Never mind that the pictures of what appears to be a Chinese stealth fighter on a high-speed taxi test surfaced just as Defense Secretary Robert Gates was to visit Beijing – or that the mysterious fighter jet was then flight-tested in the hours preceding Secretary Gates's talks with Hu. More important was what the functioning Chinese prototype – currently only the US has a fully operational stealth fighter – says about China’s military modernization and buildup, not to mention China's civilian-military power structure.
Early in the Obama administration, Gates predicted China would not be able to deploy such a jet until 2020. But the advent of such a weapon would have broad security implications in the region, including for US-Taiwan relations and for Indian and Japanese defense calculations.
