https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/2025_Annual_Report_to_Congress.pdf page 108-109
Following the May 2025 India-Pakistan border crisis, China initiated a disinformation campaign to hinder sales of French Rafale aircraft in favor of its own J-35s, using fake social media accounts to propagate AI images of supposed “debris” from the planes that China’s weaponry destroyed.
In 2024, pro-China online actors used AI-generated news anchors and fake social media accounts with AI-generated profile pictures to sow divisions in the United States on issues such as drug use, immigration, and abortion.
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China expanded its military cooperation with Pakistan in 2025, compounding its own security tensions with India. In November and December 2024, China and Pakistan held the three-week Warrior-VIII counterterrorism drills, and in February 2025, China’s navy participated in Pakistan’s multinational AMAN drills, highlighting China’s and Pakistan’s growing defense cooperation. India’s commentators viewed the drills as losses in their relationship with China and as direct security threats to its territorial positions.
Pakistan’s military success over India in its four-day clash showcased Chinese weaponry. While characterization of this conflict as a “proxy war” may overstate China’s role as an instigator, Beijing opportunistically leveraged the conflict to test and advertise the sophistication of its weapons, useful in the contexts of its ongoing border tensions with India and its expanding defense industry goals. As Pakistan’s largest defense supplier, China provided approximately 82 percent of the country’s arms imports from 2019 to 2023. This clash was the first time China’s modern weapons systems, including the HQ-9 air defense system, PL-15 air-to-air missiles, and J-10 fighter aircraft were used in active combat, serving as a real-world field experiment. China reportedly offered to sell 40 J-35 fifth-generation fighter jets, KJ-500 aircraft, and ballistic missile defense systems to Pakistan in June 2025. That same month, Pakistan announced a 20 percent increase in its 2025–2026 defense budget, raising planned expenditures to $9 billion despite an overall budget decrease.
In the weeks after the conflict, Chinese embassies hailed the successes of its systems in the India-Pakistan clash, seeking to bolster weapons sales.
Pakistan’s use of Chinese weapons to down French Rafale fighter jets used by India also became a particular selling point for Chinese Embassy defense sales efforts despite the fact that only three jets flown by India’s military were reportedly downed and all may not have been Rafales.
According to French intelligence, China initiated a disinformation campaign to hinder sales of French Rafales in favor of its own J-35s, and it used fake social media ac- counts to propagate AI and video game images of supposed “debris” from the planes China’s weaponry destroyed. Chinese Embassy officials convinced Indonesia to halt a purchase of Rafale jets already in process, furthering China’s inroads into other regional actors’ military procurements.
