In 1985, an Airbus A310, registered B-2301, was delivered to the Shanghai regional branch of the Civil Aviation Administration of China — now China Eastern Airlines — becoming the country's first aircraft from the European manufacturer and joining a national in?service fleet of about 200 planes.

With that first delivery, Airbus glimpsed China's immense potential, said George Xu, CEO of Airbus China and executive vice?president of Airbus.

China offered a vast and rapidly growing market, with the reform and opening-up policy being expected to fuel greater domestic and international exchanges, which gave the European consortium confidence in the future of the country's aviation industry, he said.

More than four decades on, China has become the world's second-largest aviation market and the biggest single-country market for Airbus.

To date, the number of Airbus aircraft in service on the Chinese mainland has grown to more than 2,300, including passenger aircraft and freighters, giving Airbus a market share of more than 55 percent. China's fleet now also includes Airbus' latest aircraft models.

The service scope also covers the entire lifecycle from pre-delivery technical support and in-flight operations to end-of-life, with 2,300 local employees based across 10 sites nationwide, including several facilities that Airbus established for the first time.

Over the next 20 years, China will — "without question", said Xu — become the world's largest aviation market. According to Airbus' latest Global Services Forecast, China is expected to take delivery of nearly 9,600 new aircraft between 2025 and 2044, accounting for more than 20 percent of global demand.

That scale gives China a uniquely important position among the company's major strategic markets, which also include the Asia-Pacific region, India, the United States, and the Middle East, Xu said.

While the Chinese market is highly competitive — not least because the aviation sector competes with China's extensive high-speed rail network, which is the world's largest — Xu said this makes it all the more crucial to deliver products and services of the highest quality.

Being a long-term and reliable partner to China has guided Airbus throughout its 40-year journey in the country. That approach has grown in step with China–European Union relations, which marked their 50th anniversary in 2025.

"Airbus has witnessed the relationship and benefited from it," Xu said. "More importantly, we have been active participants in it."

Billion-dollar partnership

Along with that first aircraft delivered to China in the mid-1980s, Airbus also brought a parts subcontracting agreement covering the production and assembly of A300 and A310 avionics bay doors.

An even more significant turning point came around 2005, Xu said, when Airbus decided to build an A320?family final assembly line, or FAL, in China, which was the first such facility outside Europe.

At the same time, Airbus also allocated a 5 percent workshare on the then?in?development A350 wide-body aircraft to China, paving the way for a composite manufacturing center in Harbin, in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province.

The Harbin Hafei Airbus Composite Manufacturing Center, a joint venture between Airbus and its Chinese partners, is now the sole supplier worldwide of Airbus A350-900 elevator, rudder, S19 maintenance door, and belly fairing parts.

Following the inauguration of the first Tianjin FAL in 2008, Airbus opened a second line in 2025, making Tianjin home to its only A320-family final assembly lines in Asia.

Next door, wings assembled by the AVIC (Aviation Industry Corporation of China) Xi'an Aircraft Industry Group are delivered directly to the production line, reflecting a partnership between Airbus and AVIC that dates back to 1999. The arrangement cuts delivery times by at least 60 days compared with shipping the wings from the United Kingdom by sea.

The relationship between China and Airbus grew from one focused mainly on the country as a market for sales to one also rooted in deep industrial cooperation, with Airbus steadily deepening the localization of its supply chain, Xu said.

"Airbus currently has around 200 suppliers in China, with annual cooperation worth about $1 billion. We aim to increase that to $1.8 billion by 2030," Xu said.

"Our cooperation has evolved from individual parts production to sub-assembly and major component manufacturing, then to final aircraft assembly, and now to maintenance, after-sales services, and even aircraft dismantling. It has become a comprehensive partnership across the entire value chain."

Chinese-made components can now be found across Airbus' entire commercial aircraft lineup.

"One thing that has become increasingly clear to us in the Chinese market is that several factors are emerging as distinct competitive advantages," Xu said. "The first is certainty. In an increasingly uncertain world, companies are looking for certainty — certainty in policymaking, industrial direction, and the business and investment environment. These are all things businesses value greatly.

"Another key factor is the strength of local partners. We have seen continuous improvements in their capabilities and overall competitiveness, whether in product quality, commercial performance, or their readiness for the future. This is particularly evident in areas such as R&D, decarbonization, and digitalization.

"These are all developments we pay close attention to, and in some respects, there is much we can learn from them."

China-Europe flagship

The two A320-family FALs in Tianjin, which are a joint venture between Airbus and a Chinese consortium comprising the Tianjin Free Trade Zone and AVIC, stand as a flagship of industrial cooperation between China and Airbus, as well as a symbol of Sino-European cooperation.

Final assembly is far more than simply putting pieces together, Xu said, as it requires coordinating deliveries from a vast supplier network, integrating thousands of components with precision, testing and validating hundreds of aircraft systems, and meeting rigorous safety and airworthiness standards before a plane can take to the skies.

What ultimately comes together is not just an aircraft, but a highly reliable and finely tuned industrial system.

To date, the Tianjin final assembly lines have delivered over 800 A320-family aircraft, with about one-third of the Airbus fleet operating in China assembled there.

The facility has also expanded its reach beyond the Chinese market. In 2025, around 20 percent of the aircraft produced in Tianjin were delivered to non-Chinese airlines.

These deliveries have set "industry benchmarks" in both quality and on-time performance, Xu said.

Marine Brand, head of quality corrective and assurance at Airbus Tianjin Final Assembly Company Limited, said Chinese colleagues' can-do attitude is particularly impressive.

"They are really efficient in fixing issues. They are really target-oriented," she said. "When you give them a goal or a target to achieve, they will do it, and they are very disciplined in doing it, which makes the work very efficient and quite easy from a management point of view."

Brand, who learned Chinese as a child and worked in Tianjin 15 years ago, said China felt like the "perfect place" to settle when she began considering a move abroad after spending many years in Europe.

At the same time, the move to Tianjin has also been professionally a "win" for her, as she took on a new function in which she had little prior experience in Europe.

"There's so much happening right now in Airbus Tianjin. There are so many opportunities. I really hope to stay and be part of that success story of Airbus in China," said Brand.

Building the future

Airbus also looks to the future by continuously refining its existing aircraft families and developing technologies for the next generation of aviation, Xu said. To do so, he added, the company "must" actively engage with China's innovation ecosystem.

"Today, China's innovation landscape stands out globally," he said. "The quality and speed of innovation, the regulatory environment's openness to experimentation, and the market's willingness to embrace new technologies have all earned international recognition."

To harness China's strengths in innovation, Airbus has established centers in Beijing, Chengdu, and Suzhou, focusing on areas such as advanced materials, aviation software, smart manufacturing, cabin interior upgrades, sustainability, and more.

The Airbus Chengdu Lifecycle Services Centre is a notable example of how the company's drive for sustainable aviation aligns with China's long-term push for greener aviation, and more recently, a circular economy under the country's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25).

Opened in 2024, the center is the first of its kind — a one?stop shop covering aircraft storage, maintenance, upgrades, conversions, dismantling, recycling, and used?parts trading.

"Aviation is among the hardest sectors to decarbonize," Xu said. "To succeed, we need to work much more closely with China, drawing on Chinese solutions to help the industry achieve its sustainability goals."

Yang Shudong, head of commercial of Airbus Chengdu Lifecycle Services Limited, said the center is also an important part of Airbus' localization strategy in China.

"Since I joined Airbus China, the Chengdu operation has grown from a project into a fully functioning company that has now been running smoothly for two years," Yang said. "It is also worth noting that around 95 percent of the company's employees are locally recruited."

In for the long haul

Xu said long-termism and mutually beneficial cooperation have been key to Airbus' success in China over the past four decades.

"The opportunities we see in China — in its market, industrial partnerships, and innovation ecosystem — are all long-term in nature. Also, aviation itself is an industry with long investment cycles and considerable risks. That is why long-termism matters rather than chasing short-term gains," he said.

"Collaboration is another value we strongly believe in. At a time when the global political and economic landscape is marked by growing uncertainty, the focus has to be on creating win-win outcomes, not one side taking all the results," he said.

Airbus has supported some Chinese private enterprises with no prior presence in aerospace in entering the sector, Xu said. They have since become increasingly capable and specialized, integrating into the company's global supply chain.

As China continues to expand its "high-standard opening-up" economic strategy, Airbus, serving as a key industry anchor, has encouraged its global suppliers to deepen engagement with China, bringing a broad range of foreign companies into the Chinese market, Xu said.

"We are proud to have been part of that journey," he added.

Over the past 40 years, the European consortium has witnessed and contributed to the rapid rise of China's civil aviation industry.

The same four decades have also been a period of progress for China-EU ties, albeit not always in a straight line.

"There are times when the relations face challenges and uncertainties," Xu said. "As a company, we see ourselves as playing an important role in driving cooperation between the two sides. That is especially true for aviation, which is fundamentally about connectivity — connecting people, goods, and ideas."

Airbus is not looking back — only forward, to exploring the next stage of its shared journey with China.

Contact the writer at zhengwanyin@mail.chinadailyuk.com