im familiar with this baseless internet rumour. this started about a decade back and mysteriously, has no credible source.
the official sources say something else.
for eg about indian air force,
The outcome of the exercise boils down to [the fact that] they ran tactics that were more advanced than we expected, Snowden says. India had developed its own air tactics somewhat in a vacuum. They had done some training with the French that we knew about, but we did not expect them to be a very well-trained air force.
Re:2004 ¦~ 10 ¤ë°ê»Ú·s»D¡]ªÅ­x¡^
"The Indian Air Force is a world-class air force with great aircraft, great pilots, and great leadership," said Capt. Marcus Wilson, an Aggressor pilot at Nellis and the team chief for the exercise.
Code One Magazine: Building Friendships Volume 24 Number 1 2009
Indian pilots have created their own combat techniques and proved to be very smart, flexible and adaptive. This was also not an expected fact because Western tactical experts used to stay on their vision of dealing with Russian style pilots with rigid tactics and no independent moves what so ever. All this matters combined points out the Indian fighters to a real considerable threat leaving the Western analysts and USAF Command thinking it over how credible their own weapons are.
http://www.dutchaviationsupport.com/Articles/IL-78%20MIDAS&Crousaders.pdf
Indian AF Su-30K during the Cope India exercise. The Flanker's soundly defeated US Air Force F-15Cs during this exercise, exploiting not only superior BVR radar/missile capabilities, but also the TKS-2 datalink, used to network flights of Flankers
ausairpower.net/flanker.html
(disputed claim)
"We came rolling in, like, 'Beep-beep, superpower coming through,'" Colonel Fornof told me. "And we had our eyes opened. We learned a lot. By the third week, we were facing a threat that we weren't prepared to face, because we had underestimated them. They had figured out how to take Russian-built equipment and improve upon it."
Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden
Infamous YouTube star Fornof re-appears in pro-F-22 article - The DEW Line
Indian planners combined the use of top-line fighters like this Su-30 with older types and impressive, innovative tactics.
Credit: USAF TSGT. KEITH BROWN
Re:2004 ¦~ 10 ¤ë°ê»Ú·s»D¡]ªÅ­x¡^
Cope India: How the IAF rewrote the rules of air combat
while the official reports for the chinese military are:
While recent years have witnessed atremendous Chinese propaganda effortaimed at convincing the world that the PRC is a serious military player that is owed respect, outsiders often forget that China does not even have a professional military.The PLA, unlike the armed forces of the United States, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other regional heavyweights, is by definition not a professional fighting force. Rather, it is a “party army,” the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Indeed, all career officers in the PLA are members of the CCP and all units at the company level and above have political officers assigned to enforce party control. Likewise, all important decisions in the PLA are made by Communist Party committees that are dominated by political officers, not by operators. This system ensures that the interests of the party’s civilian and military leaders are merged, and for this reason new Chinese soldiers entering into the PLA swear their allegiance to the CCP, not to the PRC constitution or the people of China.
China’s Deceptively Weak (and Dangerous) Military | The Diplomat