Will the Chinese make the J10 more multirole? Quite possibly.
Will China make a strike oriented J10 variant? Very unlikely.
For the PLAAF, adding more ground attack options to existing J10A, B and S' is by in large a software issue, whereby PGM and ALCM etc can be added with relatively little cost, in a very short period of time if needed, and easily retrofitable on existing assets.
That can add a lot of capacity for little cost. The main reason why the PLAAF has not shown much interest so far is because:
a) China has a pretty huge fleet of dedicated strikers which can so that job much better
b) The geographical realities means there are few theatres of potential conflict where a strike oriented J10 would have range to perform said strike mission. Its no accident that the PLAAF and PLANAF have favoured big aircraft with long range for the strike role.
c) Training time and resources. For all the hype about increasing Chinese defense budgets, the reality of the situation is that China only has a very modest defense budget in terms of defense spending as a proportion to GDP. And that is only recently the case. There has been a prolonged period of massive under-investment in defense by China in favour of investment in civilian infrastructure and R&D. For all the double digit defense spending increases in recent years, China is still not even close to making up fully for that past underinvestment, as is evident by all the legacy equipment all three of its service branches are still operating in huge numbers.
As such, the PLA's focus has been more in replaying legacy kit with modern stuff and adding force multipliers to allow them to get the most out of their legacy kit which they cannot replace anytime soon. In that context, the PLAAF gets more value for their money buying, say 120 single role J10As and replacing 120 early J7s and J8s rather than spend the same money on 100 multirole J10As and only replacing 100 legacy jets.
Similar deal with training. It costs a lot in terms of both direct costs (PGMs) as well as opportunity costs (flight hours) to train pilots up to multi-role capacity rather than allow them to focus on dedicated fighter and striker roles.
Adding multi-role capacity to all J10s might not cost all that much, but training all existing J10 pilots to be effective multirole pilots will take a lot of resources. This brings up to the last point.
d) expected adversary. Unlike the US and NATO forces who these days expect to fight the likes of Syria, Iran or even NK, the PLAAF's most likely adversairies are going to be the likes of Japan, America, Taiwan and South Korea, maybe even a combination of many or all of them.
Multirole fighters only stop being fighters and start being strikers when they have achieved air superiority and there are no more air threats for them to face.
Against most likely foes, US and NATO forces expect to loose maybe 1-2% of their combat aircraft, and there is little question of them being able to not only achieve air superiority, but also being able to maintain it for the course of the war. In that context, multirole is a good investment as it allows you to put all those air superiority fighters to use after you have cleared the skies of enemy bogies. The very tiny expected loss rate also means you are wasting very little resources in the form of multirole fighters getting shot down in air superiority missions, before they get to do any strike ops.
For China, gaining air superiority over enemy territory is going to be problematic if not downright improbably because of geographical distance and the capabilities of the enemy forces for most likely theatres of conflict. The exception is Taiwan, but improving relations and the balance of power between the straits already means that Chinese planners have looked beyond merely being able to take Taiwan if needed. If Taiwan was still a primary mission objective for the PLA, I would have expected to see a multirole J10 being given far more emphasis, since Taiwan is pretty much the only likely theatre where a multirole J10 might actually be useful.
But against the likes of Japan, the US or South Korea, the PLAAF would be looking at double digit percentage attritional losses at least, and air superiority would likely remain contested throughout the conflict. If you are expecting to loose a big percentage of your fighters in achieving air superiority, and/or have to continue to devote a huge percentage of your fighter fleet to maintaining or contesting enemy air superiority, with your fighters having little to no opportunity to engage in strike missions, upgrading them to be multirole and spending all that time and money training their pilots for strike missions seems like a distinct waste of time and resources.
All of that combined would explain why the PLAAF has not seriously looked at wide scale implementation of multirole capability on their J10As, even though they clearly have the capacity and resources to do so. So far, they have mostly limited themselves to some tests, most likely to certify the J10 for PGMs, so that they can be introduced throughout the fleet relatively quickly and easily if required. But they have thus far held off from actually rolling out the multi-role upgrades across the fleet as far as we can tell.
Now, going forwards, as the PLAAF continue to modernise and close the gap with its main potential adversaries, the projected losses in achieving air superiority would fall, as would the percentage of fighters needed to maintain it. As such, it may become worthwhile for the PLAAF to seriously look to making the bulk of its fighter fleet multi-role so there is every chance that the PLAAF will upgrade their J10s to be more multirole.
However, I seriously doubt that China would bother to develop a strike oriented J10 variant. On top of all the reasons listed above, there are also the two main problems of:
1) China already have far more suitable airframes to use to develop dedicated strikers in the form of the JH7 and J16.
2) That the Chinese aviation industry has developed so much and so fast that there are far more exciting and rewarding avenues and projects to devote China's finite R&D resources into pursuing rather than another J10 variant.
Why bother making a super J10 when CAC could be developing a medium sized full blooded 5th gen instead? Especially since its chief rival SAC has already got an early lead with the J31.
