Comment by coderenegade

Reapers aren't the only military drones, and yes, there are drones that do help establish air superiority, either on the reconnaissance and logistics side, or (more recently) directly on the combat side.

China doesn't have the same level of sophistication in stealth tech, and they still struggle to make decent jet engines, because they don't have the required materials technology for certain components. There's also decades of work in signals processing, which is at least as important as the platform. Not to mention sensor packages, but they almost certainly have a lot of that down. A drone is simple until it needs to fly close to the coffin corner, do air-to-air refueling, land on a carrier, be invisible to radar, be hardened to jamming, act as a wingman to a human pilot... You get the idea.

And since it apparently wasn't obvious, I'm not really talking drones specifically, I'm talking about all defense hardware. China doesn't have anything close to an F-22, and as far as we know, their tanks aren't as good. They can't build carriers that can compete with US ones. But they're already outcompeting the US when it comes to building civilian vessels, and they're taking over the electric car market. How long until they can build a decent carrier or tank?