China’s aviation industry keeps creating openings for foreign companies, but not the ones people talked about ten years ago. Back then the story was simple: Chinese airlines bought American and European aircraft, and the whole supply chain benefited. In 2026 Beijing wants its own narrow-body aircraft flying, its own engines under the wing, and a domestic supply base behind both. That shift scares a lot of Western suppliers. It should not. The parts of the aircraft China cannot build yet are exactly where a foreign supplier still gets paid, and the window is open now.
I am Olivier Verot, founder of Gentlemen Marketing Agency. I have been based in Shanghai since 2012 and my teams have run China market-entry work for European industrial suppliers, including aerospace component makers dealing with COMAC’s tier-one and tier-two network and with CAAC-approved maintenance shops. What follows comes from that work, not from a press kit. LinkedIn.
Where Chinese civil aviation actually stands in 2026
Forget the “explosive growth” cliché. The market went through a rough patch, recovered, and is now growing at a normal industrial pace. That matters, because a supplier who plans on 15% annual traffic growth will build the wrong business case.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China published its 2025 sector bulletin in April 2026. Chinese carriers moved 770.15 million passengers over the year, up 5.5%, and 10.17 million tonnes of freight and mail, up 13.3%. The fleet reached 4,574 transport aircraft. Of those, 220 were domestically built. Read that ratio again before you assume Boeing and Airbus are being pushed out overnight.
The first half of 2026 confirmed the pattern. Passenger volume hit 380 million, up only 1% year on year, while cargo rose 6% to 5.07 million tonnes. Domestic passenger traffic has essentially plateaued. The growth has moved to two places: international routes and freight. International services carried more than 40 million passengers in the half, up 5.7%, and Chinese carriers now operate over 1,000 scheduled international routes serving 177 cities in 80 countries. International cargo grew 13.9% to 2.32 million tonnes. Source: China News, July 2026 CAAC briefing.
| Indicator | Latest figure | Change | Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Passengers carried | 770.15 million | +5.5% | Full year 2025 |
| Freight and mail carried | 10.17 million tonnes | +13.3% | Full year 2025 |
| Transport aircraft in fleet | 4,574 (220 domestic-built) | n/a | End 2025 |
| Passengers carried | 380 million | +1% | H1 2026 |
| International passengers | over 40 million | +5.7% | H1 2026 |
| International freight and mail | 2.32 million tonnes | +13.9% | H1 2026 |
| Registered civil drones | 4.788 million | flight hours +8% | H1 2026 |
| C919 cumulative orders | close to 1,500 (1,150+ firm) | n/a | February 2026 |
Two structural points survive from the older forecasts and are still worth keeping. China is on track to become the world’s largest aviation market by passenger turnover around 2030, and roughly one fifth of global air passengers will start, end or transit their journey in China by the mid-2030s. Those projections came from IATA years ago and they have held up better than most.
How deep the dependence on Boeing and Airbus actually goes
Look at where the market was before the C919. Xiamen Airlines, one of the most profitable carriers in the country with three decades of consecutive profitability, built its entire fleet on Boeing. Its 200th aircraft, a 737 MAX, arrived in May 2018, and its 787 Dreamliners are what opened its long-haul routes out of Fujian. That was the standard model: a Chinese carrier grows, and it grows on American or European metal. In 2017 Boeing delivered a record 202 aircraft to China, its sixth straight year above 140, and China took 26% of Boeing’s global commercial deliveries. A quarter of one manufacturer’s output going to one country is a commercial success and a strategic exposure at the same time. Beijing drew the second conclusion.
The C919 and the push to depend less on Boeing and Airbus
COMAC’s C919 is a single-aisle aircraft aimed straight at the A320 and 737 segment. As of February 2026 it had close to 1,500 orders on the books, more than 1,150 of them firm. Air China, China Eastern and China Southern have each committed to at least 100 aircraft. On paper the programme is sold out for a decade.
Production is the bottleneck. COMAC targeted at least 28 deliveries for 2026 and shipped three in the first quarter: two to China Southern, one to Air China. Chinese industry press reported in January 2026 that the supply chain had improved enough to build one aircraft every 10 to 15 days. A second plant is going up in Lingang, Shanghai Pudong, with four automated lines and a stated capacity above 150 aircraft a year at full rate from 2027.
Certification outside China is the second constraint, and it is hard. EASA keeps test pilots and engineers on the C919 in Shanghai almost permanently, yet European regulators have said approval is unlikely before 2028 and could slide toward 2031. No EASA certificate means no European operator, and it also blocks the aircraft in the many countries that follow EASA rules. The C919 stays a domestic aircraft, plus a few friendly markets, for the rest of this decade.
Meanwhile Airbus opened a second A320 final assembly line in Tianjin in October 2025, doubling its Chinese assembly capacity, with full operation from early 2026. That plant needs local suppliers, logistics and support just as much as COMAC does.
Where the money is for a foreign supplier
Here is the part most European sales directors get wrong. “China wants to build everything itself” is true as policy and false as a purchase order. The C919 flying today uses a Western engine, the LEAP-1C, plus Western content across avionics, flight controls, actuation, landing gear, environmental control and fuel systems. Replacing all of that takes a generation.
The domestic engine, the CJ-1000A, shows the real timeline. Chinese reporting in 2026 put it at over 6,000 hours of endurance and extreme-condition testing, including bird strike, icing, water ingestion and high-altitude trials at Golmud in Qinghai. Type certification was expected during 2026, with a first C919 flying on domestic engines as a demonstration. Serial production is planned for 2027 at 50 to 70 units a year, so the fleet runs mixed imported and domestic power for years. Localisation of the deeper items, high-precision bearings, seals and sensors, is targeted around 2028.
So the practical map for a foreign supplier looks like this:
- Still wide open: engine hot-section components, high-precision bearings, seals, aerospace-grade sensors, test and measurement equipment, specialty materials and treatments, certification and qualification services.
- Open with a local partner: actuation, hydraulics, environmental control, cabin systems, ground support equipment, tooling and automated assembly lines.
- Closing fast: structures, wiring looms, machined parts with no proprietary process, anything where the drawing is the only value you add.
- Effectively closed: complete airframes, and anything the state has designated as a self-sufficiency priority with a domestic champion already funded.
The rule I give clients is blunt. If a Chinese engineer can reverse-engineer your product in eighteen months, China is a short-term revenue market, not a strategy. If your value sits in a process, a qualification history or a material you control, you have a decade of business ahead.
Maintenance and MRO, the quiet earner
A fleet of 4,574 transport aircraft has to be maintained, and it is ageing. Maintenance, repair and overhaul is the least glamorous entry route into Chinese aviation and often the fastest to revenue, because MRO buys continuously rather than in ten-year programme cycles.
Chinese MRO providers cluster around the big carriers and their joint ventures. They buy tooling, test benches, consumables, repair processes and training. These buyers are engineering-led, which changes how you sell: they read a technical note, run a bench test, then talk price. A supplier holding a CAAC repair station approval, or partnered with a shop that holds one, is in a different conversation than one selling from a catalogue in Europe. I have seen a European component repair specialist reach a seven-figure annual China business in under three years on MRO alone, without touching a new-aircraft programme.
Air cargo, pulled by cross-border e-commerce
Freight is the strongest line in the numbers. Cross-border e-commerce parcels, AI hardware, pharmaceuticals and high-value cold chain now drive Chinese air cargo more than traditional industrial freight does. International cargo grew 13.9% in the first half of 2026 while domestic passenger traffic barely moved.
That creates demand in places people forget: freighter conversion, cargo loading systems, unit load devices, temperature-controlled containers, warehouse automation at airport hubs, and the certification work behind all of it. If you sell ground handling or cargo systems, the buying centres are the airport groups and the express operators, not the airlines.
General aviation and drones: the low-altitude economy
The state has designated the “low-altitude economy” a strategic emerging industry in the 15th Five-Year Plan. It covers drones, eVTOL aircraft and general aviation. CAAC has put the sector at roughly 1.5 trillion RMB in 2025, with far higher figures projected for the 2030s. Treat those trillion-RMB numbers as political targets rather than measured revenue. The underlying activity is real: 4.788 million civil drones registered in China, logging 26.4 million flight hours in the first half of 2026 alone, up 8%.
The regulatory piece is what changed. A revised Civil Aviation Law took effect on 1 July 2026, running to 16 chapters and 262 articles. It adds explicit support for general aviation, tells local governments above county level to promote it, and sets tiered airspace rules. Micro and light unmanned aircraft can now fly below 120 metres true altitude outside restricted zones without an airspace application. That single clause unblocks a large amount of commercial drone work. See the CAAC text of the revised law.
If you make batteries, motors, composite structures, avionics, sense-and-avoid sensors or ground control systems, this is the fastest-moving buying market in Chinese aviation right now. It is also the most crowded with domestic rivals, so positioning matters more than price. More on the commercial side in our guide on how to market a drone product in China.
Market access: what a foreign supplier actually has to clear
Three gates, in this order.
1. CAAC certification and validation
Your EASA or FAA approvals do not transfer automatically. Depending on the item you go through validation of an existing approval or a full CAAC process. Either way it takes time, Chinese-language documentation and a local technical contact who sits in the meetings. Budget it as a project with its own headcount, not as paperwork the sales team handles on the side. Suppliers who underestimate this lose a year.
2. The joint venture question
A Chinese partner is often the practical route in, even when no rule forces it. The partner brings certification history, the relationship with the airframer or the airline, and the local content that helps a bid score well. It also takes a share of your margin and gets visibility into your product. Decide early which of the two matters more, because renegotiating a JV after signature is close to impossible.
3. Technology transfer as an unwritten condition
Nobody puts it in the contract that way. It arrives as a request for local assembly, then local machining, then a shared engineering office, then joint development of the next generation. Each step is reasonable alone. Together they move your know-how. Suppliers who handle this well decide in advance which generation of technology they localise and which stays home. The ones who improvise compete with their former partner five years later.
Getting found: how Chinese aviation buyers look for suppliers
Reputation and online presence still decide whether a Chinese engineer or procurement lead takes your call. Chinese buyers research heavily before contacting anyone, and they research in Chinese, on Chinese platforms. If you are invisible there, you are not a candidate. That was true when this article was first written and it is more true now.
Baidu is the qualification step, not the discovery step
A buyer hears your name in a meeting or at an airshow, then searches it. If Baidu returns nothing in Chinese, or a slow overseas-hosted page, you look like a company that is not serious about China. The minimum is a Chinese site on a fast local host, with technical pages written for engineers, not marketing pages written for CEOs. Technical Chinese keywords convert far better than generic ones: engineers search for the component and the standard, not for “aerospace supplier”.
Generative engine optimisation on DeepSeek and Doubao
This is new and it works. Chinese engineers ask DeepSeek or Doubao “which suppliers make X to Y standard” and treat the answer as a shortlist. The mechanism is simple. These models assemble answers from Chinese-language sources they can read and attribute: your Chinese site, Baidu Baike, Zhihu, technical articles on industry portals, WeChat articles. If your specifications, standards compliance and application cases exist as clean Chinese text on those sources, you get named. If your only technical content is an English PDF behind a form, you do not exist. WeChat’s integration of DeepSeek made this concrete for a lot of brands, as we explained in our analysis of WeChat and DeepSeek.
WeChat, and the private domain
WeChat started as a messaging app and became the place where Chinese business relationships live. For a supplier, a WeChat official account holds the technical library, and WeCom is where your engineers stay in contact with the buyer’s engineers between purchase orders. That second part is the private domain: contacts you own, in a channel you control, that no platform can take away or charge you again to reach.
Airlines proved the model first. KLM built a WeChat account as a customer service channel for Chinese passengers, and Air France, British Airways and Singapore Airlines followed. Our case study on KLM’s use of WeChat in China still holds up on the mechanics. The industrial version is less visible and works the same way: fewer followers, far higher value per contact.
Trade shows still matter, but only with a follow-up system behind them. Zhuhai Airshow, CIIE and the specialised industrial fairs generate real contacts, and the failure is always the same: cards collected, nothing built behind them. A booth without a Chinese landing page, a WeChat QR code and a Chinese-speaking engineer who answers within 24 hours is money spent on carpet. See our piece on industrial exhibitions in China and how to convert them into B2B clients.
Case study: Georg, German supplier of actuation components
Georg runs a family-owned company in Baden-Württemberg making hydraulic actuation components for aircraft systems. Around 180 people, long-standing supplier to European programmes, strong qualification history. He came to us after eighteen months of trying to enter China alone.
The problem was measurable. Two Zhuhai Airshow appearances, roughly 70,000 euros spent, 140 business cards, zero qualified opportunities twelve months later. His German and English site had almost no Baidu visibility. When a COMAC tier-one supplier’s engineering team was told to shortlist actuation partners, they searched in Chinese and found three competitors, two of them smaller than Georg. He was not rejected. He was never on the list.
What he tried and dropped: LinkedIn outreach, which reaches almost nobody at a Chinese state-linked supplier; a Chinese brochure translated once and never updated; and a commission-paid agent in Shanghai with no technical background who could not answer a single engineering question.
What worked, and why. We built a Chinese technical site on a local host, structured around component families and the standards they meet, because that is what engineers search. We published his qualification history and test data as readable Chinese text instead of gated English PDFs, which made it usable by Baidu and quotable by DeepSeek and Doubao. We opened a WeChat official account as a technical library and pushed every contact into WeCom, so his own application engineer in Germany could follow up with a translator. Nothing here was clever. It removed the reasons a Chinese engineer had to ignore him.
After nine months: 43 inbound technical enquiries, 11 from companies inside the COMAC supply chain or CAAC-approved maintenance shops, three plant audits, one signed NDA with a tier-two supplier that led to a qualification programme. No revenue in year one, which is normal in this industry. A real pipeline, which he did not have before.
FAQ
Is it too late to enter Chinese aviation as a Western supplier?
No, but the door is narrowing on commodity items. Domestic aircraft numbered 220 out of a 4,574-strong fleet at the end of 2025, and China’s own engine is only reaching certification now. Anything involving a controlled process, a long qualification history or a material you own has years of demand ahead. Anything that is essentially a drawing and a machine tool gets localised within a few years. Sort your portfolio into those two buckets before you commit a budget.
Do I need a joint venture to sell aviation components in China?
Not always, and I would not start there. Many suppliers sell for two or three years through a wholly owned trading entity or through distributors, then form a JV once they know which customer justifies it. A JV signed before you understand the market usually locks you to the wrong partner. What you do need early is CAAC certification work and a technical presence on the ground. Those two cannot be outsourced to a sales agent.
Will the C919 replace Airbus and Boeing in China?
Not this decade. COMAC targeted at least 28 deliveries in 2026 and shipped three in the first quarter, while Airbus opened a second Tianjin assembly line in late 2025. Even at the planned rate of over 150 aircraft a year from the Lingang plant, replacing thousands of Western aircraft takes fifteen to twenty years. The realistic outcome is a three-way domestic market, with the C919 taking the incremental growth first.
Which part of Chinese aviation is easiest to enter right now?
MRO and the low-altitude economy. MRO buys continuously and judges on technical merit, so a supplier earns revenue while a new-aircraft programme is still in qualification. The low-altitude sector opened further when the revised Civil Aviation Law took effect on 1 July 2026 and freed micro and light drones to fly below 120 metres without an airspace application. Both move faster than airframe programmes and both are reachable with a small local team.
Gentlemen Marketing Agency works with industrial and aerospace suppliers who need Chinese engineers and procurement teams to find them, not with consumer brands chasing followers. We build Chinese technical sites, Baidu visibility on component-level keywords, and the AI-search presence that decides who makes a shortlist on DeepSeek and Doubao. We also run the WeChat and WeCom follow-up that keeps a two-year aviation sales cycle alive. Tell us what you make and who has to specify it: contact our team.
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