Chinese State TV Uses ‘Top Gun’ Footage to Fake Part of Air Force Drill

by Brett Wilkins

If you thought China’s recently unveiled stealth fighter looks remarkably similar to the current generation of US stealth warplanes, you weren’t alone. Now it looks like our friends in the Chinese Air Force have elevated their flattery of their American counterparts (after all, isn’t imitation the most sincere form of flattery?) to a whole new level.

Last week, China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV ran a story about an air force training exercise that contained footage of a J-10 fighter attacking and destroying an “enemy” (read US) warplane. CCTV said the video was a live-fire exercise. According to the website Ministry of Tofu (which is suspiciously difficult to access today), the footage looked an awfully like a scene from the  American film Top Gun. That’s because it is a scene from the 80s classic.

You be the judge:

According to Yahoo! News, this isn’t the first time Chinese media has stolen or misused– sometimes hilariously– US sources. “In 2002, the popular Beijing Evening News tabloid translated and published as genuine a satirical news article by The Onion about U.S. Congress threatening to leave Washington D.C. unless the city built them a new building with a retractable roof,” writes Real Time China Report’s Josh Chin. “Five years later, the state-run Xinhua news agency infamously used an x-ray image of Homer Simpson’s head to illustrate a story about the discovery of a genetic link to multiple sclerosis.”

How do you say “doh!” in Mandarin?

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