It should be apparent to everyone that military technology is advancing very rapidly in China. The question is why? Over the last five years, the pace has quickened dramatically. I think there are five reasons.
1. China has a booming economy that provides plentiful resources.
Its a necessity and a pre-requisite to have the money obviously. Without it, nothing happens. But there is another thing that has worked in China's favor a LOT, and that is the technology and availability of it.
For example, if you see China really starting into the military R&D arena in the 90's and in 25 years, coming up so many weapons systems has to do with the availability of desktop based technologies. When the US and Russians started out, till really the 80's, in the US, outside of DARPA, Northrop, GD, Boeing and a couple of others, there weren't really anyone. So the US programs had to overcome things the hard way. Then mainframes came around, etc, etc.
Now, in today's time and age, starting from the 90's, technology became available on the desktops. Many graphical movies like the Lion King, which otherwise would require new super-computing capability to produce graphics, was actually developed on a network of high end Dell desktop computers with special hardware and much higher than average memory.
So when the Chinese kicked off the R&D stuff, the Desk Tops had become so powerful that it helped speed up and cut years from each project. I think the first stealth was a work of a decade of more in the US, just to get the design right. And now they compare the F-117 as having "obsolete" and "older tech" with over 40% more cost to build compared to the F-22. While the US and Russia have been at it since the 40's and really where manual work was to some degree faster than the computer. China however, benefited from the technology revolution and was able to use latest technology and equipment and apply it directly onto her programs.