Article Summary and Key Points: China’s unveiling of the “White Emperor” fighter at Air Show China 2024 has sparked speculation about its purpose and legitimacy.
-While China’s defense industry has made significant progress with aircraft like the J-20 and J-35A, the White Emperor appears more fiction than reality.
-Chinese state media claims it can operate in space, but experts dismiss it as a PR stunt meant to showcase technological prowess and confuse foreign analysts.
-Like past experimental aircraft, it may serve as a test bed rather than an operational fighter.
-The real focus remains on China’s evolving stealth capabilities with its J-20 and J-35 programs.
China’s “White Emperor” Fighter: Real Warplane or Sci-Fi Fantasy?
Of the vehicles the Chinese security services allow the world to see which really is and what is not a real example of a next-generation Chinese fighter aircraft has again become a subject of increasing speculation.
This is thanks to several new aircraft prototypes unveiled in recent months.
Their true design drivers or requirements are not clear in many respects – to the degree that is it difficult to call them “programs” at this juncture.
At the top of the list of the latest examples is the aircraft design called the “Baidi” or “White Emperor”, which was revealed in November of last year, raising numerous questions as to what its true purpose is.
For more than 15 years, the PRC’s Aviation Industry Corporation of Chins (AVIC) has been working to develop a series-production of new-generation combat aircraft that would, in theory, compete with the US F-22A and F-35 programs.
The mystery of how far they had advanced was partially unveiled on 11 January 2011 when the Chengdu Aerospace (CAC) J-20 combat aircraft made its first publicly recorded flight from the company’s main facility, which is co-located Aircraft Plant 132 aerodrome.
Not to be outdone, CAC’s main competitor, Shenyang Aircraft Works (SAC) in northern China, followed almost two years later, in October 2012, with one of the first prototypes of what is now known as the J-35A aircraft. Designated FC-31 back then in its export configuration, it made its first flight display at an international exposition at the November 2014 Air Show China in the Guangdong Province of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) city of Zhuhai.
The point being that the PRC’s military aircraft firms tend to reveal what they have been up to in the way of new combat designs either before, during or after the Zhuhai event, which only occurs in even-numbered years.
In the case of the CAC J-20 and – this past December – the J-36 and the latest SAC design– these flights took place just after the November expo.
The White Emperor at Zhuhai
November 2024 was the 15th “China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition,” as Air Show China is called. It coincided with the 75th anniversary of the birth of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).
For three decades, the expo has been (with the exception of the COVID years) a massive event that AVIC and the other major Chinese defense industrial groupings use to show off their latest achievements.
Airshow China has long been the largest aerospace trade exhibition in the PRC. There had been a good deal of speculation that the SAC J-35A, the supposedly carrier-based variant of the company’s lightweight, stealthy fighter would be returning to Zhuhia to show just how much the design had improved since the FC-31’s first appearance a decade ago.
But Chinese industry is no less adept than the rest of its government apparatus at showcasing deceptive “new” weapon systems, which are not configurations destined for series-production or are even prototypes of real designs.
White Emperor 6th Generation Fighter. Image Credit: X screenshot.
The White Emperor would be the latest poster child for this exhibitionism on the part of the Chinese.
The English-language South China Morning Post, the old Hong Kong daily that was the main news outlet for England’s Far Eastern Crown Colony, reported the aircraft is a project from the state-owned aerospace and defense conglomerate AVIC to develop what state media has described as an ‘integrated space-air fighter.'”
The Voice of China, a subsidiary of Beijing’s China Central Television (CCTV) network, chimed in that “the design concept includes the ability to fly at supersonic speeds and break through the Earth’s atmosphere to operate in space.”
White Emperor: More Fiction Than Science?
But few observers see the aircraft as much more than an “attention-grabber” that would simultaneously shine light on AVIC’s technological prowess while also creating as much confusion as possible.
One of the recent articles on the program points out that “neither the J-36 nor the new SAC aircraft has any relation to the ‘White Emperor’ fictional comic model shown at Zhuhai.” The phrase “White Emperor” being used in the same discussions of “sixth-generation aircraft” is “misleading at best, and active misinformation at worst. It would be akin to including the ‘Darkstar’ from ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ in an analysis of real-world hypersonic aircraft development,” writes the author.
What is forgotten is that the world of combat aircraft design is entire of examples of air vehicles being built and test-flown but never entered production. Instead, they were intended as test beds to generate data that could be used to design a completely different type of platform.
Witness the Tacit Blue test bed built decades ago by Northrop, which was a key step in the design of the flying wing B-2 Stealth Bomber. But the two vehicles look nothing alike. This may be the most plausible explanation for the White Emperor. A test program or someone else’s science project but not destined to be an operational fighter aircraft.
China’s Fighter Jets and Drones: A Photo Essay
China J-11 Fighter. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
A J-11 fighter jet attached to an aviation brigade of the air force under the PLA Northern Theater Command takes off for a combat training exercise on the early morning of November 21, 2018.
Image: Creative Commons.
Shenyang J-11. Image: Chinese Internet.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
