Walk the halls of the IAA motor show in Munich and the story writes itself. Chinese cars everywhere, priced below anything a European maker can build, arriving in a market that spent a century assuming it owned the category.

Now look at Jakarta, Dhaka, Islamabad and Baku. Chinese fighters, priced below anything Lockheed or Dassault will quote, arriving in air forces that spent decades buying American, European or Russian.

The parallel is tempting, and it gets reached for constantly: industrial overcapacity at home, a state-backed export push abroad, incumbents undercut on price. Put the two industries side by side against the actual numbers, though, and something more interesting happens. Half the analogy holds up rather well. The other half inverts completely.

The car playbook, in numbers

The automotive story rests on one number: capacity utilisation. Chinese car plants have been running at roughly half their capacity, against the 80 per cent the industry treats as the threshold for a healthy factory. Estimates of the domestic production surplus ran to between five and ten million vehicles in 2023, and as high as twenty million by the end of 2025.

That is not a marketing strategy. It is an industrial emergency. When roughly a hundred manufacturers are fighting a domestic price war severe enough that BYD has cut some models by more than thirty per cent, exporting stops being an opportunity and becomes the only way to keep the lines moving.

The results are exactly what you would predict. Chinese vehicle exports passed seven million in 2025, against 1.2 million in 2019. Shipments to Europe climbed 26 per cent in a single year to almost 1.2 million vehicles, and they did that after the European Union had already imposed tariffs.

Hold that shape in mind: idle capacity at home, forced export abroad, incumbents undercut in their own market. Now apply it to fighters.

Where the parallel genuinely holds

Start with the half that works, because it works better than sceptics allow.

China builds more fighter aircraft than any other country on earth. Independent estimates put current output at 220 to 280 aircraft a year, and industry capacity is projected to reach 300 to 400 annually from 2027. No Western production line comes close.

The price advantage is real too. Analysts estimate the export J-10CE at roughly $40 to $50 million per aircraft, against $80 million or more for an F-16V or a Rafale. Bangladesh’s recent paperwork puts its airframes higher, at $62.7 million, so treat the range with care. The direction of travel is not in doubt.

And China sells without conditions. No human-rights riders, no end-use politics, no equivalent of the American sanctions regime that has spent a decade punishing countries for buying Russian. For a government that has been refused by Washington or kept waiting by Moscow, that is the entire pitch.

Most importantly, there is a genuine vacuum to fill. Russia’s share of global arms exports collapsed from 21 per cent in 2016–20 to 6.8 per cent in 2021–25, a fall of 64 per cent, and it was the only supplier in the global top ten whose exports declined at all. Sanctions, the demands of its own war and a damaged industrial base have left a long queue of unserved customers.

China has picked up several of them. Pakistan now sources 80 per cent of its arms imports from China. Bangladesh has drafted an agreement for 20 J-10CEs. Egypt, Algeria and Iran have all been reported in discussions.

And in one case the displacement was unmistakably Western. Indonesia abandoned its long-stalled F-15EX plan and confirmed 42 J-10Cs in October 2025, in a package reported at $9 billion. That is not a Russian customer drifting. That is an American sale lost.

Where it inverts: there is no surplus

Here the analogy does not merely weaken. It runs backwards.

The car industry exports because it cannot sell its output at home. The Chinese aircraft industry has the opposite problem: it cannot build fast enough for its own air force. Every one of those 220 to 280 fighters a year has a domestic customer waiting, and the People’s Liberation Army Air Force is projected to approach 1,000 fifth-generation aircraft by 2030.

The clearest evidence is a statistic almost nobody noticed. In the 2021–25 period, China dropped out of the world’s ten largest arms importers for the first time since 1991–95. Its arms imports fell 72 per cent. All that industrial scale went into replacing what China used to buy from Russia, not into flooding foreign markets.

Add up every Chinese fighter export order on the books, across every customer and every year, and you reach roughly 169 aircraft. Indonesia’s 42, Azerbaijan’s 40 JF-17s, Pakistan’s 36, Bangladesh’s 20, Myanmar’s 16, Iraq’s 12, Nigeria’s 3.

China builds more than that for itself every eight months. BYD would recognise none of this. A carmaker with a full order book at home does not need Munich.

The market that settles the argument

If Chinese fighters were following the Chinese car script, Europe would be the battleground. It is the largest arms-importing region on earth, taking 33 per cent of global imports, and its purchases rose 210 per cent between the two periods. Precisely the conditions in which Chinese cars thrived.

Chinese combat aircraft have sold there in exactly zero quantity. Forty-eight per cent of European arms imports came from the United States. Among European NATO members the American share rises to 58 per cent, followed by South Korea at 8.6 per cent, Israel at 7.7 per cent and France at 7.4 per cent.

Europe is rearming at the fastest rate in two generations and buying more American, not less. The market where the car comparison should be most visible is the market where it is entirely absent.

A fighter is not a car

The reason is structural, and it is worth stating plainly, because it is the thing the analogy cannot survive.

Buying a car is a transaction. Buying a fighter is a marriage of thirty to forty years. You are committing to one country’s spare parts, weapons integration, software updates, pilot training pipeline and, crucially, its willingness to keep supplying you during the exact political crisis in which you need the aircraft most. Nobody worries that Beijing will withhold brake pads. Everybody worries about munitions release codes.

Then there is the network. The F-35 has been ordered by around twenty countries. Every one of those fleets is interoperable, shares a common logistics chain and can pass targeting data to the others. Buying one is buying membership of a club.

China’s stealth fleet is larger than anyone’s but Washington’s, and it flies alone. There is no coalition to join, no shared data picture, no allied logistics. For a NATO member the question never even reaches the price list.

And China does not sell its best aircraft anyway. The J-20 is not offered for export, exactly as the United States has never exported the F-22. Both powers keep the air-superiority fighter and sell the multirole one. BYD, by contrast, will happily sell you its flagship.

Who actually collected Russia’s customers

If China were running the car playbook successfully, Russia’s lost 14 points of market share would show up in Chinese columns. They do not.

The United States went from 36 to 42 per cent. France rose 21 per cent to take second place. Italy grew 157 per cent, climbing from tenth largest exporter to sixth. Israel went from 3.1 to 4.4 per cent and overtook the United Kingdom for the first time. Germany took fourth place.

China went from 5.5 per cent to 5.6 per cent, and was passed by Germany on the way.

The winners of Russia’s collapse were, overwhelmingly, Western. China gained a tenth of a percentage point.

The video above sets out the sceptical case on Chinese weapons in export markets, and it is worth watching alongside the enthusiastic version.

The date to watch

None of which means the comparison is dead. It means it is early.

China is still some way behind the United States on the measures that decide air campaigns, as our own audit of the world’s militaries laid out in detail: tankers, airborne early warning, combat experience, global basing and the alliance structure that makes all of it usable. A fleet that cannot deploy far from home is not yet a peer.

So Beijing has every reason to keep the best aircraft at home while that gap closes. The restraint we are measuring is not modesty, and it is certainly not weakness. It is prioritisation.

The Wall Street Journal breakdown above covers what China chooses to display, and what it chooses to sell.

But the conditions that produced the car surge are being assembled here too, just more slowly. Capacity is heading for 300 to 400 aircraft a year from 2027. The PLAAF’s fifth-generation requirement is projected to be substantially met around 2030. Chengdu and Shenyang will not tear down the factories once the domestic order book empties. That is precisely how automotive overcapacity happened.

Two signals will tell you the shift has begun. The first is the J-35, which is already openly touted for export and would put a stealth fighter on the market that no Western supplier will sell outside its alliance network. The second is a Chinese export order that displaces a European or American incumbent in a country with a genuine alternative, rather than one locked out of Western markets. Indonesia is the first real instance. A second would establish a pattern.

For now the honest reading is narrower than either camp would like. China is not dumping fighters the way it dumps cars, because it has no surplus to dump and no market willing to accept the strategic dependency. What it has instead is the largest military aircraft industry on the planet, a captive domestic customer, and time.

The car industry took roughly fifteen years to go from irrelevant to unavoidable in Europe. The aviation industry is perhaps a decade behind, and the mechanism is the same one. It just has not run out of domestic demand yet.

Sources: SIPRI, Trends in International Arms Transfers 2025 (9 March 2026); FlightGlobal World Air Forces 2026; Rhodium Group; International Energy Agency Global EV Outlook 2026; Transport & Environment; The Business Standard; TWZ; Asia Times; Military Africa.