Casic officials declined to comment, but a video and a two-dimensional display by the company showed Chinese forces using the WJ600 to help attack what appeared to be a U.S. aircraft carrier steaming toward an island off China's coast that many visitors assumed to be Taiwan.

WSJ: China's Drones Raise Eyebrows at Air Show

Taiwan's economic miracle was helped by the mass of money that the fleeing Nationalists brought with them, by the infrastructure already in place in the island after a half-century of Japanese colonisation, by an American presence underwriting Taiwan's defence, and by ready markets in both Japan and the United States.

ECONOMIST: Can China change?