On my journey through the halls of aviation doom, I did 2.5 years working for a Chinese air carrier. To say that was an odd experience is an understatement. In 2.5 years, I travelled over and back from my land far far away, and did the Recurrents for the type I had flown years before, and did CAAC medical after medical after medical, and in the whole time, the PRC manner of doing business resulted in a logbook that never included time in the aircraft. The previous company, we logged 1000FH a year, in China, I did zero flight time in 2.5 years, but I enjoyed the scenery, the bike riding, and the frequent visits to HKG for the day. Like the story goes, "you not in this for the hunting are ya, son....". They paid on time, and in the end, I went instructing on types elsewhere, cuz I'm apparently addicted to crew meals and jet lag.
20 years before, on my first arrival into the old airport at Shanghai, before Maui or his equivalent had fished Pudong out of the water, the drive into the Swissotel by the Bund was illuminating. Already the major location in the world for high rise construction cranes, all the glittering facades, sitting magnificently framed by McDonalds and Coke flags, of all of the buildings, the occupancy rate was explained to be... 3%. That is over 30 years ago. The PRC backed developments in SCS regional countries today, have... 3%-5% occupancy. I like their accounting, I think I could give up R&D and sit on a beach for the next thousand years with figgerz like that.
Doing an arrival into one big town in the PRC a while back, we got plonked into a spot that we initially declined, we considered that it would be problematic to push our jet... but rules is rules so we parked, eventually. It took 5 hours to get the aircraft pushed back due to the rules is rules, the tugs that would work were not allowed to do so, the tugs that would not work were the ones that were required to do so. No end of pleading, ranting, yelling was going to change the outcome, so, I went off and made a tow bar adapter to make the square peg fit the round hole. [If you ever want to have fun, state unable RVSM in the middle of China, whatever is supposed to happen and what happens don't residue on the same rock extant the sun].
I enjoy China, a lot, it is fascinating. It is its very own Potemkin homage.
Is it smart to be applying knowledge that was refined by all of those before to the PRC? In military matters, no, were we not taught that if you aren't winning the fight you're just not cheating enough? A GAU-8 to the knife flight is a more desirable outcome, and providing for chickenfeed the competency that has been derived over time by the forbears of the current mil drivers seems to be unfortunate. If we can't keep the guys, then we are part of the problem but giving a potential adversary a help up in their ability to take out our teams is untidy thunkin'. IMHO.