Liu wrote:
key here is not how to.fight,but how to maintain the logistics.
y20 provide pla intetcontinent mobiity.
Too much of the "we are almost like America" going on here.
Maintaining logistics chain on a smaller scale is not that difficult in Africa. India has been maintaining Mi24/35s gunships and 1000s of troops as part of UN for decades. It helps India, that the western powers operating over there, are not threatened day-in and day-out by Indian military leaders. And India could plug in smoothly with the significant Indian diaspora over there, since the British colonial times. Plus for anything else, there are russian outfits that will do the delivery of military freight in IL76s, which even the US uses behind scenes for carting their Maggi-noodles and bisleri.
But making tall claims against the reality of African bushwars (as Mansingh pointed out, not much targets to bomb and in some cases, feasting on enemies) is what America did, until that incident in Mogadishu. Benghazi arson was another more recent reminder. There are enough militias for hire in Africa, that cannot be taken out by US with its inter-continental scale drone fleets, let alone China. China at this point, cannot sustain any ops without support from a local govt, who has significant military strength (eg: Russia will not be able to replicate Syrian ops in a country with militarily less capable regime than Assad). As Shiv pointed out, China is doing nothing to combat its citizens being slaughtered in Pakistan, a country where the military are the biggest power center. So we need to wait and see if China will actually do anything, other than a chinese spokesperson screaming angrily from Beijing
Btw, this overselling of Y20s, if any Tsingtao crates are going to be carted over to Africa, China will be using its fleet of IL76s like everybody else. Y20 is too much of a risk to be shown outside china, like those J10 fighters. Same as the Su27 derivatives, the IL76s seem to be doing all the primary PLAAF tasks at this point.
India has started using the well tested (and supported) C17s in addition to IL76s for transcontinental logistics. Like that dude (forgot his name) says "color of cat does not matter" etc etc