Its quite amusing to see your "chinese will take care of the rest" attitude. Unfortunately in this case chinese dont seem to have gotten grasp of jet engines tech even for their front line fighters.
This is latest i.e jan 07 update about the development of WS-10 for j-10.
i wasnt able to identify any Chinese sources corroborating the above info coz most chinese sources are written in chinese :wall:
But still i choose to believe this coz this has been written by a chinese guy who is a longstandig editor of this j-10 article on wiki(as seen frm its edit history) and there is no reason to doubt his correctness.
Anyways this is the state of WS-10 (and remember the j-10 program started in 1986) and after 20 years WS-10 is quite far from completion.
now coming to WS-13 its development can be compared with the development of SNECMA M88 (the one used on rafale -which is in the same league as RD-33 and WS-13 with a static thrust of 5113.6 Kgf) .M88 development was started in 1986 and the engine entered production phase in 1996,i.e it took french 10 years to bring the engine from concept to production (and btw M88 is not the first fighter engine to be developed by the french they had already developed similar engines for mirage).
Now how long do you expect the development of WS-13 to go on before it is lined up for production by the chinese??
I'd say taht 12-15 years is a conservative estimate and considering that jf-17 program started in 1999 the WS-13 could be ready at max by 2012 (i.e 5 years from now!).
I'd further go on to say that china has no pressing requirement for jf-17 and any task which could be done by jf-17 could be done better by j-10 (basic version).Also it seems pakistan has no leverage to speed up the project -i.e it hasnt signed any deal stipulating that china needs to refund a part of pakistan's investment if jf-17 goes into significant time overrun. so china has no reason to expediate the development of WS-13 any further than it has at present.
Hence instead of placing all its eggs in one basket and waiting for them to hatch, the best bet for paf would be to induct 30-40 grippen/f16/mirage as a stopgap measure and wait for ws-13 to get completed...whenever taht happens