The J-36 and Shenyang Stealth Fighters: China’s Great Aerospace Leap

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China’s Two New Stealth Fighters: Heralding Defense Industrial Warfare: It’s that time again, when end-of-the-year advancements roll out in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). On 26 December, just in time for Mao’s birthday in China and Boxing Day elsewhere, footage of two “tailless” developmental “stealth” aircraft debuted within hours. The first is a large, heavy, crewed triple-engine double-delta-wing. Analysts dub it the “J-36” based on the root of its forward fuselage (“BORT”) number (36011) . A two-seat J-20S fighter serving as chase plane suggests the delta wing may developed by the same Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group.

This unprecedented diamond-shaped tailless design, with unique intake layout and angled trailing edge intersecting its thrust nozzles, eliminates a major radar signature source across bands and aspects. Capacious fuselage offers significant internal space for fuel and weapons, implying a high-altitude, high-endurance tactical combat platform. Observers’ name and role interpretations range from a JH-XX “tactical/regional bomber” to a “J-XD” or “sixth-generation fighter” (China’s counterpart to the U.S. Air Force’s Next-Generation Air Dominance air superiority initiative). 

The second airframe is a smaller twin-engine, sharply-swept wing lacking a vertical stabilizer. Apparent use of a J-16 chase aircraft suggests it is developed by Shenyang Aircraft Corporation. China’s two strikingly-configured new airframes have manifold features associated with the latest cohort of low-observable aircraft, including radar absorbing material and inlets and outlets positioned and shaped to minimize radar deflection. Tailessness mirrors international state-of-the-art efforts, including the Northrop Grumman B-2’s split rudders and B-21’s sleek flying wing configuration.

While details remain fuzzy and there have been no official comments yet, broader dynamics are already clear. Public availability of video footage readily taken in daylight appears authorized. These apparent combat aircraft demonstrators are part of a larger PRC defense modernization—the postwar era’s most dramatic. The scope and scale of China’s military aviation advances evokes the Luftwaffe’s relentless rise amid Germany’s ramp-up for World War II. Today no other nation is working simultaneously on so many distinct military aircraft programs in general, or so many modern tactical jet programs in particular, as China. In aviation and beyond, no other nation is pursuing so many major military megaprojects. Welcome to the new PRC-led era of defense industrial warfare!

PATTERN OF PROGRESS

This latest revelation has echoes of two previous major firsts from Chengdu: the J-20 fifth-generation stealth fighter’s unveiling almost exactly fourteen years ago on 11 January 2011, itself almost thirteen years after the J-10 fourth-generation multirole fighter’s maiden flight. Both the J-20 rollout and the new delta wing’s flight occurred under the leadership of superstar aerospace engineer Yang Wei, head of Chengdu’s design team. A leading analyst sees parallels between Chengdu’s newest platform and the J-20: “not quite a pre-production aircraft in every detail, but a full-size prototype rather than a minimal technology demonstrator, to be followed by a low-rate production batch.”

These are tremendous achievements for a military aviation industry that China incubated with pioneers returning from MIT and elsewhere abroad, as well as Soviet assistance during the Korean War, only to let it languish amid the 1960 Sino-Soviet split and Maoist malpractice during the late-1950s Great Leap Forward and 1966–76 Cultural Revolution. Then, just when China’s “Reform and Opening Up” in the late 1970s and 1980s began yielding access to Euro-American technology and expertise, the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre triggered Western export controls, prompting China to target Russia, Ukraine, and Israel instead as the most promising military aviation sources available in the 1990s.

A quarter-century later, persistent efforts are paying off. China’s military aviation forces have over 3,150 piloted combat aircraft (vice trainers and uncrewed systems), of which roughly 2,400 are fighters, strategic and tactical bombers, multi-mission tactical aircraft, and attack aircraft. More than 1,300 of China’s 1,900 fighters are what the U.S. Department of Defense terms fourth-generation aircraft. The Pentagon projects PRC military aviation will likely “become a majority fourth-generation force in the next several years.”

Moreover, Beijing has what is “soon to be the world’s largest Air Force” by number of warplanes, then-INDOPACOM Commander Admiral John Aquilino declared in his final Senate Armed Services Committee testimony on 21 March 2024 and his staff further confirmed in a follow-up with Air & Space Forces Magazine. “In the three years since I took command,” Aquilino emphasized, “the PLA has added over 400 fighter aircraft (almost all 4th and 5th generation variants)….” He reflected, “PLA [People’s Liberation Army] aviation has also undergone a significant transformation since 2021. Combined, the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) and PLAN [PLA Navy] Aviation constitute the largest aviation force in the Indo-Pacific. Over half of the PLA’s operational fighter force is 4th and 5th generation, enabling longer-range A2/AD and counter-air operations across the western Pacific Ocean. The PLA is also developing a stealth bomber that can cover the Second Island Chain and the Western Pacific.”

PLAN Aviation is focused foremost on carrier-based operations, having relinquished numerous maritime strike and other aircraft, together with related shore facilities. Smaller than Chengdu’s J-20, Shenyang’s FC-31/J-31/J-35 carrier-based stealth fighter is in development and prototype, with the potential to become operational “in the coming years” on the PLAN’s Fujian-class carrier(s). In early 2024, a J-35 model appeared on the deck of Liaoning, China’s first aircraft carrier and a deck aviation testbed. Meanwhile, the land-based J-35A variant made its first public appearance at the Zhuhai Airshow this November.

China Sixth-Generation Fighter NGAD. Image Credit: Social Media Screenshot.

The developmental stealth fighters’ logical home is thus the PLAAF, which celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary on 11 November. They will join the J-16 fourth-generation-plus multirole fighter, to be capable of carrying PL-17 very-long-range air-to-air missiles (AAMs), which apparently reached initial operational capability in 2023 and can strike targets 400 km away. The fifth-generation J-20 is being upgraded, including to increase the number of AAMs it can carry in its low-observable configuration. Other potential upgrades include installing thrust-vectoring engine nozzles and adding supercruise (sustained supersonic flight) capability in the form of higher-thrust indigenous WS-15 engines. Xi’an Aircraft Corporation is also developing a long-range H-20 flying wing stealth bomber, China’s B-21 counterpart. China has also unveiled a redesigned version of the GJ-11 stealth unmanned combat air vehicle.

EMERGING ENGINE INDIGENIZATION

Jet propulsion is the beating heart of combat air power. This apex technology is notoriously difficult to master because, like semiconductor manufacturing, it represents a sensitive system-of-systems interacting at the cutting-edge of metallurgy and materials science, advanced machine tools and precision manufacturing, chemistry, physics, and thermodynamics. Multifarious research, supply chain, and manufacturing inputs defy ready application of a preferred PRC approach that exploits others’ painstaking resource-intensive research: reverse-engineering or “imitative innovation.” China has the world’s largest organizational bureaucracy for acquiring priority technologies by all means possible and harnessing them for targeted applications, but the extraordinary electronic and human industrial espionage thus dedicated still does not translate straightforwardly into results the way it can for simpler technologies and use cases.

In part because of the tacit knowledge involved, “This isn’t a ‘throw money at the problem’ solution,” explains David Markov of the Institute for Defense Analyses. “What [China] still [has] yet to understand is, modern aviation engines, particularly supercruise fighter engines, are more art than science. There’s a lot of phenomenology that takes place in an engine that we still do not…understand…with our qualitative computing technology. But there’s a guy named Joe who works at [major American machine tool manufacturer] Cincinnati Milacron, who’s been working that thing for 30 years, [who] just knows, through experimentation, time, and experience, that you do this thing to make the engine get this outcome. And that’s the part where China just doesn’t have that capability yet.”

Commercial cooperation, e.g., through the CFM International joint venture to produce Leap-1C engines for national champion COMAC’s C919 narrow-body airliner slated for replacement by locally-built CJ-1000As, can help. PRC companies have acquired German firms with engine expertise. Moreover, China strongly emphasizes Military-Civil Fusion to maximize technological synergy by spinning-off defense technologies into the commercial sector and vice versa. However, there remain critical differences between civilian and military jet engines.

Clearly China has advanced greatly in aviation powerplants since my tour of Chengdu Aircraft Corporation’s Factory 132 in April 2011. There, in front of a J-10 in the humid courtyard, the Chief Deputy Engineer explained, “We are now using Russian engines, and developing our own. We have mastered the technology of operating and maintaining Russian engines. If our own engines are mature enough, we will use them. We will import civilian engines, but will definitely make our own military engines, because the U.S. won’t sell them to us.” Russo-Chinese collaboration, both mutually-agreed and PRC-manipulated, has been highly symbiotic: Russian knowledge and Chinese production are comparative advantages. Ukraine has also offered key inputs, particularly through its crown jewel aeroengine company Motor Sich.

Several decades of intense efforts and billions of dollars have been yoked under the aegis of China’s “Two Engines” project, emphasizing development of both civil and military aviation powerplants and gas turbines and enshrined in Beijing’s previous and current Five Year Plans. The Pentagon now assesses that China’s domestic jet engine production “is starting to produce results.” While some Russian Saturn AL-31F engines “may remain in use,” the PLAAF’s J-10 and -20 fighters have started to use Russian-based, domestically-produced low-bypass-ratio Shenyang WS-10 “Taihang” engines. The Pentagon judges Shenyang’s high-bypass-ratio WS-20 “Huanghe,” China’s first domestically produced high-bypass turbofan, has begun flight testing on the Y-20 heavy transport; and has likely started replacing its currently-used Russian D-30KP-2 engines, initially with Chengdu’s medium-bypass WS-18, to be superseded by the WS-20 as feasible.

J-20 Stealth Fighter. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Stability and maneuvering can be challenging for tailless designs like those of China’s two new developmental aircraft; thrust-vectoring engines, now undergoing testing, could help compensate. Other military turbofans include two low-bypass versions: Xi’an’s improved thrust-to-weight ratio WS-15 “Emei,” intended to have thrust vectoring control, under testing in the J-20A; as well as Guizhou’s WS-19 “Huangshan,” reportedly outfitted in JF-17B fighters for Pakistan’s Air Force. Meanwhile, China pursues other engine advancements, such as 3-D printing, carbon-based coating, and adaptive technology.

CONCLUSION: CAPABILITIES AND CORRUPTION COEXIST

China’s two new combat aircraft demonstrators are best understood not as portending invincible stealthiness but rather as defense industrial capability indicators and potentially potent weapons platforms; particularly for missiles of long and increasing range, such as formidable PL-series AAMs. It is achievements like these that lead the Pentagon to conclude the PLAAF is “rapidly approaching technology typical of U.S. standards.” Regionally-operating U.S. and Allied tanker, airborne early warning and control, and reconnaissance aircraft may become particularly vulnerable, together with surface ships and ground-based forces. Like their enemy counterparts, the emerging advanced PRC aircraft could employ drone “wingmen” to enhance their survivability and lethality.

While it is dangerous to underestimate China’s capabilities, it is deceptive to reify stealth. Rather than worshiping these airborne marvels excessively, we must understand electromagnetic detection science. Never a panacea, low observable technology is ever less game-changing with the relentless onslaught of detection means. No matter how well radar and thermal radiation emissions are cloaked within a low-observable aircraft, and however well-developed and -maintained its sensitive skin, it is ever-more-vulnerable to an array of increasingly sophisticated, persistent countermeasures. China itself “manufactures a variety of long-range air surveillance radars, including models claiming…the ability to detect stealth aircraft,” the Pentagon documents. “Marketing materials emphasize these systems’ ability to counter long-range airborne strike and combat support aircraft.” PRC journals brim with technical analyses, including regarding such stealth aircraft detection techniques as passive coherent location—see examples here, here, here, and here. It is creative use of the full electromagnetic spectrum, to which China has devoted comprehensive attention, that observers should more broadly situate their interest in stealth.

Finally, the latest revealing of important new PRC airpower developments is a telling reminder of just how much capability China’s military continues accruing despite endemic corruption. The 13 full generals, 18 lieutenant generals, and more than 50 major generals removed under Xi for “graft” include those in the PLAAF’s two highest positions. PLAAF Political Commissar Tian Xiusi fell on 9 July 2016, PLAAF Commander Ding Laihang on 4 December 2024. Despite some leadership churn, however, China’s Air Force thunders on. No longer middling in any aerospace aspect, the Middle Kingdom has developed a massive defense base, tests frequently, and moves fast. The exquisite warfare that Washington mastered over the past three-plus decades risks being overtaken by the industrial warfare for which Beijing rapidly prepares, portending intense, protracted application of military might. As a new year dawns, America must double down on shoring up defenses, emphasizing missiles in particular. And ensure that China doesn’t get to Joe at Cincinnati Milacron.

J-20 Stealth Fighter.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew S. Erickson 

Dr. Andrew S. Erickson is Professor of Strategy in the U.S. Naval War College (NWC)’s China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI). A core founding member, he helped establish CMSI and stand it up officially in 2006, and has played an integral role in its development; from 2021–23 he served as Research Director. Erickson is currently a Visiting Scholar in full-time residence at Harvard University’s John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, where he has been an Associate in Research since 2008. He has received the Navy Superior Civilian Service Medal, NWC’s inaugural Civilian Faculty Research Excellence Award, and NBR’s inaugural Ellis Joffe Prize for PLA Studies. He blogs at www.andrewerickson.com.