Originally Posted by
plhought
The Chinese have been license producing Russian engines for military use for decades, often featuring some very exotic metals to avoid the complexity of internally cooled rotors/stators, adaptive tip clearances etc etc.
I think they'll figure it out.
The Russians haven't (yet). Western engines are clearly far better than their Russian counterparts - better fuel burn, more reliable, less maintenance - and it's due in large part to the metallurgy.