Since 2023, the consensus is that China will end up with more than 1,000 of the planes.
By Jim Morris, Warrior Vice President, News
It’s a deadly serious parlor game that China military experts take part in whenever they’re together – either in person or online. They try to guess how many J-20 fifth-generation fighter planes Beijing eventually will build.
The J-20 was unveiled in 2010 and by 2018, a congressional intelligence committee was told that up to 500 of the planes would be built. Within a couple of years, that number had grown to 700. Since 2023, the consensus is that China will end up with more than 1,000 of the planes. According to Military Watch Magazine, that would be unprecedented for a post-Cold War Chinese fighter.
The number is important for a number of reasons. Chinese government-controlled media have boasted about the ability to rival or outperform US fifth-generation fighters such as the F-22 and the F-35. Plus a large swarm of J-20s could be used in the first stages of a mass attack on Taiwan, which is located just 100 miles from China’s coastline.
“The rapid and significant expansion of J-20 production facilities provided an important early indicator of a very large production run,“ author Abraham Abrams, who wrote a book on Chinese air power, told Military Watch Magazine. “The high requirement for fifth-generation fighters as a result of pressure on China’s defenses from the tremendous numbers of F-35s that were set to be deployed by its potential adversaries…made a small J-20 production run appear unlikely.”
Unlike the US and Russia, which sustained high rates of production for their front-line fighters after the Cold War ended by selling aircraft to their allies, China never made a major effort to export its warplanes.
The J-20 is believed to be able to hit speeds of Mach 2.0, which would be faster that the F-35 (top speed of Mach 1.6) but not as fast as the F-22 (Mach 2.25). The J-20 can be converted to a less stealthy “bomb truck” mode, in which it carries almost 28,000 pounds of internal and external ordinance – much more than a fully loaded F-35. That makes it appear that China is willing to sacrifice an amount of stealth in favor of larger payloads.
Last November, China unveiled a two-seat variant of the J-20 at Airshow China 2024 in Zhuhai.
The Global Times, the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language newspaper, quoted a military expert who said the plane has potential as a command aircraft for coordinating so-called “loyal wingman” drones. He said those drones could function both as external sensors for the fighter while others could service as weapon launch platforms.
Jim Morris is the Warrior Vice President, News. Morris is a former senior executive, editor and producer at ABC News and Bloomberg TV