"We are targeted on China and intend in the nearest future to get no less than 50 per cent of the passenger market," said Bo Lung, president of Airbus China.
"Boeing has been a strategic partner of China for the past 30 years, and we aim further to develop our cooperation," said David Wang, president of Boeing China.
Currently Boeing accounts for 62 per cent of the market of passenger liners in China, while the share of Airbus is 30 per cent.
Russian companies, too, hope to return to the Chinese market of passenger traffic.
"Unfortunately, in the early 1990s, the Chinese reoriented themselves from our aircraft to western ones, also because of the wrong pricing policy of Russian plants," Yevgeny Yefimov, head of the international cooperation department of Tupolev company, told RIA Novosti.
"We hope that in several years' time Tupolev's share of the Chinese market will be a significant one," emphasised Alexander Zatuchny, deputy director-general of the company.
In the autumn of next year Tupolev intends to supply five Tu-230 aircraft to Chinese air lines in Beijing and Shanghai. "We are conducting negotiations with other companies, but our Chinese partners are waiting for the completion of deliveries under this contract," Zatuchny said.
According to a representative of the First Aviation Corporation of China at Airshow China-2004, in the next 20 years China will need 2,194 new passenger planes.
"According to a forecast prepared by the Commission for Science and Technologies under the Chinese government, the total number of aircraft in China will reach 2,769 by 2023, including 396 cargo planes. This means that in the next 20 years China will buy 2,194 passenger planes," the agency's source said.
Meanwhile, in the near future Russia may encounter serious competition on the Chinese armaments market as well if the European Union decides to lift the embargo on supplies of military hardware to China. In October of this year, this issue was raised at talks between Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and French President Jacques Chirac in the course of an unofficial European-Asian summit in Vietnam.
The leader of the Russian delegation to the airshow in Zhuhai, Yuri Koptev, head of the defence industry department at the Economic Development and Trade Ministry of Russia, noted that Russia is ready for honest competitive struggle.
"Regardless of changes in political conditions, we hope that the results of many decades of our joint work will be meaningful for the Chinese side and have an effect when deciding about a future partnership," Koptev said.
In the view of western specialists, who arrived at Zhuhai, European and American companies do not as yet view China as an armaments market.
"Western companies are not so far ready to work in China, which explains the far from representative presence of western arms makers at the airshow in Zhuhai," a representative of one of the large western corporations told RIA Novosti.
In the opinion of most experts interviewed by RIA Novosti, the airshow in Zhuhai is in decline, despite increased exhibition space. "Here, one can see practically no new developments, with most of the participants having brought the already known models," said Guido Bacelman, editor of the Swiss magazine Fly News.
"In Zhuhai this year there are almost no aircraft, with the Chinese putting only models on display," said Andrew Chang, chief editor of the Hong Kong information centre KANWA.
On a huge flying field behind the exhibition grounds there are indeed virtually no planes. Towering lonely above the mock-ups of Chinese single-seater aircraft is an Il-76, on which the Russian side brought most of its equipment to Zhuhai. At the same time, the exhibition in Zhuhai is among the most expensive for participation.
"To bring an aircraft here costs about $70,000, and the Chinese demand $6,000 for parking only," said Yevgeny Yefimov, a spokesman for Tupolev.
Rosoboronexport refused to quote to RIA Novosti the exact price of participation in the exhibition for the Russian side. According to a spokesman for one of the Russian companies, leasing a standard stand at the exhibition costs as much as $100,000.
