Kazim AlamWith a non-existent industrial base, China was still a low-income country until the early 1980s as nine of every 10 people lived in extreme poverty.
But that didn’t stop Deng Xiaoping – the architect of modern China who led the country through the decade – from conceiving a moonshot aeronautical programme: the development of an indigenous fighter built largely on local technology that could assuredly fend off intruding aircraft of Western design.
The task of building the “new type” of Chinese aircraft was so enormous that it outlasted Deng’s 11-year rule.
When his successor, President Jiang Zemin, went for an inspection of the aircraft manufacturing site in 1994, he said China was building a fighter jet that was “more useful than the atom bomb”.
It took about two and a half decades for Beijing to fully develop the J-10, a lethal flying machine built for air-to-air combat that is equally capable of ground strike missions. The jet became operational in the mid-2000s and joined the combat service in 2018.
But it was only in the wee hours of May 7 that the fighter jet saw live combat for the first time in what has been described as the biggest air battle since World War II in terms of the number of jets involved.
An ‘ironclad’ ally of Beijing, Pakistan is the only country other than China that owns and operates the J-10C, the third and latest variant of the Chinese aircraft.
The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) claims to have downed five Indian warplanes, including three French-made Rafales that have until now never been shot down, in the May 7 dogfight with archrival India.
The Indian Air Force (IAF) has yet to acknowledge any aircraft loss, even though US and French officials have confirmed the downing of the Rafale.
A French multi-role fighter jet, the Rafale is considered one of the world’s most advanced and versatile 4.5-generation aircraft. Acquired by India in 2020-22, it represents the pinnacle of the IAF aerial arsenal.
The first and successful battle test of the J-10C against the combat-proven Western aircraft marks a significant milestone for what security analysts grudgingly described as a “rough equivalent to the American F-16” before May 7.
Other things being equal, does that mean that the Chinese J-10C has emerged as a worthy rival to the Rafale – that too at a lower price tag?
Andreas Rupprecht, a military aviation expert and the author of seven books on Chinese war planes, tells TRT World that comparing the J-10C and the Rafale will be simplistic at the time because of limited available data on the performance of the Chinese aircraft.
“It is actually the first indication that Chinese systems are indeed modern. Some in the West but also in India might find this surprising: (it is) not junk or ‘a bad copy’,” he says.
India may have either overestimated its Rafale jets or underestimated the Chinese-made warplanes, Rupprecht adds.
Mauro Gilli, senior researcher for military technology at the Center for Security Studies of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, says it is difficult to give a definitive answer to the question because of “very little public information” on the May 7 air battle.
“There is a lot that we don’t know yet. The downing of the Rafale might be due to mistakes by the pilot, by the mission planners, or others,” he tells TRT World.
Any confirmed jet downing would not only dent New Delhi’s military prestige, but also signal its miscalculation in assessing Pakistan’s upgraded aerial strength.
What forced Beijing to build its own aircraft
In the early 1980s, four in every 10 children under the age of five in China faced stunted growth because of chronic malnutrition.
Yet it set aside massive economic resources for building military aircraft indigenously instead of simply buying them from the US, Russia or France, major jet-making nations.
Building new aircraft normally requires 30 percent of the technology and features to be “wholly newly designed”. For the J-10, however, roughly 60 percent of the technology had to be “entirely new” owing to China’s technological level at the time.
“China relied on a mix of licit and illicit means to acquire foreign expertise, something it has kept relying on since then,” Gilli says.
The same view was echoed by Rupprecht.
“China never really had the option of buying stuff from those who had it. It had to invest heavily and work hard (to build the J-10),” he says.
The J-10 was meant to replace the outdated J-7 fleet. To overcome serious technical challenges due to a lack of advanced technology, China invested heavily in its aerospace industry and smartly learned from other countries without directly copying their aircraft, he says.
From the early to mid-1980s, Beijing briefly gained access to Western technology through improved relations, learning about systems like radars and missiles.
This included insights from Israel’s Lavi jet, though the J-10 is far from its clone, Rupprecht insists. “(It is) nonsense often used to disparage (the J-10).”
China’s military ties with the West weakened after the US sanctions in response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the end of Peace Pearl, a US-China military cooperation programme.
Beijing then turned to the Soviet Union and later Russia for technology. The economic downturn in Russia in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed Beijing to buy Moscow’s advanced systems crucial for the J-10’s success, Rupprecht says.
“The result is now a fully developed ecosystem in which the J-10 can be produced entirely independently,” he adds.
When asked as to how much of this technology is actually new, he says the question has become ‘irrelevant’ now.
“I would say the percentage (of Chinese technology in the J-10) is 100 percent.”
