And that's what I agreed to, but the media hype and the claims around CM400 did not stated that, but claimed it to be equal or similar to P800, but that wouldn't create a need for a copy.
The CM400AKG is an air-to-surface weapon, not an air-breathing system; people should pay more attention to technical details than newspaper sensationalism.
But why is there a need to do so many copies? The lack of innovation and R&D capability. The US are huge in defence spending and industrial capability and still there are smaller countries like Israel, Sweden or Germany that show similar or even more innovations with far less spending. So being able to produce something similar, doesn't automatically mean you could have developed something similar on your own.
That approach is far too simplified. "Copying" may be the superficial way to describe what some Chinese firms are doing now (and what countries like Russia and the US did in their youth), but what goes on behind the screens involve dissecting, integrating, understanding, and most importantly, innovating. Every single fruition of engineering relies in some form or another on previously-defined motifs. In fact, the reason why technology can advance in the first place is rooted in peoples' ability to learn, adapt, and apply. To stand on the shoulders of giants is not a sign of a lack of innovation, but rather an ability to take what others have laid out and use what's best of it to catalyze your own learning. In fact, the mere concept of "reverse engineering" requires a very developed technology base and ability to innovate on prior iterations of the said technology. Pick up any science magazine and open to a random research paper; you will find references to concepts that were made by other researchers every single time. There is a reason why people claim "reverse engineering" is easy or lame but yet so few organizations are capable of doing it.
Take J11 as an example, a good copy of the Su 27, but that doesn't gave China the capability to further develop it similar to Su34 or 35s did it?
I presume that you've never heard of the J-11B, J-15, or J-16. These systems, which utilize subsystems that are entirely unique to any Russian fighter, are precisely the result of what the aviation firms learned while producing improved variants of earlier Russian designs.
Having build J11 versions later and J10, didn't gave China the capability to develop own NG fighter designs either. The most innovative feature might be the SR missile bay, which clearly shows that they have developed it with certain aims behind it and not only copied from what they saw somewhere else.
I presume that you've never heard of the J-10B, J-20, or J-31. It would be quite naive to think these aircraft were developed without the input of the lessons learned in developing earlier designs, including ones that involved "copying".
But exactly this kind of own innovation and R&D is still at low level compared to the defence spending at least, while the ammount of copies is very high.
Defense spending has nothing to do with how "innovative" a systems is. Reverse engineering, if it were indeed the case, requires ample research, testing, innovating, applying, testing, and reflecting.
