New entrant in the wide-body aircraft market?

Interesting news: it looks like China and Russia are set to cooperate in the development of a new wide-body long-range airliner.

 Picture: Wikipedia

The closest thing to such a projected aircraft is possibly the Ilyushin Il-96, that has not enjoyed much commercial success (still operated by Aeroflot though!) and suffered also from reliability problems.

It won't be easy to challenge Airbus and Boeing on this market, but, given enough political and financial support, I guess they will eventually get there...