I'm John Batchel with my colleague and friend Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang.

The J.35 Warplane for the People's Liberation Army Air Force.

The headline of the South China Morning Post with a photograph of a plane going higher and higher.

Can China find a market for its fifth generation J35 warplanes question mark.

This is a South China morning post.

It's in English, but it's heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party.

The sub-ed analysts are uncertain how much demand there will be for the fighter in the face of competition from the U.S. F-35 or cheaper alternatives.

To help us understand what looks to be inside language,

we welcome our good colleague, General Blaine Holt,

United States Air Force, retired,

who is the author of Dangerous Intellectuals,

his podcast now at number 24, I believe,

about foreign aid.

I recommend the podcast enormously, but we're going to draw on Blaine's gossip around the water cooler or the equivalent in international air forces.

Blaine, something might be wrong with the J35, too expensive or doesn't live up or dangerous.

How do you hear it? Good evening to you,

General. Good evening. J35 has its origins in an intel operation to steal American technology, and they may have got the contours in the look of the F-35, correct? But what they don't, what they didn't do is the guts of the airplane just don't measure up.

Here's the problem.

It's plagued with reliability problems.

It's hard to get the sorties generated, although it does fly, and it does have some radar evading

capabilities.

It has these pesky W.S-19 engines that are terrible to maintain.

...