Does the Little Eagle 500 look familiar, too?
Copied? I believe they own them :-)
They might just be old refurbished Cessnas/Socatas. Then they rebrand them and sell them as own in the domestic market. Maybe because it is easier to certify them this way? It would be way too painful to copy the aircraft down to every single detail.
The TB20 is probably licensed: https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1988/1988%20-%200408.html
Aaaahhh threads merged 
I doubt it – that is a 1988 article. Yeah, the chinks probably visited the Socata factory to see how to copy it.
Interesting though that Socata were looking for foreign manufacture that far back. It was examined much later but without success.
I don’t know about that Cessna (I believe the claim is that it is a copy, not a refurbished Cessna) but the TB20 is definitely a copy, made in China. The Chinese cannot sell it to the “civilised world” due to lack of Part 23 certification, and possibly a risk of litigation from Socata, but they can sell it to “captive” customers in their region. AFAIK it was done for flying schools.
Someone described China to me as “open source manufacturing” which is quite apt. I understand the government turns a blind eye or doesn’t fully recognise foreign intellectual property (a quick internet search has hundreds of funny examples). Certainly, when I was in up-the-supply-chain litigation a couple of years ago the lawyers said it would be near impossible to do anything in the Chinese courts, which could be overruled by the government anyway.
I’ve never really had quality problems importing from China. A few years ago we ran out of stock, so bought from a UK factory (with knackered machines, leaky injection moulding tools…) at a premium. I soon had an irate customer on the phone complaining about quality, saying, “I know what you’ve done, you’ve given me cheap Chinese crap!” He absolutely refused to believe they had been manufactured in the UK and he’d been buying ‘crap’ for years
For a communist country, their manufacturing certainly seems to understand capitalism better than UK factories From my experience:
Looking at the photo, a quick TB20 question: why is the elevator so far behind the rudder?
Capitaine wrote:
For a communist country, their manufacturing certainly seems to understand capitalism better than UK factories
That’s because China isn’t a communist country other than in name… It has a heavily state-regulated market economy.
China is still looking at GA…
https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/china-ga-growing-slowly/
Pics of their TB20 copy:
