What makes you suspect that one of these changes involves getting rid of the entire land-based air component?
J-20 may have a larger range & load, but things might change if the PLAN stresses commonality and logistical streamlining.
Cost and common sense.
If the PLAN carrier programme runs to 6-8 carriers, with at least half being nuclear supercarriers to start with, and then gradually all becoming nuclear supercarriers, then the air wing for those carriers could easily be bigger than the entire PLANAF. You need planes for all those carriers, as well as training and reserve units. On top of that, the PLAN is going to be getting lots of new AWACS and MPA and tankers. Not to mention the carriers and support warships.
That all cost money, and even the PLAN need to make choices and sacrifices. So if the choice is to keep some J10 and J11 wings, or to get more of some of the above, the obvious answer is to ditch the land based aircraft and use that money for more naval operationally relevant things.
Carrier fighters can operate from land bases, but land based aircraft cannot operate off carriers.
Any mission current land based PLANAF fighters perform could easily be carried out by carrier based aircraft operating from land bases if needs be. Those aircraft would also be able to embark on any of the carriers. OTOH, any PLAN land based aircraft becomes dead weight once the PLAN starts operating beyond the first island chain.
Operating both land based and carrier aircraft long term also creates needless logistics and training complications.
The PLANAF isn’t going to be turning in their existing land based fighters en mass anytime soon, but I would not expect them to be purchasing many more new land based fighters going forwards. Instead, all their new purchases will be carrier fighters, so that their existing land based fighter fleet could be gradually phased out and replaced with carrier fighters over the remaining useful lives of those fighters, which will probably be over the course of the next decade or two at least.
Right now, the PLANAF is drawing the best of its pilots to create new carrier wings. But once they get the training syllabus nailed down, and new carriers start coming online, I would expect entire existing naval fighter wings to convert to carrier ops.
Eventually, even with all existing land based navy fighter regiments converted to carrier wings, they may still need to found a few new regiments to have enough fighters for all their new carriers. So it’s not like they are going to have to scrap entire fighter regiments to do this conversion.
