In November 2024, on the grey runway of the Zhuhai Airshow in southern China, the world got its first direct glimpse of an aircraft that had been making the rounds in satellite imagery and rumours for years. The Shenyang J-35A taxied onto the runway in full People’s Liberation Army Air Force colours. With the serene assurance of something that knows it has already altered the discourse, its structure caught autumn’s light. What defence analysts who were watching were most impressed by was not the aircraft’s stealthy shape, its twin-engine setup, or the internal weapons bays that made it look smooth and unbroken; it was something more interesting: the J-35A looked almost exactly like an American F-35 Lightning II on the outside. That similarity, whether it was caused by industrial spying, engineering convergence, or an awkward mix of the two, would become the most important question about a machine that China plans to use not only to protect its own skies but also to change the rules of the global arms market.

The J-35A didn’t just show up out of nowhere. The FC-31 Gyrfalcon, a privately funded prototype made by the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation that first flew in October 2012, is its ancestor. The Shenyang Aircraft Corporation originally planned to sell it as an export product after losing the domestic competition for China’s main stealth fighter to the Chengdu J-20 Dragon. For a long time, the FC-31 was in a grey area where it was too advanced to be abandoned but not good enough to get serious government funding. The Chinese Navy saved it. The PLA Naval Air Force realised that it needed a stealth fighter that could carry a carrier, so they took the design and paid for its conversion. A new version of the naval variant flew in October 2021. It had folding wings and stronger landing gear. The J-35A came out in September 2023. It was designed to perform better on regular runways by removing the extra weight that carrier design adds to the structure. China became the second country, after the United States, to have two operational fifth-generation stealth fighter types at the same time when the PLAAF officially adopted it in late 2024.

China has not officially said much about what the J-35A can do. What open-source assessments and state media reports have shown analysts is a picture of a medium-weight multirole platform that really works. The plane is about fifty-five feet long and has a wingspan of thirty-seven feet. It has two domestically made WS-19 turbofan engines that each produce about twenty thousand pounds of thrust, giving it a top speed of about Mach 1.8. It can fight for about 600 miles, which is not very far compared to the F-35’s operational range, but it is good enough for the regional missions the PLAAF has in mind. Chinese state media claimed in September 2025 that the aircraft’s radar cross-section had been shrunk to the size of a human palm using only Chinese metamaterial technologies. Western analysts were skeptical of this claim, but they couldn’t completely rule it out because the underlying shaping and radar-absorbent material technologies are........

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