The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has a range of aircraft and weapons that could threaten American ships and airbases from 1000km or more, threatening the assumption that the US would have air superiority in a conflict over Taiwan.

The PLA’s suppliers are making fifth-generation J-20A stealth fighters at a rate of 120 a year, more than double the number the US air force buys of the nearest equivalent, the F-35. The PLA is also buying 100 units a year of the slightly less advanced J-16 fighter.

More secret is the state of its missile systems, but they became highly visible in the conflict between India and Pakistan last year, when a Chinese PL-15 missile supplied to the Pakistan air force shot down an Indian French-built Rafale jet from, it was claimed, 200km away.

Both the PL-15 and another air-to-air missile, the PL-17, have longer ranges than anything produced by the US, Russia or Europe, according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the security think tank.

“The PLA now fields a range of capabilities that can threaten US air force aerial refuelling tankers, US navy carrier groups and forward airbases at 1000km or more,” it said. “These include thousands of long-range ground-based, air-launched and maritime ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as long-range ground-based surface-to-air missiles and long-range air-to-air weapons carried by hundreds of advanced fifth-generation fighters.”

The modernisation of the PLA has been one of President Xi Jinping's keynote policies. The PLA, which long operated under a Mao-era doctrine of strength through numbers alone, realised it had to change after the speed of America's initial victory in the 2003 Iraq war.

The RUSI report said: "US-led Western forces may still be able to win localised and temporary windows of air superiority in a potential conflict by leveraging greater operational experience. However, current Chinese capability growth is sufficiently impressive and rapid that the traditional Western airpower edge is no longer guaranteed."