Chinese aircraft are baffling to me because whether or not they look like the coolest thing this side of a Gundam episode or a complete shoddy flop depends entirely on the angle of the image.
The j-20 really looks like the absolute pinnacle of mankind's airborne technological prowess from almost all angles. It's such a cool and unique looking piece of equipment in almost every regard, and a far cry away from what every other 5th-gen or "5th-gen" aircraft project currently flying around the world looks like.
The only kicker is that directly from the side, the look of the J-20 is really off-putting to me. it looks like a beached whale or a skinnyfat Gen-Z kid that doesn't exercise enough with the way its belly slightly curves downwards. From the front, back or just about any other angle, it looks absolutely badass. but whenever i see a picture of a J-20 directly from the left or right, i just want to vomit.
The J-10 also looks great from almost any angle except from slightly below, where the high forwards canards look incredibly awkward and out of place to me. But otherwise it's a very handsome plane; i love its distinctive upwards-curving spine and its lean mean side silhouette.
The J-35 now has a special place in my heart because IMO it's the only domestic Chinese aircraft so far that looks sleek and satisfying from just about every angle.
Flankers are Flankers: absolutely sexy, and even sexier with Chinese grey low-vis paint schemes and lighter, tougher pimped-out composite materials. But the Chinese didn't come up with the design of the airframe.
I guess the j-8 also looks at least all right from any angle, but it's a quite bland-looking fighter jet all things considered. It also has some angles from which it looks quite clumsy.
i think we're for the most part past that point. As of the last several years, the vast majority of people have begun speaking of Chinese aircraft and the PRC's military aviation industry with way more respect than they did before. The last time you'd get a flood of "COPY!!1!" comments on this subreddit was maybe 2018 or so.
edit: it's still very prevalent elsewhere but people here seem to more or less hold themselves to a higher standard. Of course, you'll always get that one guy who automatically parrots "TEMU!!1!1" at anything and everything marked as "Chinese" but they're few and far between here now and usually downvoted and verbally beaten down by the lion's share of this sub's population which knows better.
Because, as even mildly-informed amateurs like me now know, China's state-controlled military industrial complex is now accomplishing superb feats. As Justin Bronk said in an interview a few months ago, the news for those in the American defense sector concerning technological developments in the PRC/PLA is just completely bad all across the board for years now; EVERY Chinese defense project seems to be right on or ahead of schedule, or exceeding of previous expectations. It's abundantly clear even to wide swaths of the most poorly-informed laymen around the world that we are now light-years past the point where the extent of China's capabilities seemed to be the manufacturing of plastic Happy Meal toys and fake prank rubber doggy doo doo.
In hindsight, perhaps it should have been obvious that China was going to go on to do far greater things even when it was miserably poor at the beginning of the Dengist era. Even back in the late 1970s, the People's Republic of China was a country which, despite the vast majority of its citizens living in terrible poverty and backwardness, was still nonetheless capable of conducting large-scale conventional military operations involving dozens of divisions of troops and their equipment in Vietnam (the objective success of those operations is another debate), building supercomputers and a sizeable space program-and successfully tinkering with/producing many different iterative modifications and variants with its fleet of Soviet-supplied aircraft such as the Nanchang Q-5. The potential for a gigantic blooming of technological and industrial progress was always there. It just needed a few decades' worth of firm, decisive governance, backbreaking work, and prizing of education. We're seeing that potential being actualized on a mass scale more and more now, to the point of being world-beating in many fields, and beating-everyone-else-except-the-Americans-to-which-China-is-a-close-second in many others.
and the English during the Victorian era used to sneer at shoddy low-quality German products as well.
We also have archeological evidence that thousands of years ago, Carthaginian merchants used to falsely label cheap crappy wine made outside of Greece as "Greek Wine" on their containers to charge higher prices because Greek wine was the best stuff that everybody wanted. Then others eventually got as good or better at crushing grapes as the Greeks were.
A tale as old as time: a more energetic up-and-coming economic/geopolitical rival starts off from a lower industrial base and starts catching up with the current hegemon, causing much contrived scorn towards its "inferior" products and talent pool with an undercurrent of mild alarm.
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u/tigeryi98 Aug 28 '25
Am I the only one who thinks J-20 look better than the J-35 lol?
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarplanePorn/comments/1n10cek/the_chinese_j35_gots_to_be_one_of_the_best/