I don't understand why you are so fixated on Rafale vs J-20. It ain't happening. China is not going to deploy J-20 to the Indian border because there are not enough on the eastern side and neither is the Rafale combat ready with the IAF. If your assumptions about the J-20 is correct, then the J-20 will have the first look advantage. The leading ECM provider in Europe is the Swedish - not the French. The Rafale's IRST is only good up to 50 kms.
I expect any conflict will be between SU-30MKI vs J-11 in counter air and Mirage vs J-10 in CAS and strike. I suspect interdiction will be Jaguar vs J-16/JH-7. I don't know what assets will conduct SEAD. Probably Mirage vs. J-10.
It will be force on force and not individual actions. The problems for the IAF are (i) SA is weak due to poor data links between a bunch of different assets; (ii) inadequate support assets; and (iii) generally lacking SDRs for communications . That said, there are a lot of unknowns because execution of integrated wholesale air operations are unproven on both sides in a live situation. It boils down to tactics and training.
Rafale IRST claims 100 km range, but I assume that's in an ideal case with a hot target. For instance, the F-35's EODAS claims to be able to detect ballistic missile launches out at least hundreds of nautical miles, but ballistic missiles are very hot.
As to
@zgx09t ,
I mean, the three views of China possible are, that China is doomed to failure (panda sluggers), that China will always succeed (Chinese triumphalists), or that China has many choices and some of these choices are good choices and other choices are bad choices (a belief in human agency).
You guys seem to be addicted to view #2, just as there's many people in the West who are addicted to view #1. I'm trying to propose view #3, that anything can happen and the situation is constantly shifting.
For instance, did anyone expect that coronavirus would have spiked out of China, causing economic damage to China and getting the West to take a strong Sinophobic stance? Did anyone expect that the West would have bungled coronavirus as badly as it did, causing thousands of deaths and crashing economies because of arrant incompetence?
===
The fact of the matter is, China is vulnerable. There are strategic vulnerabilities in China, such as the labor force decline, the fact that China isn't comprehensively at the leading edge of technology, that it seems to have switched to an increasingly investment-intensive economic model at the expense of TFP, that China is being denied access to Western export markets at the same time its low-cost labor advantage is vanishing, etc.
The traditional Chinese strength, rapid economic improvement, has been fading since the glory days of 2007, when GDP growth was double digits. It's unlikely right now that China can ever retain the same rate of growth due to the increasing level of development in China.
Likewise, as China's economic growth portends that the Chinese will become a greater economic power, in nominal terms, than the United States, implies considerable friction between China and the United States and as we see now, anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States, which it seeks to spread to Europe and the rest of the world as well, is a major factor and it is not impossible that the United States could successfully engineer regime change in China due to sociopolitical collapse.
This is why a dollar crash as a result of the second phase of coronavirus impacts (when the stimulus needs to be withdrawn, but isn't) is beneficial to China, and Stephen Roach at Yale / ex-Morgan Stanley has a reasonable hypothesis on why such a thing would happen:
