a market that had long stopped expecting one.
Nearly two decades later, the results tell a more complicated story.
The C919’s Structural Problem
The C919 first entered commercial service in May 2023 with China Eastern Airlines. On paper, the order book looked strong, with over 1,000 orders from Chinese state airlines, government leasing companies and Chinese partners. In practice, virtually no international airline showed interest, and for two clear reasons.
The aircraft has not received certification from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), disallowing it from operating in most major international markets. Approval is expected no earlier than 2028, with a possibility of slipping to 2031. The trust built by the duopoly over fifty years simply does not exist for COMAC, and the certification delays only reinforce that.
The delays are not purely technical. In 2018, the US Department of Justice indicted ten Chinese nationals, including intelligence officials, for allegedly stealing trade secrets from thirteen aerospace companies involved in the C919 program. Western regulators have long memories. Production tells the same story. COMAC set an ambitious target of delivering 75 C919s in 2025. The figure got slashed to 25 after the United States temporarily blocked export licences for the CFM LEAP-1C engines that power the aircraft. That single restriction, lifted months later, was enough to derail an entire year of production targets. Western components account for up to 60% of the C919’s total value. Honeywell supplies the flight control systems, Collins Aerospace supplies the avionics, the engines come from CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aerospace and France’s Safran. China’s domestic replacement engine, the CJ-1000A, is not expected to be certified until 2030 at the earliest.
A COMAC C919 aircraft operated by China Eastern Airlines sits on the tarmac at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport ahead of its maiden commercial flight, May 28, 2023). Credit: Andy Wong / AP
Beijing’s Trump Card
The Boeing deal did not emerge from a commercial negotiation. It emerged from a tariff war. Earlier in 2025, China imposed a 125% duty on American imports in retaliation for Trump’s tariff hikes, briefly banning domestic airlines from accepting new Boeing deliveries. That ban had a paradoxical effect; stranding aircraft China had already ordered and grounding deliveries Chinese airlines actually needed. The C919 could not fill the gap. COMAC was already missing its own production targets.
When Trump set off in Beijing, China needed a trade concession it could offer, and Boeing needed a market it had lost. The 200-aircraft commitment was the result, a deal shaped less by aviation economics than by the pressure of a trade war both sides needed to de-escalate. Trump called it 750 planes and a lot of jobs. Boeing’s CEO called it reopening the China market. Neither framing captures the underlying dynamic: China bought Boeing jets because its own jets weren’t ready.
That context matters for what comes next. The Boeing deal is not a signal that China has abandoned its aviation ambitions. It is a signal that those ambitions are running on a longer timeline than the political rhetoric admitted.
What we understand about the duopoly
Boeing and Airbus have watched new entrants attempt to break their market before. Bombardier tried with the CSeries, Embraer carved out a regional niche but never cracked the narrowbody core, Mitsubishi spent a decade and billions on the SpaceJet before abandoning it entirely. Each underestimated the same thing: regulatory certification, supply chain maturity and production scale. These are not engineering problems; they are time problems. In commercial aviation, time is measured in decades.
The C919 will eventually increase production, receive EASA certification, and develop a domestic engine. But eventually means a lot of work, and in the meantime, Chinese airlines need aircraft they can use to fly out.
For now, the country that wants to end the Boeing-Airbus duopoly just handed one half of it its largest order in nearly a decade. The C919, as it currently exists, is not an instrument of decoupling, rather a domestically assembled product with a foreign-dependent supply chain and more geopolitical talking point than strategic asset.