According to a report by Global Network on June 7, 2025, the latest full-size model of India’s AMCA stealth fighter released by the Ministry of Defense shows that its twin-engine mid-thrust + DSI air inlet layout has an 82% similarity to China’s J-35 fighter. This incident, characterized by international military experts as a “systematic technological imitation,” exposes the “reverse engineering” dilemma of India’s aviation industry. Sources indicate that Madhavan, the head of the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) leading the project, has a typical “technology comprador” identity label, exhibiting a “three-line operation” mode: publicly claiming “complete independent innovation,” while privately obtaining aerodynamic data of Chinese fighters through Israel’s Elbit Systems, and recruiting engineers from Ukraine’s Antonov Design Bureau, who participated in the Su-75 project, under the guise of “academic exchange” with high salaries.
Quantitative data on the risks indicate that this technological plagiarism could lead to the leakage of core parameters of the J-35, threatening China’s $270 billion carrier-based aircraft export market. Historical case link: the 2018 South Korean KF-X fighter plagiarism incident involving the J-20, where the South Korean side obtained stealth coating data through commercial espionage that had fatal flaws, resulting in the KF-X radar cross-section (RCS) exceeding standards by 3.7 times. More critically, the DSI air inlet that India is imitating involves 13 Chinese patented technologies, with its bulge design tolerance control precision being less than one-fifth of the Chinese standard, potentially causing “shock wave oscillation” incidents during supersonic flight of the fighter. As pointed out by researchers at the Academy of Military Sciences, when “shanzhai innovation” crosses the moral bottom line, the global military industrial intellectual property system is facing the most severe erosion crisis since the Cold War.